Modernist mysteries: Perséphone 9780199730162, 9780199932467

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page ix)
List of Musical Examples (page xiii)
Acknowledgments (page xv)
Abbreviations (page xxi)
Translations (page xxiii)
Introduction: Melancholic Modernism (page 3)
PART ONE Faith
1. Gide's Anxiousness: Proserpine/Perséphone (page 55)
2. Stravinsky's Dogma (page 117)
3. Performing Devotion (page 182)
PART TWO Love
4. André's Masked Pleasures (page 239)
5. Igor's Duality (page 290)
6. Ida the Sapphic Fetish (page 396)
7. Voices from the Crypt (page 474)
PART THREE Hope
8. The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference (page 565)
Core Bibliography (page 625)
Index (page 633)

Citation preview

M Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone

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Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone

Tamara Levitz

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York Auckland Cape'Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong _ Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai ‘Taipei ‘Toronto With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland ‘Thailand ‘Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxtord University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization, Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxtord University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levitz, Tamara, 1962Modernist mysteries: Perséphone / Tamara Levitz.

pcm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-0-19-973016-2 1. Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971. Perséphone. 2. Persephone (Greek deity) — Songs and music—History and criticism. 3. Mythology, Greek, in music. 4. Modernism (Music) §. Gide, André, 1869-1951—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Rubinstein, Ida, 188$?-1960—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

M1410.8932L43 2011

782.1—dc22 20110087 Publication of this book was supported by the Fondation Catherine Gide. Additional financial support was also provided by Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

2 37° 5:43 21 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

© In memory of playing music with my father Abraham Levitz (1924-77)

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McoONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix List of Musical Examples xiii Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xxi

Translations xxiii

Introduction: Melancholic Modernism 3 PART ONE JB Eaith 1. Gide’s Anxiousness: Proserpine/Perséphone 55

2. Stravinsky's Dogma 117 3. Performing Devotion 182 PART TWO &@ Love

4. André’s Masked Pleasures 239

5. Igor’s Duality 290

6. Ida the Sapphic Fetish 396 7. Voices from the Crypt 474 PART THREE S® Hope

8. The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference S65

Core Bibliography 625 Index 633

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MLIsT OF ILLUSTRATIONS INSERT IMAGES ARE DENOTED BY @®

m™ Figure0.1 André Barsacq, stage design for Perséphone, MAQ. 10125, slide 13974, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. m Figure 0.2 André Barsacq, stage design for L’Arbre de songes (The dream tree), Perséphone, slide 12350, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

™ Figure0.3 André Barsacq, stage design for the temple, Perséphone, slide 12370, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Figure 0.4. “Mme Ida Rubinstein (on the left), rehearsing André Gide’s and Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Perséphone on the stage of the Opéra,’ unknown photographer, reproduced in “Ce que les 4 compositeurs des ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein disent de leurs propres oeuvres,’ Excelsior, 29 April 1934. Permission:

Bibliotheque nationale de France. 53 Figure 1.1 Igor Stravinsky with André Gide, Wiesbaden, 1933. Foto SO, Stravinsky 1479, unknown photographer, DN 563, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Permission: Paul Sacher Stiftung. 105 Figure 3.1 “A Meeting at Madame Ida Rubinstein’s. From Left to Right: Mr. [André] Barsacq, Mr. Jacques Copeau and Mme Ida Rubinstein busy with the staging, unknown photographer, reproduced in Ida Rubinstein, “Ma prochaine saison de spectacles de danses,” Excelsior, 10 December 1933.

Permission: Bibliothéque nationale de France. 214 ®™ Figure 3.2 André Barsacq, costume design for Persephone, Perséphone, slide 12380, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacg and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. m™ Figure 3.3 André Barsacq, second costume design for Persephone, Perséphone, slide 12357, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. 1X

x mm List of Illustrations

@ Figure3.4 André Barsacq, costume design for Demeter, Perséphone, slide 12358, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

™ Figure 3.5 André Barsacq, second costume design for Demeter, Perséphone, slide 12365, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. m Figure 3.6 André Barsacq, costume design for the Génie de la mort (Spirit of death), Perséphone, slide 12368, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. m™ Figure3.7 André Barsacq, costume design for Lethe, Perséphone, slide 12363, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

® Figure 3.8 André Barsacq, stage design of the door to the crypt, Perséphone, slide 12363, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

™ Figure3.9 André Barsacq, costume design for Eumolpus, Perséphone, slide 12356, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

® Figure 3.10 André Barsacq, costume design for Triptolemus, Perséphone, slide 12366, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliothéque nationale de France. ®™ Figure 3.11 André Barsacq, costume design for the adolescent, Perséphone, slide 12362, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. m@ Figure 3.12 André Barsacq, costume design for the Shadows, Perséphone, slide 12369, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. ®™ Figure 3.13 André Barsacq, costume design for the Hours, Perséphone, slide 12367, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France. ™ Figure 3.14 André Barsacq, costume design for the Nymphs, Perséphone, slide 12355, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permissions: Jean-Louis Barsacq and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

List of Illustrations @ xi

Figure 3.15 | Photograph of Perséphone, unknown photographer, Studio Granere, Bibliothéque-Musée de Opéra. Permission: Bibliotheque Nationale de France. 218 Figure $.1 “Mr. Igor Stravinsky conducting Perséphone during a rehearsal at the Opéra,’ unknown photographer, unidentified article in Excelsior, Collection Auguste Rondel, Département des arts du spectacle, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France. 292 Figure 5.2 André Gide, typescript for Perséphone (draft 1c) with corrections by André Gide and Igor Stravinsky, microfilm 226.1, p. 6, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Permission: Paul Sacher Stiftung. 386 Figure 6.1 Photograph of the narcissus-plucking scene in the first tableau of Perséphone, unknown photographer, Studio Granere, Bibliotheque-Musée de l'Opéra. Permission: Bibliotheque Nationale de France. 397 Figure 6.2 Georges Tribout, Dessins sur les gestes de Mademoiselle Ida Rubinstein, preface by Charles Batilliot (Paris: A La Belle Edition, 1912), no page numbers. Permission: Bibliothéque

nationale de France. 400 Figure 6.3 Georges Tribout, Dessins sur les gestes de Mademoiselle Ida Rubinstein, preface by Charles Batilliot (Paris: A La Belle Edition, 1912), no page numbers. Permission: Bibliothéque

nationale de France. 401

Figure 6.4 Photograph of Madame Ida Rubinstein with her pet leopard, reproduced from the program for Emile Verhaeren’s Héléne de Sparte (1912), Collection Auguste Rondel, Département des arts du spectacle, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale

de France. 404 Figure 6.5 Ida Rubinstein in the role of Orpheus, unidentified clipping in the Collection Auguste Rondel, Département des arts du spectacle, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliothéque nationale de France. 405 Figure 6.6 Ida Rubinstein in South Africa, unknown photographer, Département de musique, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliothéque nationale de France. 436 Figure 6.7 Ida Rubinstein in Algeria, unknown photographer, Département de musique, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France. 437

xii m List of Illustrations

m™ Figure 6.8 Romaine Brooks, La Femme avec des fleurs (The woman with flowers), Collection Lucile Audouy, Paris. Permission: Lucile Audouy. m™ Figure 6.9 Romaine Brooks, Le Trajet (‘The crossing), Smithsonian American Art Museum Permission: Smithsonian American Art Museum. m Figure 6.10 Romaine Brooks, La Venus triste (The sad Venus), Musées de Poitiers Permission: Musées de Poitiers.

Figure 6.11 Ida Rubinstein, still photograph for Arthur Honegger’s Sémiramis, Bernard Lipnitzski-Viollet, May 1934. Permission: Roger Viollet/The Image Works. 458 Figure 6.12 Ida Rubinstein, still photograph for Arthur Honegger’s Sémiramis, Bernard Lipnitzski-Viollet, May 1934. Permission: Roger Viollet/The Image Works. 459 Figure 6.13 Photograph of the first tableau of Perséphone, unknown photographer, Studio Granere, Bibliotheque-Musée de

Opéra. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France. 462 Figure 6.14 “An image of Perséphone, André Gide's and Igor Stravinsky’s beautiful ballet, created at the Opéra as part of Mme Ida's current season, unknown photographer, Intransigeant, 18 May 1934, Collection Auguste Rondel, Département des arts du spectacle, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Bibliothéque nationale de France. 463 Figure 6.15 “Mme Ida Rubinstein in a scene from Perséphone at the Opéra,” unknown photographer, Illustration, 19 May 1934, Collection Auguste Rondel, Département des arts du spectacle, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliothéque nationale de France. 464 Figure 6.16 “Mme Ida Rubinstein in Perséphone,’ Le Monde illustré, 12 May 1934, Bibliotheque-Musée de Opéra. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France. 467 Figure 8.1. ‘Théodore Stravinsky, drawing for Perséphone. Permissions: Fondation Théodore Stravinsky and Paul Sacher Stiftung. 586

Figure 8.2. Thronende Géttin (Goddess on the throne), photographer Johannes Laurentius, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Permission: Bildarchiv Preufischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource. 586

MLIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Musical Example 2.1 (1) Stravinsky’s rhythmic outline for this line on draft 1c of Gide’s libretto [sic]; (2) the rhythm in three-quarter time in the final score (R9:3-11); and (3) the correct French versification. Gianfranco Vinay, “Abbozzi della discordia: Gide, Stravinsky e Perséphone,’ in Musica se extendit ad omnia: Studi in onore di Alberto Basso in occasione del suo 7So compleanno, ed. Rosy Moffa, Sabrina Saccomani, and Alberto Basso (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana,

2007), 851-52. 143 Musical Example 5.1 — Perséphone, R39:4—R40:3 379 Musical Example $.2. — Perséphone, R42:2-4 379

Musical Example 5.3 Perséphone, R44:3-R45:2 388 Musical Example 5.4 — Perséphone, R62:3-R66:3 391 Musical Example 7.1 — Perséphone, R74:1-R80:1 $33 Musical Example 7.2 — Perséphone, R130:2-R133:4 547

Musical Example 7.3 Perséphone, R144:4-R148:4 $53 Musical Example 8.1 Perséphone, R207:1-R214:2 576 Musical Example 8.2. Perséphone, R257:1-R262:4 $92

Xill

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MAcKNOWLEDGMENTS

I feel very grateful to the community of colleagues, friends, institutions, and librarians whose generosity and kindness made it possible for me to write this book. I would like to thank first and foremost my editor, Juliane Brand. | originally hired Juliane privately to help with the developmental editing of my book. Little did I realize when we met that I was about to embark on one of

the most satisfying intellectual exchanges of my life. I have never known a sharper, more sensitive reader and more precise creative mind. Juliane challenged me to pursue deeper levels of analysis, clarify my arguments, and strive for greater historical accuracy. She was honest and daring, and through her pointed and insightful comments encouraged me to push myself as far as I could go. She taught me to love writing as a dialogical rather than a lonely art and changed my view of scholarship through her generosity and erudition. This book is a product of our dialogue. Many other editors, archivists, librarians, and institutions cooperated in helping me to complete this book. I want to thank Suzanne Ryan, for her impeccable professional advice. I would also like to thank her assistants Caelyn Cobb and Madelyn Sutton at Oxford, for guiding me through the production process. I appreciated the deeply intelligent readers’ reports from Oxford, the input of Senior Production Editor Erica Woods Tucker, the editing of Trish Watson, and especially the participation of Amy Whitmer.

I likewise owe a special thanks to freelance editors Eric W. Engles, John Tallmadge, Rose Vekony, and Edith Gladstone for their readings of portions of earlier versions of this book. Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude toward Alexandra Grabarchuk, a gifted musicologist and linguist, for translating the Russian documents | consulted for this book and for consolidating a unified system of Russian transliteration. Among the archivists who aided my research, I would like to single out musicologist Ulrich Mosch at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. whom I have admired

since we were both students with Carl Dahlhaus in the 1980s and whose kindness and erudition made all the difference to what this book became. I would also like to thank the staffs at the Médiatheque Musicale Mahler, Bibliotheque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Bibliothéque-Musée de Opéra, Bibliothéque nationale de France, the Dance Collection of the New York Public xv

xvi m Acknowledgments

Library, the Tanzarchiv Koln, the Music Library at UCLA, and the entire staff at the library of Middlebury College. I also feel special gratitude toward Jean-

Louis Barsacq, Lucile Audouy, and Catherine Gide. This book would not have been possible without the generous support of subventions from the Fondation Catherine Gide and the Joseph Kerman Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society, as well as from the Nelson Fund, Faculty Research Grants of the Academic Senate, and Dean of the Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles. Several extraordinary mentors have guided me in the writing of this book. Words cannot express the depth of my gratitude to Byron Adams, who pro-

vided invaluable input into this project. Byron generously shared with me his astonishing knowledge of French culture and musical repertoire, and showed me how to become a more sensitive and careful listener. I cherish Byron as a friend, and look up to him as a scholar, composer, and person. Jann Pasler likewise provided me with invaluable support and friendship throughout this project. I have tried to meet her high standards of historical inquiry, critical interpretation, and archival research. Annegret Fauser and Tim Carter showed me tremendous generosity, friendship, and kindness throughout the writing of this book, and likewise held me to the highest scholarly standards. Suzanne Cusick demonstrated to me through her example how I want to be as a person and scholar. Carolyn Abbate’s scholarship served as my guide. And finally, there is Richard Taruskin, whose presence can be felt throughout this monograph. I have read Richard's work on Stravinsky more times than I can remember, and each time I feel the same thrill of intellectual discovery and challenge that I felt the very first time. There are few people whose interpretations of music I cherish more. I feel special gratitude toward all my colleagues at McGill University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, and UCLA. I feel lucky to have begun my

career, and the seeds of this book, in the company of Julie Cumming, Brian Cherney, Steven Huebner, Peter Schubert, and Chip Whitesell at McGill University. I would like to thank Robert Walser at UCLA for granting me the precious research time to launch this project when he was chair. I also thank Susan McClary for her advice on an early version of one

chapter. Raymond Knapp’s integrity and gifts as a scholar inspired me countless times throughout this project, as did the strength of character he showed as chair. Iam grateful to Mitchell Morris for introducing me to queer musicology studies on a wintry day on the steps of McGill University in Montréal and for pushing me always to reach beyond my intellectual limits. Bob Fink provided important friendship during difficult times,

Acknowledgments @ xvii

and encouraged me by his scholarly example. I deeply appreciated Tim Taylor's sharp criticism, dear friendship, and intellectual vigilance. I have written this book in dialogue with him, attempting at all times to respect the cultural and social conditions of music making that he so beautifully theorizes in his work. I likewise feel an intellectual debt to Olivia Bloechl, who challenges me to think more clearly about my theoretical premises and philosophical assumptions. And finally, I thank Elizabeth Randell Upton and Nina Eidsheim. Through her brilliant work and sharp understanding of the world around us, Nina recently opened up for me an entirely new world of scholarly endeavor, which I hope to explore through her in the years to come. It is difficult to put into words what my colleague Elisabeth Le Guin has meant to this project. It grew out of my friendship with her, and has been touched on every level by the way she thinks, the care and subtlety with which she handles life and human relationships, her extraordinary sensitivity and clarity as a writer, and the beautiful research she does. Her consistency, patience, understanding, and friendship have provided the safe haven in which I felt I could become a writer. I feel a similar sense of gratitude toward Harald Fanzler, Shane Butler, and Leo Proietti, whose friendship helped me survive the last years of this project. Many other friends, colleagues, and students contributed in important ways with their ideas, advice, and support to this book, among them Joe Auner, Nancy Berman, Seth Brodsky, Jeannice Brooks, Eric Drott,

Catrina Flint, Susanne Fontaine, Kimberly Fox, Christopher Gibbs, Bryan Gilliam, Stephen Hinton, Elie Hisama, Kim H. Kowalke, Steve Laitz, Ralph Locke, Katerina Levidou, Francois de Médicis, Ben Piekut,

Anne-Marie Reynolds, Laurie Silverberg, and Marianne Wheeldon. | profited greatly as well from my dialogue with graduate students past and present at McGill, UNC Chapel Hill, and UCLA, among them Alexandra Apolloni, Sam Baltimore, Andrew Berish, Natalia Bieletto-Bueno, Ewelina Boczkwoska, Maria Cizmic, Phil Gentry, Lester Feder, Kariann

Goldschmidt, Gordon Haramaki, Des Harmon, Barbara Moroncini, Stephan Pennington, Caroline Polk O'Meara, Cecilia Sun, and Erica Schienberg. Ewelina Boczkwoska’s careful readings of selected chapters,

and Jillian Rogers’s thoughtful dialogue had a particularly important impact on this book. Finally, I think Andrea Moore, Benjamin Court, and Alexandra Grabarchuk for their meticulous proofreading. Brigid Cohen, Ryan Dohoney, and Kimberly Francis played more than a

passing role in my intellectual development as I wrote this book. Brigid opened my eyes to new ways of discussing social networks and the experience

xviii m Acknowledgments

of emigration and helped me to understand my own objectives in writing this book. Ryan Dohoney gave me a model of how to write history with compassion and interest and renewed my belief in the importance of investigating the intricacies of people's lives. His thoughtful reading of one chapter of this book in an earlier stage inspired me to try to push my work to a new level. Kimberly Francis has challenged me to reconsider the role Nadia Boulanger played in Stravinsky’s life.

I have felt special gratitude to the remarkable group of Stravinsky scholars whom I had the fortune to meet while working on this book. Maureen Carr's Multiple Masks has been at my bedside since the day I decided to write this book; Maureen touched my life personally with her tremendous generosity, friendship, and musical passion. I did not meet Valérie Dufour until I had completed this book, and yet it would not have been possible without her. I remain stunned by the philological brilliance and extraordinary historical empathy evident in her work, and I hope to have done justice to the scholarly legacy she has created by embracing her research as a foundation for my own. I have also greatly valued my conversations with Jonathan Cross, Natalia Braginskaya, and Lee C. Carter. My family has played a very important part in creating this book. René is at its very heart. He has accompanied me through thick and thin during

the long journey of writing it, and he has consistently supported me throughout. This book is inseparable from him, and is intertwined with the relationship we have shared for the past twenty years. I likewise want to especially thank my mother, Bernice, for her integrity and strength, and for

making everything possible. My sisters Carolyn and Suzanne and their husbands Kim and Isaac, brother David, nieces and nephews Brian, Brittany, Emily, Nathanial, Rebecca, Sabrina, and Zachary, and cousins Carol, Danny, Jacob, Laura, and Stevie are likewise at the very core of my experience of this book, which kept me from seeing all of them. I missed them while writing it. I feel the same strong sense of gratitude for my family in Germany, Opa Paul, Joachim and Margita Jagnow, Jacqueline and Axel,

Ivonne and Stefan, Onkel Siggi und Astrid, and especially Sophie and Tobias. I am particularly grateful for the wonderful conversations with Paul (Opa) Behrens, who shaped the approach to history and humanist research evident in this book. Sophie inspired me throughout with her courage and grace.

I wrote this book in memory of playing music with my father, who was an amateur violinist. When I was a child, I would accompany him at the piano in reading through sheet music together, whether excerpts of

Acknowledgments ™ xix

Yiddish theater that he had bought in the 1950s on trips to New York City from his hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Fiddler on the Roof, AlJolson songs, or a selection from the wide range of largely French

popular piano pieces of the early twentieth century that my parents had bought at flea markets in the Catholic churches in Montréal, Québec, where we lived. I remember most vividly the serene smile on my father’s face whenever he leaned his head into the rest on his violin and began to play with his strong vibrato. In writing this book, I wanted to remember that smile and the sound of his violin, and to celebrate my father’s love of music by recreating the passion, vitality, and individuality of people who collaborated and created music in the past. My father died of cancer when I| was fourteen. Finally, I want to say a special word about Tim Stowell, who became

the Dean of Humanities at UCLA at a critical moment in the history of this book. I quickly came to admire Tim as a mentor whose honesty, integrity, acuity, and capacity to remain down-to-earth allowed him to

create a wonderful atmosphere in the humanities at UCLA. Tim showed me what academia could be, namely, a community of scholars who treat each other with generosity and compassion and who share a common purpose in pursuit of intellectual goals. Tim’s equanimity, fairness, and unwavering support of his faculty changed my life. At a very crucial moment he gave me the courage to find my voice as an author and to complete this project.

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M ABBREVIATIONS

M™ ARCHIVE ABBREVIATIONS AG-BLJD _ Fonds André Gide, Bibliothéque littéraire Jacques Doucet

BMdO _Bibliothéque-Musée de |’Opéra (Bibliothéque nationale de France)

BNE Bibliotheque nationale de France DAS-BNF Département des arts du spectacle, Bibliotheque nationale de France

DC-NYPL Dance Collection, New York Public Library DM-BNF Département de musique, Bibliotheque nationale de France FAS-MMM _ Fonds André Schaeftner, Médiathéque Musicale Mahler FJC-BNF _ Fonds Jacques Copeau, Bibliotheque nationale de France PSS __ Paul Sacher Stiftung

™ BIBLIOGRAPHIC ABBREVIATIONS BAAG — Bulletin des amis d‘André Gide.

CGC Correspondance André Gide Jacques Copeau, ed. Jean Claude, 2 vols., Cahiers André Gide 13 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). CPD Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame: Notes pour histoire authentique d André Gide 1929-37, 3 vols., Cahiers André Gide 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

D&D _ Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Dialogues and a Diary [1961] (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). EeD Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments | 1959] (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). IVP Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album, 1921-1971, text

from Stravinsky's interviews 1912-63, including 258 photographs selected by Vera Stravinsky and Rita McCaffrey with captions by Robert Craft (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982).

J-I André Gide, Journal I 1887-1925, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1996). J-Il André Gide, Journal IT 1926-1950, ed. Martine Sagaert (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1997).

JMOC Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Oeuvres completes, ed. Cercle d’études Jacques et Raissa Maritain, 16 vols. (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul/Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1982). XXi

xxii m= Abbreviations

MeC_ Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). NRF La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. PeéP André Gide, Proserpine (drame): Perséphone (mélodrame), critical edition by Patrick Pollard (Lyon: Centre d’études gidiennes, Université Lyon II, 1977). SPD _ Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). SPRK Victor Varunts, ed., I. F. Stravinsky: Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialy k biografti, 3 vols. (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2003).

SSC Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1985).

MTRANSLATIONS

Alexandra Grabarchuk translated all Russian sources in this book, and I have used her system of transliteration for all Russian names, terms, and bibliographic entries. For consistency and in accordance with common practice, Alexandra has transliterated Russian names that should end in “skiy” according to her system with “sky.” I have referred to Stravinsky's sons—Théodore (Fyodor) and Soulima (Svetik) Stravinsky—according to both their Russian and French names, depending on context. Stravinsky and his friends called his sons by their Russian names in the early 1930s. I have also referred to Pierre Souvtchinsky and Catherine Stravinsky according to their Russian names, by which they were still known in the early 1930s: Pyotr Suvchinsky for Pierre Souvtchinsky Ekaterina for Catherine Stravinsky

I use names in multiple languages in footnotes and bibliography in accordance with how sources are listed in North American library catalogues. I have also used French or English versions of Russian names if that is how the bearer of the name was better known. This is the case, for example, with Nathalie Krassovska and Nicolas Nabakov. All translations from the French, German, Spanish, and Italian are my

own unless otherwise indicated. Due to the book’s length I have not included quotes in the original languages or a complete bibliography of all sources used, but both are available in the original manuscript.

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M Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone

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Introduction Melancholic Modernism

Ida Rubinstein ran her long fingers absently over the initials engraved on her silver cup before raising it tentatively to her lips for a sip of pink champagne. Her eyes focused intently on the piano, where Igor Stravinsky and his twenty-three-year-old son Svetik (Soulima) sat playing a transcription of two of the three tableaux from the work she had commissioned for the 1934 ballet season: Perséphone. On this evening of 20 October 1933, they were playing through completed passages from the work in progress before a private audience gathered at Rubinstein’s apartment.’ The “Cyclopean power’ unleashed by the rhythm of the two performing bodies mesmerized her.* Leaning into and away from each other in perfect synchronism as they followed the interlocking piano parts, the two men looked peculiarly alike yet different, separated only by age and by the “singular strength’ of Igor’s singing voice.” Igor’s good friend Pyotr Suvchinsky bent toward them, disrupting the flow of their duet with a “loud and abrasive” performance of the vocal line intended for the narrator, Eumolpus.* The music was stern, unremitting, and potent. From their cozy position in front of the fireplace, France's literary lights

took in this spectacle of Russian passion with reserved caution. Paul Valéry smiled politely, Paul Claudel “glared,” and André Gide turned his

1. Soulima recalled that Ida Rubinstein served pink champagne in silver cups during her social gatherings at this time. See the transcript of an interview with Soulima Stravinsky by Thor E. Wood, recorded 3 and S February 1977 and 14 January 1978, MGZMT S-563, Dance Collection, New York Public Library (hereafter DC-NYPL). Information about which part of the score was ready in October 1933 is given in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978; hereafter SPD), 315-16. 2. In a journal entry for 20 May 1934, Julien Green thus described the rhythms of a later performance of Perséphone that he attended at the home of the Princesse de Polignac on 18 May 1934. See Green, Journal: 1928-1958 (Paris: Plon, 1961), 181-82. 3. Jacques Copeau, entry for 21 October 1933, Journal: Deuxiéme partie, 1916-1948, ed. Claude Sicard (Paris: Seghers, 1991), 356-57. 4. Stravinsky, quoted in Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Dialogues and a Diary [1961] (London: Faber and Faber, 1982; hereafter DéD), 36; reprinted in Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries (London: Faber and Faber, 2002; hereafter MevC), 177. Stravinsky confused the performance at Rubinstein’s apartment in October 1933 with Nadia Boulanger’s postpremiere performance at the Princesse de Polignac’s home on 18 May 1934. On this confusion see Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky:

A Creative Spring, Russia and France 1882-1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 535; 663n76. 5

4 @ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

head in disgust.° “It’s curious, it’s very curious,’ Gide remarked to nobody in particular.® This was not how he had imagined the musical setting for his melodrama. Standing slightly to their left, Jacques Copeau, the designated director of the project, gave them an annoyed look. “Here's some-

thing we can believe in and wholeheartedly embrace,’ he whispered, before turning his attention back to the piano and nodding vigorously at Stravinsky in ecstatic support.’ From the other side of the room, Rubinstein observed the group's dynamics with self-contented amusement. Rubinstein had reason to want the evening to go well. By the time of this social gathering she had gone to great lengths to coax her illustrious partners into collaborating on the stage work with which she hoped to dazzle the Parisian public in the coming season.* The odyssey had begun almost ten months to a day earlier, on 19 January 1933, when Gide showed

her a “little ballet” on the subject of Proserpina (the Roman name for Persephone), which he had written for a proposed collaboration with Florent Schmitt in 1909.’ Gide had all but forgotten about this “symphonic

ballet” until asked to prepare it for imminent publication in the fourth volume of his complete works in 1933.'° He may have been attracted by 5. Stravinsky, quoted in DeD, 36; reprinted in MevC, 177. In his diary Copeau mentions the presence of Valéry and Arthur Honegger (see note 3 above). 6. Gide, quoted by Stravinsky, in MeC, 176. Gide frequently used this phrase to express his discomfort with art he did not immediately like. 7. Copeau, entry for 21 October 1933, in Journal: Deuxiéme partie, 1916-1948, 357. 8. In the same season Rubinstein also intended to present Elisabeth de Gramont’s and Jacques Ibert’s Diane de Poitiers, Paul Valéry’s and Arthur Honegger’s Sémiramis, revivals of her old Ravel favorites La Valse and Bolero as well as a new ballet by Ravel titled Morgiane, and Florent Schmitt's Oriane, le sans égal. Neither Ravel's nor Schmitt's new works were completed in time for Rubinstein's season, in

Ravel’s case because he was already suffering from the illness that would lead to his death in 1937. Rubinstein, one of his closest friends, used her private jet to consult specialists throughout Europe in the vain hope of finding a cure, and in 1935 arranged for Ravel to travel through Spain and Morocco to lift his spirits and improve his condition. See Marguerite Long, “Images d’Ida Rubinstein: Idole, amazone, princesse, mécéne ...,’ Le Figaro littéraire, 21 January 1961. 9. Maria van Rysselberghe, entry for 19 January 1933 in Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame: Notes pour l'histoire authentique d'André Gide 1929-37, Cahiers André Gide 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974; hereafter CPD), vol. 2, 283. On the history and dating of Proserpine/Perséphone, see Patrick Pollard, introduction to André Gide, Proserpine (drame): Perséphone (mélodrame), critical edition by Patrick Pollard (Lyon: Centre d’études gidiennes, Université Lyon II, 1977; hereafter PerP), 3-54; and Jean Claude, “Proserpine 1909,” Bulletin des amis d’André Gide (hereafter BAAG) 10, no. 54 (April 1982): 251-68. 10. Gide frequently changed Perséphone's genre designation over the course of its history. In his first letter to Stravinsky, dated 20 January 1933, he calls it a ballet symphonique, first writing drame symphonique but then crossing out the word drame (drama) and replacing it with ballet. See microfilm 102.1, p. 1021, and copy in microfilm 95.1, pp. 642-44, Paul Sacher Stiftung (hereafter PSS). Gide’s letter is quoted in Jean Claude, “Autour de Perséphone;’ BAAG 15, no. 73 (January 1987): 25, and in English translation in Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Knopf, 1985; hereafter SSC), vol. 3, 186; Craft’s translation of Gide’s letter is also included in the original edition of Igor Stravinsky’s and Robert Craft's Memories and Commentaries [1960] (Berkeley: University of California, 1982),

146. Craft did not, however, include the correspondence between Gide and Stravinsky on the subject of Perséphone in D&D or MGC.

Introduction m §

the generosity of Rubinstein’s offer.’ Gide’s close confidant Maria van Rysselberghe reported in her diary that Rubinstein immediately suggested staging Gide’s Proserpine as a ballet with music by her much admired former collaborator Stravinsky and sets by José Maria Sert.'” When Stravinsky's business manager, Gavriil Paichadze, wrote Stravinsky on 24 January he included a letter from Gide that extended Rubinstein’s

invitation to the composer to participate in the project.’ The two men met in what Gide called “perfect agreement” in Wiesbaden ten days later to discuss the project in person. Gide sent Stravinsky his libretto shortly after.'* By April Stravinsky had signed his contract with Rubinstein and received his first 25,000 francs in payment.'* He met at Rubinstein’s apartment with Madame Debussy, Gide, and Nadia Boulanger on 7 April and then began to compose in May.*° Both Gide and Stravinsky felt confident at first about collaborating with Rubinstein, notwithstanding their reservations about her taste and talent, and despite their both having experienced failed collaborations with her in the past. But the pay was good, and Persephone intrigued them. Once Stravinsky's participation had been secured, Rubinstein set about hiring the best theater director in France to organize the entirety of her

11. It was rumored that Gide received 200,000 francs from Rubinstein to write Perséphone; see “Les Danseuses de l’'Acropole,” La Termine de France, 6 July 1934. Another anonymous reporter remarked sarcastically that Rubinstein had paid Gide 200,000 francs, Fokine 40,000 francs, and Copeau 30,000 francs and that it was a shame her season didn’t last all year. (See “Les Beaux Cachets,” Ecoute, 12

May 1934.) One franc in 1930 was the equivalent of 0.63 euros in 2012 (with an inflation rate of 41385.9% ). This would put Gide’s remuneration at approximately 126,449 euros. 12. Maria van Rysselberghe, entry for 19 January 1933, CPD, vol. 2, 283. 13. Gavriil Paichadze wrote Stravinsky that, contrary to what they had assumed, Gide rather than Paul Valéry would be writing the libretto for the new ballet for Rubinstein. Paichadze felt he could get Stravinsky “better conditions” than originally planned and told Stravinsky, “It'll be entirely up to you to infect Gide with the corresponding enthusiasm. The more of this enthusiasm he has, the more it will be conveyed to Ida and the easier it will be to speak to her about conditions.’ At this point the premiere was planned for November 1933. Paichadze included in his letter Gide's letter from 20 January, mentioned in note 10. See Paichadze to Stravinsky, 24 January 1933, in Victor Varunts, ed., I. F. Stravinsky: Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialy k biografii (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2003; hereafter SPRK), vol. 3, 502.

14. Gide, entry for 8 February 1933, in André Gide, Journal IT 1926-1950, ed. Martine Sagaert (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1997; hereafter J-II), 400. 15. See Paichadze to Stravinsky, 26 April 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, $12, and SPD, 315-16. Robert Craft noted that Stravinsky signed the contract on 22 April and received his first installment of 25,000 francs two days later, for a total of 75,000 francs (approximately 47,418 euros in 2012). It is not entirely clear how many installments Stravinsky received in total, but I believe there were three. By 29 June he had received his second installment and by 4 July his third; see SSC, vol. 3, 190. In 1959, Stravinsky remembered having earned “$7500” for Perséphone. See Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments [1959] (London: Faber and Faber, 1962; hereafter EeD), 75. 16. Jacques Depaulis describes this meeting in Ida Rubinstein: Une inconnue jadis célébre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 403.

6 ® MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

1934 ballet season. Gide recommended his old friend and longtime collaborator from La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, the former director of the Thé-

dtre du Vieux-Colombier, Jacques Copeau.'’ By May, Rubinstein was tentatively negotiating with Copeau to perform the role of the emperor in a projected revival of Gabriele DAnnunzio and Claude Debussy’s Le Mar-

tyre de saint Sébastien and to direct her 1934 season.** She originally planned to hire the former Ballets russes stage designer José Maria Sert to assist him, and Toscanini to conduct.”” But Copeau recommended to her André Barsacq—a twenty-four-year-old stage designer of French-Russian ancestry who was related to Léon Bakst through marriage (and thus had a

social connection to Rubinstein) and whose family had emigrated from the Crimea to France in 1919. Barsacg had made a name for himself in the late 1920s through the stage designs he created for the Théatre de [’Atelier,

which was managed and directed by Copeau’s famous student Charles Dullin.“’ Copeau and Barsacq had also collaborated successfully on a major production in Florence in 1933; Copeau was hoping to build on this success when he urged Rubinstein to hire Barsacq for Perséphone. On 5 August Rubinstein made Copeau a formal offer, in which she stipulated

that he would work solely for her for an uninterrupted period of six months, from 15 October 1933 to 1S April 1934, with an attractive salary of 30,000 francs per month, or 180,000 francs in total (she subsequently

added a seventh months payment upon realizing that her 1934 season would have to be delayed). Copeau agreed to his contract in a letter to Rubinstein’s secretary, Pauline Regnié, dated 21 September 1933. He noted

that he was still director of drama studies at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and that he would have to be away occasionally. He also demanded, as an “essential condition’ of his contract, that his former collaborator Barsacq be hired as stage designer at a flat salary of 10,000 francs, with an ad-

ditional 3,000 francs per month for five months’ work as Copeau's “assistant” starting on 1 December 1933. Pauline Regnié agreed to these

terms in Rubinstein’s name in a letter to Copeau dated 23 September 17. Copeau mentions this to Gide in a letter dated 28 February 1933, Correspondance André Gide Jacques Copeau, ed. Jean Claude, Cahiers André Gide 13 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988; hereafter CGC), vol. 2,

= 18. Rubinstein thought of hiring Copeau for this role because she had admired his performance as the récitant in Arthur Honegger’s Le Roi David on 4 February 1933. See Jean Claude, “Perséphone, ou l’auteur trahi?,” in Pascal Lécroart, ed., Ida Rubinstein: Une utopie de la synthése des arts a lépreuve de la scéne (Paris: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2008), 220. 19. Copeau to Gide, 3 May 1933, CGC, vol. 2, 413. 20. Jean-Louis Barsacq, Place Dancourt: La Vie, Voeuvre et Atelier d’André Barsacq (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 16-66.

Introduction m 7

1933. Copeau moved from Pernand to rue Moncey in Paris that fall and rented an office at the Cité Chaptal from 16 December 1933 to 1 January 1935 to facilitate his work with Rubinstein’s company.”!

Rubinstein must have smiled with satisfaction when she watched her newly hired, hard-won collaborators Gide, Stravinsky, and Copeau file into her luxurious home at 7 Place des Etats-Unis in the sixteenth arrondissement for the first run-through of Perséphone on that October evening in 1933. Her pleasure may have been clouded only by frustration over the one crucial position still to be filled in her production team: Perséphone lacked a choreographer. Although she herself was a dancer, she did not choreograph her own works and had in the past spent considerable money and effort hiring the best people in the business to do that for her. For Perséphone, she had hoped to hire Michel Fokine, with whom she had collaborated for decades; he had recently come out of semiretirement in the United States, leaving his “bourgeois life of fireplaces and cozy slippers” to choreograph the productions she planned for her 1934 season.” But Stravinsky refused to collaborate with Fokine. “I have learned of your desire to entrust Fokine,’ Stravinsky telegraphed Rubinstein in September. “To collaborate with | Fokine] would be excessively painful to me. I see no other choreographer for my music for Perséphone except Massine or Balanchine.” It is difficult to determine why Rubinstein ultimately chose as her choreographer Kurt Jooss, a student of Rudolf Laban and an exponent of German expressive dance, or Ausdruckstanz, whose approach to movement was utterly foreign to the French and Russian ballet tradition in which she had been trained. She may have been responding to the general buzz around Jooss, who in July 1932 had taken Paris by storm with his pacifist work Der griine Tisch (The Green Table), unexpectedly winning first prize in the Grand Concours International de Chorégraphie, the first international choreography competition organized by the former manager of the defunct Ballets suédois, Rolf de Maré, in connection with his

21. Copeau to Gide, 24 July and 27 August 1933, CGC, vol. 2, 414, 419-21; and Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 36-37. Copeau’s original contract and Pauline Regnié'’s letter to Copeau of 23 September 1933 are kept in folder 716, subfolder 3, p. 1 and pp. 17-19, respectively, Fonds Jacques Copeau, Bibliothéque nationale de France (hereafter FJC-BNF).

22. Michel Fokine, quoted in Marie A. Levinson, “Un entretien avec Michel Fokine: Avant les spectacles de Mme Rubinstein,’ Je suis partout, 7 April 1934.

23. Stravinsky to Rubinstein, 1 September 1933; microfilm 102.1, p. 1032, PSS. Craft offers a slightly different translation in SSC, vol. 3, 480n4.

8 ® MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

Archives internationales de la danse.” Jooss’s success threw French critics for a loop, upsetting their deeply rooted, persistent suspicions about the artistic merits of German dance. In January 1933 Jooss’s company gave a controversial repeat performance of Der griine Tisch and other works at the Casino de Paris, a music hall venue.* A few months later, in April and

May 1933, Rubinstein’s impresario, Arnold Meckel, booked Jooss’s company for several performances at the more prestigious Salle Pleyel, which all the French artistic elite, including Rubinstein, attended.” Those performances elicited a vivid and engaged response from a wide variety of French critics. A second series of performances followed at the Théatre

des Champs-Elysées in January 1934, reviewed by none other than Rubinstein’s new stage director, Jacques Copeau, one of Jooss’s staunchest supporters in France.*’ Copeau had emphatically praised Jooss’s Der griine

Tisch in the French press, easing the German dancer’s entrance into French theatrical circles with his prestigious endorsement. Rubinstein invited Jooss to join her production team some time after her party in October. He came for no more than a few weeks in February 1934 to rehearse with Rubinstein’ “company —a heterogeneous group of English, French, American, and Russian ballet dancers whom she had

hired on temporary contracts for the 1934 season alone.* Rubinstein attended these rehearsals only occasionally.” During the many weeks of the preparation when Jooss was not in town, Rubinstein arranged for the dancers to rehearse with Fokine and to take daily lessons from renowned

24. See Clare Lidbury, “Le Grand Concours de Chorégraphie, 1932,” in Kurt Jooss: 60 Years of The Green Table, Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Birmingham 17-19 October 1992, ed.

Andy Adamson and Clare Lidbury (Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, 1994), 1-14; and Suzanne K. Walther, “The Dance of Death: Description and Analysis of The Green Table,” Choreography and Dance 3, no. 2 (1993): §7-S9. 25. See Legrand-Chabrier, “Ballets quasi-music-hall,’ Carnet de la semaine, 7 May 1933. An exten-

sive collection of reviews of this and all other French performances by Jooss’s company in the early 1930s is included in “Coupures de presse Kurt Jooss,” A.LD. Fol. XIV, Bibliothéque-Musée de Opéra, Bibliothéque nationale de France (hereafter BMdQ). 26. Rubinstein’s presence at one of these performances is noted in an untitled notice with no author, La Griffe cinématographique, 31 May 1933. 27. Copeau, “Le Théatre: Les Ballets Jooss aux Champs-Elysées,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 6 January 1934; reprinted as “Les Ballets Jooss aux Champs-Elysées,” Le Figaro, 8 January 1934.

28. In rehearsals Jooss was accompanied by his assistant, Sigurd Leeder, and his pianist, Fritz Cohen. See Copeau to Gide, 19 February 1934, CGC, vol. 2, 433-35, and the photograph of Rubinstein's 1933 company in Pierre Laclau, “Perséphone-Diane-Sémiramis,’ Je suis partout, 19 May 1934; reprinted in Margaret Severn, “Dancing with Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein,” Dance Chronicle 11 no. 3 (1988): 360. 29. See Keith Lester, “Rubinstein Revisited,” Dance Research 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1983): 3-31; and Severn, “Dancing with Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein,” 333-64.

Introduction m 9

Russian ballet dancer and teacher Olga Preobrazhenskaya.”” Jooss’s choreography of Perséphone, danced by a company steeped in Russian balletic tradition and scheduled to premiere alongside Fokine’s choreographies for Ibert’s Diane de Poitiers and Ravel's La Valse, could not but be expected to stick out like a modernist German sore thumb. From the start it was clear that the artists who gathered under Rubinstein’s financial umbrella to create Perséphone at the Paris Opéra in April 1934 were divided from one another in age, nationality, personal experience, and history. Within months of their initial encounters they began feuding, disagreeing on everything from who should be involved in the

project to its staging, music, and setting of texts. Musicologists have focused on the very public dispute between Gide and Stravinsky over the

composers controversial text settings, which broke with the standard rules of French versification. But there were other, more serious disagreements as well. Each of the collaborators had different notions about the

central themes of faith, love, and hope embodied in the classical myth, and thus each envisioned Perséphone in ways that conflicted with everyone else's ideas. Soon all were trapped in a quagmire of acrimony. The preparations were also haunted by a mood of melancholic regret. It was difficult for some of the collaborators not to succumb to the general despondency gripping the Parisian theater scene since the collapse of the French stock market. Economic hardship was visible everywhere in Paris, affecting the lives even of aristocrats as protected as Ida Rubinstein. Hitler's election to power in Germany in March 1933 had further destabilized the situation, leaving many frightened, cautious, and nostalgic for a past that looked safer in retrospect. There was a strong feeling in the air that war was imminent and that the postwar pleasures of the Roaring Twenties were a thing of the past. Political and social instability was also exacerbated by the general strikes of February 1934, which occurred squarely in the middle of Perséphone preparations. For six days, right-wing factions, including the Action francaise, Camelots du roi, and Jeunesses patriotes, rioted throughout Paris in opposition to the leftist coalition then in power, their actions seriously threatening the Third Republic and laying the groundwork for the formation of the Front populaire in 1936. These events further polarized the French Left and Right and created a pervasive feeling of fear that affected all aspects of life, including the stage production of Perséphone. One consequence was that most of the collaborators increasingly felt the

30. Severn, “Dancing with Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein,’ 356.

10 @® MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

desire to escape into the past, with its familiar social acceptance of aristocratic privilege and leisure. ‘This created an extenuated sense of sentimental retrospection around every aspect of the Perséphone project. All of Perséphone's collaborators were, moreover, anxiously unsettled during the fifteen months of production, moving variously between Paris, the locus of the project’s realization, and tourist destinations or tempo-

rary homes. Political instability in Russia and Europe had earlier condemned three of them—Rubinstein, Stravinsky, and Jooss—to the existence of émigrés. Ida Rubinstein habitually traveled widely between brief working stays in her luxurious apartment at the Place des Etats-Unis. Gide, who hated the trip to the capital, either escaped to his aristocratic home and garden in the French province (Cuverville) or traveled abroad. Copeau moved to Paris only temporarily at Rubinstein’s behest. Stravinsky, who had left Russia in 1910, commuted between Paris and Voreppe in the South of France and traveled regularly to fulfill his commitments as a performer and conductor. Jooss restlessly searched for a safe and permanent new home for his company outside Germany. Of all Rubinstein’s collaborators, Kurt Jooss's life was by far the most unsettled. He had arrived in Paris to begin rehearsals on Perséphone just weeks after fleeing Nazi Germany, where he was in danger for his political affiliations and for having refused to fire his Jewish pianist, Fritz Cohen. He and his company performed extensively in the United States and Europe in the early months of 1934 and were in the process of settling in Darlington Hall, England, that spring, at the very time of Perséphone’s premiere.”' Jooss had accepted the engagement to choreograph for Rubinstein on his own, without his own dance company. Although he appears to have engaged fully in the artistic project of devising choreography for Rubinstein’s company, he kept his artistic and physical distance from her and the other collaborators during the production period. Of all Rubinstein’s collaborators, Jooss left the fewest historical traces of his involvement with the project.

Afterward he neither perpetuated nor revived its choreography, and he rarely mentioned it in any of his extensive interviews.**

31. Critics started to take note of Jooss’s forced emigration from Nazi Germany during his company’s tour in Switzerland in March 1934. See, for example, Gaston Bridel, untitled notice, Gazette de Lausanne, 19 March 1934; “Jooss-Ballett,’ Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 21 March 1934; and Suzanne K. Walther, “Biography of Kurt Jooss,” in The Green Table: A Dance of Death in Eight Scenes, ed. Ann Hutchinson

Guest (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10-11. 32. I did not find any archival materials or primary sources related to Perséphone in the Kurt Jooss archive, Deutsches Tanzarchiv, Cologne, Germany. Perséphone is not listed in. A. V. Coton’s important first critical study of Jooss, The New Ballet: Kurt Jooss and His Work (London: Dennis Dobson, 1946).

Introduction m= 11

Like many German émigrés, Kurt Jooss was received in France by a sourly anti-German French public, who associated him with Nazism rather than recognizing him as one of its victims. Jooss remembered how frightened he was to perform at the Grand Concours International de Chorégraphie in 1932 because of what he knew would be strong antiGerman sentiment in the hall.*’ His reception at the Casino de Paris six months later proved even more hostile, shocking his still sympathetic German reviewers at home. The critic Kurt Ihlefeld concluded that the Casino was a “stronghold of hatred towards Germany” and asked the French to tone it down, given that there were still so many German tourists in France and that such antics would ruin their tourist industry. “The whole gallery whistled, screamed, and rioted. Many people in the orchestral seats participated in the storm of protest as well. It’s possible that a few ‘Camelots du Roi’ of the nationalistic Action francaise had been ordered into the theater to disturb the peace.”** Rubinstein may have shared this French prejudice. She allowed her secretary, Pauline Regnié, to call Jooss “the one flower from the German dung heap’ in front of her dancers.» And she tolerated that the dancers themselves made fun of him constantly, asking him to repeat movements incessantly as if they had not understood them and referring to his choreography as “osteopathic dancing.”*°

Jooss suffered most from the ruthless animosity and insensitivity of the highly influential André Levinson, the Russian doyen of French dance

criticism. Drawing on stereotypes that had circulated in France for decades, Levinson spoke of Jooss’s German dancers’ innate ineptitude for dance and heavy, awkward, ugly bodies.” In a brutal and scathing critique in Les Visages de la danse, Levinson admonished Jooss’s company for their

gymnastic training, pretense at being intellectuals, simplicity of movement, and failure to explore the rich reservoir of popular dance. “There was incontestable evidence,’ Levinson concluded, “of the disconcerting

33. Interview with Kurt Jooss, MGZMT 3-565, transcript of interview by Tobi Tobias recorded 26 September 1976, DC-NYPL. 34. Dr. Kurt Thlefeld, “Kurt Jooss im ‘Casino de Paris,” Hamburger Anzeiger, 26 October 1932. These and other reviews were written before Jooss became a persona non grata in Germany. 35. Keith Lester, quoted in Michael de Cossart, Ida Rubinstein (1885-1960): A Theatrical Life (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987), 170. 36. Severn, “Dancing with Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein,’ 359, 362. 37. André Levinson, “Les Ballets Jooss: La Grande Ville, Un bal dans le vieux Vienne,’ Comedia, 29

April 1933. See also Dominique Sordet, “Les Ballets Jooss au Théatre des Champs-Elysées,” Action francaise, 6 January 1934.

12 ™@ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

inferiority of these Westerners descended into barbarism.’** Like many other critics, he thought the Germans were mechanistic and performed in a collective spirit that lacked individuality.” Beryl de Zoete compared such discipline and assembly line precision to the Krupp weapons factories, remarking on the fact that Jooss and Krupp came from the same town, Essen.” The Belgian critics went even further, treating any German performance as a potential military threat." German expressionism was too “morbid” and “pathological,” some critics thought, a sign of “retarded avant-garde-ness.’** For months on end Jooss was left to defend himself against these accusations, but he seems to have acquitted himself throughout with particular patience and grace.” Rubinstein faced similar expressions of xenophobia, though mitigated by having lived in France since 1909 and never having to worry about earning a living because she was independently wealthy. She thought of herself as French “by choice’ and went to great lengths to express her artistic allegiance to her new country whenever she could. In her 1934 season

she planned to play the role of a French heroine in the nationalist ballet Diane de Poitiers, for which she had commissioned music on historical

French sources by Jacques Ibert. Thanks to supporters like Jacques Rouché (of the Paris Opéra) and Gabriel Astruc, she received the Chevalier de la légion d’honneur for her contributions to French culture that summer.” In February 1935 she became a French citizen. Yet French allegiance did not bring acceptance. Journalists questioned Rubinstein’s nationality and the legitimacy of her wealth, which they associated with the money, bad taste, and errant modern ways of nouveau riche Russian and American émigrés. Rubinstein didn't attract the usual opera public, one reviewer commented, but rather

38. André Levinson, Les Visages de la danse (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1933), 302. 39. See Fernand Divoire, “Les Ballets de Kurt Jooss,” A Paris, 5 May 1933; Lucienne Florentin, “A

la Comédie: Les Ballets Jooss,” La Suisse (Geneva), 5 May 1933; and Robert Brussel, “Théatre des Champs-Elysées: Les Ballets Jooss,” Le Figaro, 3 January 1934. 40. Beryl de Zoete, “The Jooss Dance School at Essen,’ Monthly Musical Record, October 1933, n.p. 41. Unsigned notice, Nation Belge, 25 January 1933. 42. “Le Fils prodigue,’ Le Figaro, 16 January 1934.

43. Jooss stressed his dancers’ individualities and spoke of personality as a “sacred thing” in Chamine (Alexandre Vialatte), “Les Ballets d’Essen: II. La Vie privée des danseurs,” Beaux-arts, 27 January 1933. He emphasized the apolitical nature of his company in Marc Augis, “Une école moderne de danse: Chez Kurt Jooss 4 Essen,” La Meuse (Liége), 23 August 1933. And Jooss argued “we don’t have political ideas” in Francis Silvart, “La Danse et les Ballets Jooss,” La Wallonie (Liége), 25 January 1933. 44, Depaulis, Ida Rubinstein, 418.

Introduction m= 13

Russian taxi drivers and cleaning ladies who took out their old jewels and old furs, their badges and uniforms from before the “affair,” and went looking there for what the Russian Ida Rubinstein gave them: the pleasure of luxury, the taste for dance, bright lights and rhymed music, an entire forgotten world of happiness, power, and music. Their words (I was standing very close to

them) translated their spiritual state: “Her crown was real.’ “Her shirt was woven silk, sown in one piece.’ “She spends several million on each show.’*

These “anonymous pearl- and lamé-laden” Russians had “gained a bit of weight” since the “exodus, creating a notable contrast to the “thin Americans doing footing in the lobby.” Several reviewers commented on how dangerously international this public was, a “tower of Babel” that felt like a novel by Paul Morand or tourist attraction.”

Although Stravinsky worked hard to distinguish himself from this group, he could not entirely shake the negative aura of being a Russian émigré. He had won the favor of many important French critics by shifting to an ethnically neutral neoclassical compositional style, but uncertainties about him remained. During the production of Perséphone his émigré anx-

iousness was compounded by the turmoil in his life. In October 1933 Stravinsky moved from Voreppe in southeastern France to the apartment that Rubinstein had arranged for him at 21, rue Viete in the seventeenth arrondissement in Paris.*’ In June 1934 he received French citizenship. In an interview that month he commented that he had left Russia at the age of twenty-seven years, before the war, that he had just turned fifty-two, and that he wondered why he had waited so long to become a French citizen when he had clearly long since found in France his “intellectual climate.’** The date of this interview implies that during the production of Perséphone Stravinsky and his family were struggling to deal emotionally

45. Chamine (Alexandre Vialatte), “La Premiére des ballets d’Ida Rubinstein a l’Opéra,” L’Intransigeant, 2 May 1934.

46. Notice in La Vie est belle, 11 May 1934. See also Louis Léon-Martin, “Ida Rubinstein devant tout Paris,” Paris-Midi, 1 May 1934. 47. In July 1934 Stravinsky moved to the upscale 125, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the eighth arrondissement. See Stravinsky to Paichadze, 7 July 1933, in SPD, 316; and Paichadze to Stravinsky, 25 July 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 521. See also Pierre-Olivier Walzer, introduction to Charles-Albert Cingria, Correspondance avec Igor Strawinsky, ed. Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Lausanne: LAge d’ Homme, 2001), 38; Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 38; Théodore and Denise Stravinsky, Au coeur du foyer: Catherine et Igor Strawinsky, 1906-1940 (Bourg-la-Reine: Zurfluh, 1998), 136; and Walsh, Stravinsky, A Creative Spring, $28.

48. See Ruth Léon, “Le Célebre Compositeur Igor Strawinsky est désormais citoyen frangais,’ Le Journal, 4 June 1934; and “Le Grand Musician Igor Strawinsky nous dit pourquoi il s‘est fait naturaliser francais,’ Excelsior, 16 June 1934.

14 @ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

with their emigration to France. His children had also just experienced the shock of finding out about their father’s long-standing affair with Vera

Arturovna de Bosset Sudeikina, of whom his wife, Ekaterina, had long known and who was about to become a more vivid presence in all of their lives. Despite this personal turmoil, Stravinsky continued to move in French society with relative ease.

For some of the collaborators the melancholy they felt about Perséphone was also linked to their ambivalent and anxious feelings about aging. Only Stravinsky, at fifty-two, appeared calm about middle age. Rubinstein

was around forty-five and knew that Perséphone would have to be her “swan song.” In the interviews she gave that year she spoke nostalgically about the beauty and successes of her youth and the spectacular days of the prewar Ballets russes. At fifty-nine, Jacques Copeau shared her feeling of remorse over the end of his theatrical career. He yearned to revive the achievements of his Théatre du Vieux-Colombier and the outdoor festivals that had celebrated French culture at the turn of the century. Yet he, too, resented having sacrificed so much to the theater, and by July 1933 he was so depressed that he wanted to break off all contact with the world.*° The oldest member of the production team, André Gide, at sixty-four, also suffered from melancholia. The sight of a destitute old man on a Parisian street corner in the spring of 1933 plunged him into a state of despair over the “intolerable” state of the world. “How will I find the peace of spirit I need for my work? I think I’ve lost it for always,’ he wrote in his diary.”' The greatest nostalgia to grip the Parisian stage occurred in the realm of modern dance and ballet. The unexpected deaths of Jean Borlin, Sergei Diaghilev, and Anna Pavlova in the late 1920s and the subsequent demise

of the Ballets suédoises and Ballets russes had created a vacuum from which the dance world found it difficult to recover. The Parisian public mourned the loss of these companies for years, idealizing their achievements and magnifying their memory by attributing to them qualities they may never have possessed. Rehearsals for Perséphone in February 1933 coincided with a memorial exhibit for the much loved and now deceased mythical spirit of Terpsichore, Anna Pavlova, organized by the Archives internationales de la danse and accompanied by three concerts at the 49. Itis uncertain when Rubinstein was born. Jacques Depaulis speculates that her birth date was 5 October 1888; see Depaulis, Ida Rubinstein, 42. For Gide’s comment on Rubinstein calling Perséphone her “swan song” (chant du cygne), see Maria van Rysselberghe, entry for 19 January 1933, CPD, vol. 2,

= 50. Copeau to Gide, 16 July 1933, in CGC, vol. 2, 418. 51. Gide, entry for 14 April 1933, in J-I, 409.

Introduction m 15

Théatre des Champs-Elysées. Everybody remembered Vaslav Nijinsky as

well, whose mental illness still made headlines and whose tortured, entrapped body occasionally appeared on the front pages of the daily newspapers.” As the living movements of these dancing geniuses became a thing of the past, their place in collective memory became ever more mythical and fantastic. Nothing in the present seemed to offer comparable promise of such transcendent kinesthetic bliss. Turning away from that bitterly realistic present, critics scrutinized new productions for any potential features that might help them to escape into the recent modernist past. “Indeed we had the feeling we were searching for a lost paradise, an unidentified critic wrote. “The current state of affairs, he went on, demonstrates “our mental disarray, the impatient passion with which we pursue an ideal of dance that escapes us and our regret over and nostalgia for the vain dream of a few beautiful nights! In the concert hall, theater, and music hall, everybody tries to recapture that almost legendary treasure: the successors of the Ballets Russes.”*’ Diaghilev’s ghosts certainly haunted the reception of Kurt Jooss.** “Ever since the Ballets Russes, nothing has appeared on the stage in the realm of dance that has brought as much novelty, quality and above all possibility,’ one anonymous reviewer wrote about Jooss’s company.” “In the international history of modern theater, this troupe of incomparable virtuosi will be ready to capture victoriously the place left vacant by the demise of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,” the critic Emile Vuillermoz forecast. “I don’t know of another company with such an ensemble of profoundly musical dancers, animated by such a communicative faith, and so miraculously disciplined.” Performances by Rubinstein’s company mixed salt in the wounds of the grieving French balletomane. Rubinstein, once one of the greatest stars of the Ballets russes and known primarily for her youthful beauty, insisted on

continuing to dance into middle age, her fading charisma a persistent reminder of a tradition irrevocably lost. Saddened critics repeatedly compared her older figure to that of the young girl whose spectacularly slen$2. Nijinsky had attended Ida Rubinstein’s productions in 1928 and made a “scene” that was discussed in the press; see de Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, 143. 53. Unidentified clipping “La Danse et la musique” { 1934], included in “Coupures de presse Kurt Jooss,’ A.LD. Fol. XIV, BMdO.

54. Jooss is compared to the Ballets russes in A.P., “Théatre et musique: Les Ballets Jooss 4 la Comédie,” Journal de Genéve, 5 May 1933; Anita Esteve, “Les Ballets Jooss,’ Germinal, 6 May 1933; and Brussel, “Théatre des Champs-Elysées.” 55. “Des Ballets Jooss a ‘Jeunesse, Le Mois, 1 June 1933.

56. Emile Vuillermoz, “Théatre des Champs-Elysées: Les Ballets Jooss, ‘Le Fils prodigue’,” Excelsior, 11 January 1934.

16 @& MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

der, long limbs, translucent white skin, and outrageous blue wig had dazzled them in Diaghilev’s Cléopdtre in 1909. It did not help that Rubinstein had commissioned Michel Fokine, the star of the early Ballets russes,

to choreograph three of the four new productions in her 1934 season. Fokine ignored recent developments in dance, instead reviving all the shocking spectacle of his early ballets, especially in the crowd scenes in Diane de Poitiers, which reminded such critics as Maurice Brillant of the famous fair scene from Petrushka.°’ Rubinstein’s old friend and former Ballets russes set designer Alexandre Benois exacerbated the outdated effect of Fokine’s choreography of Diane de Poitiers with sumptuous fin de siecle stage designs and costumes. Older Parisians gazed nostalgically at the programs, whispering to each other, “Do you remember, in 1910...”°° But Rubinstein’s “frivolous” desire to perpetuate the traditions of the Ballets russes also embarrassed the Parisian elite. “Why do these spectacles, like everything derived from Diaghilev’s ballet, always seem so retrospective, no matter what their splendor?” Michel Georges-Michel asked.°’ André Rivollet described Picasso as being “red with emotion’ as he leaned over to his friend Madame Sert and whispered the single word: “Remem-

ber’

** *

I open this book with images of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of those who created and experienced Perséphone as a means of highlighting the historical uniqueness of the 1934 production. Whereas musicologists have tended to consider Perséphone, and rightly so, as an aesthetic object or score created by one author (Stravinsky), or at the most two (Stravinsky and Gide), I focus on the history of Perséphone as a performance event resulting from a multitude of actions and conflicting intentions of a disparate team of collaborators. In presenting this microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Perséphone at the Paris Opéra on 30 April 1934, I engage above all with the collaborative, transnational nature of this production, critically interpreting the contributions of the two Frenchmen, the writer André Gide and stage director Jacques Copeau, the two

57. Maurice Brillant, “Les Fétes dansées et Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ LAube, 1 May 1934; and Gabriel Marcel, “Décombres,” =1934=, 23 May 1934. 58. Léon-Martin, “Ida Rubinstein devant tout Paris.” 59. Michel Georges-Michel, “Ballets,” Noir et Blanc, 13 May 1934. 60. Picasso, quoted in André Rivollet, “Le Retour de l’Ida prodigue,’ =1934=, 9 May 1934.

Introduction m 17

Russians, composer Igor Stravinsky and dancer Ida Rubinstein, and the German choreographer Kurt Jooss. The aesthetic and intent each of them brought to the collaboration were often at complete variance, even fundamentally conflicting, with the aesthetic and intent of the others. In the course of investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of their diverging perspectives, and the fallout of their titanic clash on the theater stage, I found myself having to dismantle myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. My objectives are revealed in the books title, a double entendre that refers both to the Eleusinian mysteries as a sacred tradition perpetuated through Christian reinvention in 1930s neoclassical music and to the “mysteries” or unresolved questions and untold secrets of modernism itself. The result of my engagement with this collaborative work is a revisionary account of modernist neoclassicism.

™ SCHOLARSHIP ON PERSEPHONE AND NEOCLASSICISM Perséphone has remained little more than a footnote in music and literary history. Since Patrick Pollard completed a thoroughly annotated edition of the libretto in 1977, Gide scholars have virtually ignored the work.°! The few musicologists interested in Perséphone have tended to dwell on the conflict between Gide and Stravinsky over the latter's errors in French pronunciation and versification. Robert Craft, Eric White, and others set this interpretative tradition in motion when they focused on the awkward and contrary text settings of Perséphone in their summaries of the piece, though this feature of Stravinsky's compositional approach is by no means unique to that work. In his classic monograph on the composer, White included the article Stravinsky wrote for Excelsior in 1934, in which he stated that he had deliberately set syllables instead of words as a means of evading the “discursive” aspect of Gide’s text. This so-called manifesto served for decades as evidence of Stravinsky's linguistic priorities and

anti-expressive aesthetic creed. Many scholars thereafter trusted that

61. P&P, 3-54; Claude, “Proserpine 1909,” 251-68; Jean Claude, André Gide et le thédtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 62. “Ce que les 4 compositeurs des ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein disent de leurs propres oeuvres,’ Excelsior, 29 April 1934; corrected in “M. Igor Strawinsky nous parle de “Perséphone,” Excelsior, 1 May 1934. The article from 1 May is included in French (with indications of variants in comparison to the article from 29 April) in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 579-81.

18 @ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

Perséphone was all about syllables, and the article has been cited in various contexts ever since to prove Stravinsky's abstract attachment to language. Musicologists have also tacitly assumed that Perséphone is neoclassical, but this thesis has rarely been tested. In 2002 Maureen Carr presented one of the first extended discussions of the work in English, in the context of a

study of Stravinsky’s compositions on Greek subjects (Oedipus Rex, Orpheus, and Perséphone). She did a tremendous service to Anglo-American

musicology by introducing the literary, philosophical, and artistic sources for Perséphone and by discussing its unpublished sketches and typescripts (samples of which Craft had printed years earlier in facsimile in his edition of the Stravinsky correspondence). Carr aimed primarily to explain the continuity between Stravinsky’s early and late compositional process.” The subject of neoclassicism has enjoyed an equally curious, if more robust scholarly tradition. Neoclassicism, which Boris de Schloezer famously associated with Stravinsky in 1923, became the catchword for distinguishing Stravinsky and Schoenberg in the new music marketing wars of the 1920s and for defining Stravinsky's “second” style. In 1949, Theodor Adorno solidified this way of thinking in the classic dialectic of Die Philosophie der neuen Musik by identifying Stravinsky as the “regressive” neoclassic in opposition to the “progressive” Schoenberg. Adorno’ arguments had remarkable staying power, scaring people away from the topic of neoclassicism for decades and distorting many strains of its orig-

inal history. In the 1980s, just as musicology faced the shake-up now known as New Musicology, scholars began clamoring to define the term—as if they felt it might hold secrets to the fierce battle between ancients and moderns, or “tradition and progress,’ once again plaguing

ie . 33 ce +, 3) - .

their discipline. Scott Messing set the stage with an influential study of the

word’s etymology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.® In a

63. Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002). Craft reproduces in facsimile selections from Gide's draft typescripts for Perséphone with Stravinsky's notes and sketches in Robert Craft, ed., “Appendix B: Perséphone: The Evolution of the Libretto,” in SSC, vol. 3, 475-507. Carr's and Gretchen Horlacher’s insightful analyses rep-

resent almost the extent of the interest music theorists have brought to bear on Perséphone. See Horlacher, “Superimposed Strata in the Music of Igor Stravinsky,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990; “The Rhythms of Reiteration: Formal Development in Stravinsky's Ostinati,’ Music Theory Spectrum 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 171-87; and Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 64. Theodor W. Adorno, Die Philosophie der neuen Musik [1949], in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), vol. 12, 7-126; translated into English by Anne G. Mitchell and Welsey V. Blomster as Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2003). 6S. Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/ Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988).

Introduction m 19

flood of encyclopedia entries and extended studies, European and North American scholars thereupon struggled to define a term that many agreed remained unsatisfying as a means of defining a style or aesthetics and unreliable as a signifier of any kind.” Historical research reveals “a collection of usages | that] produced such a variety of meaning,” Messing wrote, “that the expression seems to possess no syntactical weight whatsoever.” “So what was it,” Richard Taruskin echoed in a 1993 review, “hardboiled modernism or futile nostalgia? Can we define it, or can we only ‘know it when we see it’?... Should we call it a musical style at all? A concept? A practice?”®* The term appeared impossible, and yet inevitable. “Despite many reports to its demise as a category in our professional discourse,’ Martha Hyde concluded a few years later, “neoclassicism shows a persistent, if messy and equivocal life.’ Musicologists and theorists focused their discussions of neoclassicism in the 1990s on two pressing topics. The most controversial and difficult was that of how neoclassical composers related to the past, and whether such retrospectivism could be reconciled with the project of modernism. Joseph Straus contributed in an important way by setting the tone for this debate in Remaking the Past, in which he analyzed how composers reworked

or used past musical techniques and styles, interpreting their psychology in terms of Harold Bloom’s then popular “anxiety ofinfluence.’’”” Numerous

theorists speculated with or against him on how such “imitation” could work within the aesthetic of modernism, their essays fraught with anxiety about neoclassicism’s tendency to stretch beyond the confines of the

66. Among the vast literature on this topic | would mention here Canto damore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music 1914-1935, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt (Basel: Paul Sacher Foundation, 1996); Markus Bandur, “Neoklassizmus,” in Terminologie der Musik im 20, Jahrhundert, Handworterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie 1, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995), 289-94; Michel Fauré, Du néoclassicisme musical dans la France du premier XXe siécle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997); Ruth Piquer Sanciemente, Clasicismo moderno, neoclasicismo y retornos en el pensamiento musical espafiol (1915-1939) (Berlin: Editorial Doble J, 2010); and Gianfranco Vinay, Stravinsky Neoclassico: L’Invenzione della memoria nel ‘900 musicale (Venice: Marsilio, 1987). 67. Scott Messing, “Polemic as History: The Case of Neoclassicism,’ Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4

(Autumn 1991): 481. 68. Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,’ 19th-Century Music 16, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 287. 69. Martha Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music,’ Music Theory Spectrum 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 202. 70. Joseph Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kevin Korsyn, “Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence,’ Musical Analysis 10, nos. 1-2 (1991): 3-72; and Richard Taruskin, “Revising Revision,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 114-38.

20 ™® MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

autonomous work.’' Many tacitly assumed that neoclassicism was a modernist style and consequently focused on its characteristics of montage, parody, imitation, and “estrangement.’”* A small group in Germany had even associated neoclassicism with Russian formalism, though this is an unlikely association unsupported by historical evidence.” Many of these studies, which in hindsight appear trapped in less than adequate analytical and stylistic frames, forced modernist classicism into a formalist straightjacket that erased its broader cultural history. A second pressing theme was that of how neoclassicism reflected nationalist ideology—a topic Jane Fulcher has most emphatically argued in her research on it as a Third Republic doctrine in France.’* Fulcher followed on a decade-long practice of analyzing neoclassicism within the context of nationalist chauvinism in Europe in the early twentieth century. In 1993 Taruskin had shaken musicologists out of their complacency by arguing that neoclassicism hid an ideology far more dangerous than mere nationalism: musical autonomy and form were intrinsically ideologically tainted, he had ominously declared. Taruskin called neoclassicism the “N-word,’ implying a depth of injury behind the mask, for he recognized its function as a flashpoint for phobic anxieties about modernism.” His work became a singular source of inspiration for me as I researched this book. Yet his words also virtually ended the North American debate on neoclassicism, which for the past decade has remained shrouded in silence.

71. J. Peter Burkholder, “Musical Time and Continuity as a Reflection of the Historical Situation of

Modern Composer,” Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 411-29; and Marianne KielianGilbert, “Stravinsky's Contrasts: Contradiction and Discontinuity in His Neoclassic Music,” Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 448-80. Pieter van den Toorn disagreed with some of these approaches in “What Price Analysis?,” Journal of Music Theory 33 (1989): 165-89. 72. Richard Taruskin, “Pathos Is Banned: Stravinsky and Neoclassicism,’ in The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), vol. 4, 447-95.

73. See Rudolf Stephan, “Zur Deutung von Strawinskys Neoklassizismus,” Musik-Konzepte 34-35 (1984): 80-88; and Wolfgang Osthoff and Reinhard Wiesend, eds., Colloquium Klassizitat, Klassizismus, Klassik in der Musik 1920-1950 (Wiirzburg, 1985) (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1988). Alan Lessem picks up this subject in “Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Neo-Classicism: The Issues Reexamined,” Musical Quarterly 68 (1982): 527-42. Hermann Danuser also perpetuates this idea in “Rewriting the Past: Classicisms of the Inter-War Period.” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century

Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 260-85. 74. Jane Fulcher, “The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in Interwar Neoclassicism,” Journal of Musicology 17, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 197-230; and The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 75. Taruskin, “Back to Whom:?,’ 290.

Introduction m 21

M™ PERFORMING MODERNISM: A NEW APPROACH The interpretive potential of my approach in comparison with those described above lies in my emphasis on the performance of neoclassicism

and modernism and in my shift from formalist or stylistic analysis to a microhistorical investigation of music as performed historical event. In the 1930s, journalists acknowledged a concert or composition as an “event” by reporting on it, advertising it, announcing it, photographing it, and conducting interviews with the people involved in it. Individual listeners enjoyed the aesthetic experience of listening to music, of course, but their private moments of musical communion attained historical significance largely because mediated through the printed or broadcast word and image. “The media transforms into an act what would otherwise remain a word in the air, Pierre Nora comments. Although this was true of music reception for centuries, the pattern accelerated after World War I, when “the monopoly on history went to the mass media.” My understanding of how music functions as an “event” has been influenced by my long-standing engagement with the writings of Michel Fou-

cault, who first defined the term in the early 1970s as a means of distinguishing his genealogical approach to history from the traditional “history of events” (which battle happened when) and from the “nonevent-oriented history” of the structuralist Annales school.’’ Foucault thought of the event as a means of breaking away from text-based accounts of historical meaning, or what he called the “regime” of “scientifically true statements. He believed that historians should stop trying to find meaning

in history on the basis of texts, symbolic fields, or signifying structures and instead document relations of power as revealed in active moments of

change.”* In his view the event was not the historical action itself but rather the reversal in power relations or shift in discourse created by it (e.g., by means of vocabulary appropriated from and turned against those

76. Pierre Nora, “Le Retour de l’événement,” in Faire de histoire: Nouveaux problémes, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 212, 214. 77. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge/Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed.

Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972/1980); “Questions of Method: Michel Foucault [1980],” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 73-86; Thomas Flynn, “Foucault's Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29-48; and “Michel Foucault and the Career of the Historical Event,” in At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed. Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Athens: University of Georgia Press,

1987), 178-200. 78. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge, 112-15.

22 @& MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

who had once used it).” In his “genealogies” he examined the origin of practices as a series of jolting, coincidental, surprising, contingent, and pluralistic events. I take up his challenge by exploring the relationship collapses and moments of failure permeating the production of Perséphone rather than the work's historical successes.

My interpretive approach to Perséphone as an event is likewise shaped

by the discourses in dance history and performance studies. From the former I have gained an appreciation for reading the symbolic and representational meaning of the performing body without reducing it to text or losing sight of somatic experience, and for situating the body in the context of dance history, taking into account not only aesthetic and stylistic frameworks of dance but also individual dancers’ theories of bodily expression. I have been most motivated by the work of Ann Cooper Albright,

Susan Foster, Jane Desmond, and Mark Franko.*° From performance studies I have gained theoretical insight—models for piercing the event of performance in search of new sources of knowledge and alternative his-

tories. I am guided particularly by the scholarship of Sue-Ellen Case, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, and Diana Taylor.*' Each of these scholars questions the illusions of symbolic representation and comfortable iden-

tity politics; they push toward histories that take into account oral memory, lived experience, presence, and corporeal sensation. These areas

of research are just beginning to resonate in the musicological community, although interest in dance has been increasing in the discipline for years. Within musicology my greatest source of inspiration has been Elisabeth Le Guin’s work on corporeal memory, “carnal” hermeneutics of music, and the performer’s relation to history.”

79. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,’ in Hommage a Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971), 160; translated by Donald F. Bouchard into English as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 154. 80. See in particular Ann Cooper Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Con-

temporary Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); Jane Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 81. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre | 1988], foreword by Elaine Aston (New York: Palgrave, 2008); Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2003). 82. Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

Introduction m= 23

Inspired by carnal musicology, performance studies, and Judith Butler’s paradigm-shifting perspectives on the possibilities of the performative, I depart in my analysis of Perséphone from the premise that theatrical meaning reveals itself in aporias: moments that appeared to original spectators to be out of the ordinary or stand out in some way. Many critics remarked on those features in the 1934 premiere of Perséphone. They pointed to rhythms that were out of sync with actors’ stage movements, exaggerated opulence of props and costumes, incomprehensible declamation of text, illogical twists of plot, the audience's bored and suspicious response to the music and its suitability to the drama, the offense they took at Gide's interpretive liberties with the myth, their discomfort with sexual innuendo, and their surprise about Rubinstein’s awkward gestures and lack of talent in comparison to other dancers. Most of the stage actions on which these original spectators commented left virtually no mark on published scores, libretti, or recordings. Much of the impact of utter-

ances, gestures, movements, actions, and staging is recoverable only through archival research. There was much to learn, I realized, from reading reviews against the grain, analyzing stage directions, secondary texts, and archival documents for clues to theatricality and corporeal experience, and studying eyewitness accounts and recollections that document audience expectations and reactions. By searching through a variety of records directly and indirectly related to the production, I was able to recover traces of the sensual and theatrical experience of the performance that, collectively, provide a persuasive picture of a one-time event and its significance for 1930s modernism. My method for investigating theatrical aporias and music as an event has been influenced by reflections on microhistory that took place around the millennium.*’ The work of Matti Peltonen and Istvan Szjarto, in particular, convinced me to undertake a severely limited investigation—in this

case a single performance of one piece—as a means of understanding a broad spectrum of themes related to modern music and what is known as the style of neoclassicism. By exploring in depth the concrete and specific

evidence that has survived to document the premiere performance of

83. My understanding of microhistory is influenced by Carlo Ginzberg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 10-35; Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991 ), 93-113;

Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History

and Theory 40 (October 2001): 347-59; and Istvan Szjarté, “Four Arguments for Microhistory,’ Rethinking History 6, no. 2 (2002): 209-15.

24 ™ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

Perséphone, and by developing what Peltonen calls a “method of clues” to investigate aspects of the performance that did not fit or that seemed odd and needed to be explained, I hoped, in Giovanni Levi's words, to “reveal

factors previously unobserved” and give new meanings to phenomena previously considered “sufficiently described and understood.” In my microhistorical investigation of Perséphone I follow Jean-Jacques

Nattiez in departing from the premise that the meaning of performed music in the past can best be reconstituted, or brought back to life, by examining the intentions of those who created it, the neutral texts that survive (as they are mediated in the event of performance), and the opinions expressed by those who originally witnessed it. I differ from Nattiez only in exploring the live experience of music heard in the past, rather

than, as he sometimes does, reducing stage productions to music, and music to text. I decided to return to the exploration of authors’ intentions, and to the study of poietics, or the genesis of a work, and its staging, in spite of criticism that has been leveled at these approaches within the field of musicology since the 1990s. I have returned to the “author” because I believe that the history of musical modernism has suffered from his “death.” Letters and papers hold valuable clues to authors’ and performers’ aesthetics

and artistic and theatrical visions. I have therefore analyzed Copeau’s notes on the staging, Gide'’s drafts and typescripts for Proserpine and Perséphone, Stravinsky's sketches and commentaries, photographs and film

documentation of Joosss choreographies and performances, contemporaneous literature, newspaper reviews, friends’ and acquaintances letters and diaries, and all available written sources on the elusive Ida Rubinstein (who left no archive). I have placed particular emphasis on the countless interviews Rubinstein and Stravinsky gave for the press in the interwar years—many of which have escaped scholarly attention, despite their historical significance in articulating the story of neoclassicism as a media event. I explore these authors and performers’ intentions not with the goal of proving the value of the work made (a Romantic and modernist bias Richard Taruskin famously dismantled as the “poietic fallacy”) but rather to gain insight into the meanings performed on the theatrical stage and in public discourse at the 1934 event.® A large part of my work has involved linking biographical motivation (whether religious

belief, personal trauma, or political conviction) to aesthetics, thereby 84. Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads,’ 349; and Levi, “On Microhistory,’ 97-98. 85. Richard Taruskin, “The Poietic Fallacy,” Musical Times 145, no. 1886 (Spring 2004): 7-34.

Introduction m 25

connecting the personal to the communicative realm representing the social. In this I follow Anne Anlin Cheng, who has argued for an intimate link between “interior patterns” and “psychical experiences” with “social

and subjective formations of minority groups’; and Heather Love, who has argued for a “politics of affect” that allows “personal encounters and the feelings that they elicit [to] stand in for theories of history and of the social.’ My approach to poietics differs from traditional approaches because I consider the intentions of a wide range of collaborators involved in a first production rather than just those of a composer or librettist, the

individuals who created the “work.” I have refrained from judging the value of the collaborators’ expressed intentions—restraint made easier by the fact that Perséphone failed at its premiere in Paris. My choice to study intentions is a consequence not only of the intellectual beliefs with which I began the project but also, and more so, of the evolving process of doing historical research on Perséphone, which drew

me ever more intensely into the debates over autobiographical writing, self-revelation, and the role of the writer in 1930s France. I came to see Perséphone as a symbolic product of these debates, which centered on the person of André Gide. French identity, I learned, was intrinsically linked to the literary practice of acute self-observation and documentation that Gide and many other French intellectuals of the time, including Jacques Copeau and Michel Leiris, developed in their published diaries and correspondence. Writers deliberately began to record minute details of their lives, seeking justification for their thoughts and actions through a practice of extreme—and public—self-revelation. ‘Their extensive records re-

semble today’s blogs or “reality shows” for the manner in which they transformed the private sphere into a matter of public record, medializing even the most intimate aspects of human existence. My narrative on Perséphone mirrors and takes into account this unparalleled documentary

source, which I came to consider emblematic of identity construction within the French hexagon in the 1930s. One consequence of my approach to the author is my realization that figures previously considered ancillary by those who studied the music alone—stage designers, dancers, the choreographer, even journalists—in fact played a far more active role in the history of the melodrama, and of

musical modernism, than was hitherto understood. The meaning of 86. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), x; and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 2007), 11-12.

26 M@ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

Perséphone emerges not from the score but rather from the collaborators’ multidimensional involvement in philosophical, sociopolitical, and artistic debates of their time and the intersection of their ideas in the event of Perséphone’s performance. My close, detailed examination of the dynamics

of personal interaction resulted in a salutary counter to depictions of modernism that emphasize deterministic processes, analogies between musical and social structures, monolithic interpretations of style, identity, and Zeitgeist, or teleological views of history. Perséphone’s collaborators

articulated their intentions and actions in the mass media in a manner that prevented a single interpretation of their enterprise; their pluralistic enunciations complicate traditional stylistic and structural interpretations of what has come to be known as neoclassical style. The multiple discourses in which Perséphone’s collaborators engaged caused me to question the identity politics of modern music as they have come to be understood since the New Musicology battles of the 1980s: Perséphone’s collaborators did not formulate their artistic subjectivities and narrative strategies within a national context, as is often assumed in musicology, but rather in the local framework of overlapping subcultures

in Paris and in dialogue with individuals operating across transnational communication networks. My microhistorical approach is inspired by the idea of “transnational encounters’—a term I use to describe the pluralistic cultural contexts created when dancers, writers, stage directors, composers, critics, and intellectuals from different nations, or from distinct subcultures within those nations, come into contact and dialogue or collaborate with one another. I have come to understand the music, liter-

ature, and dance of the interwar years of transnational capitalism in Europe as the product of such encounters, which historians such as Karl Schlogel have made the center of their work and which also became part of the East German historiographic tradition.*’ I developed my historical methodology also in part in response to Brigid Cohen’s call to move the study of musical modernism “beyond the nation” by accounting for “cosmopolitan boundary crossing and urgent post-national cultural identifications that gesture beyond the national models of belonging that often frame the study of Western art music.’** One of my primary objectives 87. See, for example, Fritz Mierau, Russen in Berlin 1918-1933: Eine kulturelle Begegnung (Weinheim: Quadriga, 1988); and Karl Schlégel, Das russische Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas (Munich: Hanser, 2007). 88. Brigid Cohen, “Musical Modernism beyond the Nation: The Case of Stefan Wolpe,’ in Crosscurrents: European and American Music in Interaction, 1900-2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne Shreffler (Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, 2012). Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha

Introduction m= 27

was to rediscover these often hidden or silenced local and transnational subcultures and, in so doing, reveal the limitations of style, compositional history and the geopolitics of the nation state as frameworks for the investigation of modern music.

M FAITH, LOVE, HOPE Many of the themes of my investigation of the event of Perséphone emerge from the content of the melodrama itself, which Gide based on the myth of Persephone as articulated in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter of 650-550 B.c., which had been discovered in a stable in Moscow in 1777.*? Classicists recognize the Homeric Hymn as a primary source of information on the secretive ancient cult of the Eleusinian mysteries and female fertility ritual of the Thesmophoria.”” Homer opens with an evocation of the god-

dess Demeter and a description of how Hades abducted her daughter Persephone into the underworld while the girl was innocently plucking a narcissus flower, which Hades, with the permission of Persephone’s father,

Zeus, had planted as a trap. Tormented with grief over the loss of her daughter, Demeter roamed the earth, casting curses of famine and infertility. Zeus thereupon sent Hermes to the underworld to fetch Persephone back. Before letting her go, however, Hades tricked her into eating

a pomegranate seed, thereby binding her to him. Persephone returns home but may stay there for only two-thirds of each year, being obliged to reside in the underworld for the remaining third as the queen of the dead. The mature Persephone thus possesses a rare dual knowledge of life and death, her regenerative power metaphorically linked to the image of grain, the seasons, and the invention of agriculture. and Bruce Robbins, Cohen adopts the term “migrant cosmopolitanism” to describe the state of displaced persons who have lost the comfort of national affiliation and engage in multiple and hybrid forms of new attachments to new practices and communities. She prefers this term to the traditional notion of “exile,” which implies a struggle between a lost and anew homeland and thus keeps the idea of the nation state intact as the basis of historical inquiry. I agree wholeheartedly with Cohen's approach, yet I prefer the term “transnational” within the context of Perséphone because not all of the people involved in my story were migrants, and some of them lived in the country in which they had been born and yet grappled with the nation state. 89. For dating and history of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see Helene P. Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and N. J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 90. See Kevin Clinton, Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Stockholm: Svenska institutet i Athen, 1992); and Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

28 © MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

The key theatrical aporias I see as having emerged during the premiere of Perséphone stem from the collaborators’ divergent responses to the myth’s central themes of faith, love, and hope. These three virtues, which Saint Paul (Corinthians 13:13) and Thomas Aquinas made the foundation of Christian ethics, became the point of greatest moral contention among those involved in the 1934 production. Across many religions, faith refers

to a belief in transcendent reality—an idea many secular modernists rejected outright in favor of materialism; love is interpreted as agape, or charity, in opposition to Eros; and hope implies eternal life, salvation, and resurrection—possibilities many skeptics refused as irrational or unproven in the scientific years of the early twentieth century.

These three mythical/theological virtues are important for understanding neoclassical aesthetics. They also haunt modernism, both as an affirmative ethics embraced by believers (as evident, e.g., in Alban Berg’s essay “Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe [ Faith, Hope, Love]”), as the mottos for Stravinsky’s Symphonie de psaumes and part 3 of Canticum sacrum (where

he uses the Latin equivalents Caritas, Spes, and Fides), and as parodied hypocrisies, as in Od6n von Horvath’s 1932 drama Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. I reflect on each of these virtues with critical distance and awareness of their modernist ambivalence, allowing them to inspire my titles, yet

not denying the doubt and anxiousness that surrounded them in the interwar years. This framework allows me to work in stages through the process of trust, attachment, loss, and potential for recovery described in

the myth of Persephone; understanding this process helps us to gain insight into 1930s neoclassicism.

Each of the three main parts of Modernist Mysteries opens with a detailed description of a key theatrical aporia in Perséphone. The length of

these three parts reflects the proportions of Perséphone: part 1 has the feeling of an overture, part 2 is weighted with gravitas, and part 3 ends with a lighter, speculative touch. Part 1, “Faith,” begins with the theatrical moment at the opening of Perséphone when Ida Rubinstein as Persephone struggles to outshine the youthful and charismatic Nathalie Krassovska as Demeter as the latter entrusts her to the nymphs. Demeter's gesture raises the questions of how religious faith shapes artistic practice and what happens to that practice when faith is called into question, or when it relin-

quishes its claims to universal appeal and ties with national identity, as occurred in 1930s France. In the three chapters of part 1, I explore how all of Perséphone's collaborators expressed their religious faith through their

contributions to the work and its premiere performance. I begin with André Gide, whose involvement with Perséphone spanned a period of

Introduction m 29

more than forty years, from his first poetic musings in 1891 through his two drafted scenarios, from 1909 and 1913, on the subject of Proserpine (the French version of Persephone’s Roman name) to the final melodrama, based on revisions of these earlier materials, that he wrote for Ida Rubinstein in 1933. I continue in chapter 2 with an analysis of Stravinsky’s poietics of Christian faith as revealed in the music he composed for Perséphone that year. Finally, I conclude part 1 with an exploration of how

questions of faith affected the staging and production of Perséphone through the contributions of Copeau and Jooss, who joined the production team only a few months before the premiere in 1934. The lapse in time between the moment when Gide first imagined Perséphone in 1892 and its premiere in 1934 is significant: although the work embraced the traditional values and emotional restraint that characterized lart des années trentes it remains, like modernism itself, haunted by and nostalgic for the trespasses of its nineteenth-century youth. ‘The historical disjunctions created when Copeau layered Christian teaching and Stravinsky Orthodox dogma onto Gide’s dated Symbolist mysticism contributed greatly to the work’s religious lability and can be seen as emblematic of a loss of unified tradition and faith in 1930s modernism generally. Moreover, Gide had matured during the forty years of Perséphone’s gestation, and in the process of rewriting the work multiple times he had abandoned the Nietzschean hedonism of his youth. By the early 1930s he was on the threshold of old age, his identity, like that of modernism, now shaped by a lifetime of fond and tragic memories. The religious battle in Perséphone crystallized around an age-old question that had divided French Catholics and Protestants for centuries yet

acquired new relevance in the 1930s: should one accept the Catholic Churchs dogma as ultimate truth and universal law or, rather—as Gide thought one should (according to his interpretation of Protestant tradition)—develop one’s morals individually based on life experience. In French literary circles in the 1930s this question became bound up with issues of sexuality and political engagement, especially in relation to Gide's

“coming out” as a pédéraste and “conversion” to communism in the late 1920s. Among Perséphone’s collaborators, Copeau, Stravinsky, and Rubinstein all aligned themselves more or less with the Catholics and in opposi-

tion to Gide. The ecumenical dispute between them left its mark most tellingly on the 1934 performance of Perséphone in the awkward moment of

representational disjunction between Persephone (as the embodiment of Protestant individualism) and her mother, Demeter (as the keeper of Christian

dogma). Personal religious belief determined for each collaborator which

30 @& MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

figure—Persephone or Demeter—was to be allowed to prevail in their interpretations of this modernist mystery. Part 2, “Love, opens with a description of Rubinstein’s disruptive performance in plucking the narcissus. Most critics attending the premiere on 30 April 1934 noticed with consternation that for this scene Gide had

changed the plot of the well-known myth.” In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter the narcissus functions like a trap, ensnaring Persephone in the ravenous clutches of Pluto, who abducts her into the underworld. There she succumbs to him, but only after having been tricked into biting the pomegranate; with that, her marriage to him becomes symbolically consummated. Karl Kerényi and others later identified this passage of the myth as a profound allegory of female heterosexual initiation, marriage, and death.”* By eliminating Persephone’s ravishment at the moment when she plucks the narcissus and by allowing her to descend into the underworld of her own free will, Gide symbolically disrupted the foundation of Western patriarchy and opened the door to a revolution in the literary, musical, and performative expression of sexual desire. Gide's radical rewrite not only transforms the nature of Persephone's desire but also alters the meaning of her subsequent sojourn in the under-

world. Without her abduction, there is no legitimate reason for her mother, Demeter, to mourn. Rather than form attachments that will provide her with the foundation for her experience of loss, Gide’s Persephone has evaded connection to those around her by displacing her desire into

the abstract sphere of purported charity toward people she does not know. Gide emphasizes this deferral of desire by also altering the symbolism of the pomegranate seeds from that of the original myth. In the Hymn to Demeter Persephone, while in the underworld, consumes pomegranate seeds offered her by Pluto (the Roman name for Hades), thereby binding herself to him and symbolically consummating their marriage. In Gide’s text it is Mercury (the Roman name for Hermes) rather than Pluto who offers Persephone the pomegranate. The fruit thereby loses its erotic symbolism and becomes instead a conduit that restores Persephone'’s memory of the earth, which had been disrupted by her sojourn into the underworld. But because her narcissus-plucking and pomegranate-eating actions have precluded the formation of erotic attachment to others out of desire, Gide’s Persephone is unable to mourn.

91. See, for example, Paul Le Flem, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Comedia, 13 May 1934. 92. Karl Kerényi, “Kore,” in Carl Jung and Karl Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 141-43.

Introduction m= 31

In the four chapters of part 2 I explore representations of desire and loss in the 1934 performance of Perséphone. I shift gears from my focus on the

genesis of the production, which dominated in part 1, to a historically based hermeneutical analysis of the performance, in which I draw on poietic criticism. In part 2 the curtain has been raised and we find ourselves in medias res as spectators of the production. If in this part I focus almost exclusively on Gide's libretto, Stravinsky's music, and Rubinstein’s performance, this is only because information and material on Copeau’s produc-

tion and Joosss choreography for the second tableau is scant. The Gide-Stravinsky-Rubinstein triangle provides a rich constellation: in the moment of narcissus plucking, Gide communicates a pédéraste vision of desire, Stravinsky manifests his dual character by promulgating Orthodox dogma through his musical dramaturgy while secretly expressing existential fear as the inverse of desire through his historic dances, and Rubinstein fails in her performance of Sapphic ecstasy. These diverging representations of desire lead to diverging interpretations of loss. Yet in spite of their differences, these three central collaborators found common ground in the collective melancholy they symbolically represented once they had landed in the underworld. Whereas desire forced differences between them into the open, death united them. My views on the interrelatedness of love, desire, and loss in the four chapters of part 2 were shaped by psychoanalytical and philosophical explorations that informed the French discourse of the 1930s (including those of Kierkegaard, Freud, and Melanie Klein); the writings of Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida; Heather Love's and Jonathan Flately’s close readings of modernist literary texts; and contemporary views on Greek mythology.” In particular I build in these chapters on the idea, psychoanalytically explored by Melanie Klein, that love by its very nature contains the seeds of guilt and fear of loss.” In a very different context, both Roland Barthes and Derrida suggest that friendship and love are always necessarily haunted by the possibility of loss—a binary

93. See Love, Feeling Backward; Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of

Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer, Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005S). In my analysis I do not adopt Freud’s theory of Eros (or libido) and the death drive—the two competing

drives or instincts that he thought motivated human behavior—or any other psychoanalytic theory of the relationship between desire and death. I prefer to follow the logic of Perséphone in determining how desire and loss interrelate in this work. 94. See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 16, pt. 2 (April 1935): 154.

32 @ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

opposition that Derrida further complicates with the introduction of specters and a mode of historical attentiveness that he calls spectrality.”° This “thanatoerotic” anxiety, as Henry Staten labels it, has also been the subject of recent inquiry among queer theorists who seek to reafhrm the historic connections among desire, loss, and melancholia in the wake of the AIDS crisis.”° In the myth of Persephone the pomegranate symbolizes the ineluctable bond between desire and mourning: it both links Persephone's sexual fate with Pluto and assures her place in the realm of the dead. For Gide, Stravinsky, and Rubinstein love is accompanied by the specter of irremediable loss.

My analyses in part 2 led me to conclude that the neoclassical aesthetics of Perséphone are determined by a dialectic of desire and loss that can be traced back to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who established an enduring and remarkably resilient European neoclassicist tradition in the eighteenth century. Winckelmanns aesthetic was motivated by deferred homoerotic desire and rooted in the experience of loss and absence. Winckelmann compared the art historian who studies Greek sculpture to a maiden who waves good-bye to a departing lover. ‘The lover, like the authentic Greek sculpture, has disappeared from sight and is forever lost yet leaves behind a trace, like a ghost, that the art historian studies all the more fervently: Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tearful eyes her departing sweetheart, with no hope of seeing him again, and believes she can glimpse even in the distant sail the image of her lover—so we, like the lover, have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining. But this arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost, and we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals. In this, we often are like individuals who wish to

converse with ghosts, and believe they can see something where nothing exists. ... One always imagines that there is much to find, so one searches much to catch sight of something. Had the ancients been poorer, they would have written better about art: compared to them, we are like badly portioned heirs; but we turn over every stone, and by drawing inferences from many

tiny details we at least arrive at a probable assertion that can be more instructive than the accounts left to us by the ancients, which, except for a few

95. See Roland Barthes, “Absence,” in Fragments d'un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 19-24; and Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 96. Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See also chapter 7.

Introduction m 33 moments of insights, are merely historical. One must not hesitate to seek the truth, even to the detriment of one’s reputation; a few must err so that many may find the right way.”’

Here Winckelmann compares himself, the art historian, to a fictional abandoned lover who seeks in Roman copies, or in the phantom images on the sails of a departing ship, substitutes for a lost object of desire, the Greek original. “The art historian’s efforts thus produce a love object,’ literary scholar Richard Block writes, “a third party to this affair, who serves as the surrogate recipient for affections forever barred access to the real thing.””®

Thinking of Winckelmann’s practice as an art historian in terms of deferred homoerotic desire has numerous consequences for how we interpret his aesthetics. An eerie emptiness emerges in his neoclassicism— an “absent center” that masks a hidden trauma, or death itself.”” Eighteenth-

century theorists understood the dichotomy created by absent trauma and present beauty and thus contrasted Winckelmann’s Greek ideal with the medieval or baroque image of a gruesomely tormented dead Christ. Gotthold Lessing, for example, was mortified by corpses and abhorred the dead body, and he evoked both as the binary opposites of the beauty he aspired to in his classical aesthetics.'*’ Thus neoclassicism, or strange classicism, came to require its absent opposite—the disgusting corpse, crucifixion, trauma, and pain. Winckelmann’ss aesthetics were torn not only between the extremes of beauty and pain but also between rationality and sensual pleasure. They functioned as a model of rationality by controlling viewers’ feelings and passions (an important aspect of French and German classicism since the eighteenth century) and yet at the same time encouraged sensual indulgence by encouraging the contemplative observation of art. Harold Mah 97. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, with introduction by Alex Potts,

trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 351. I have replaced “spirit” with “ghost” as a translation for Gespenst. For the original, see Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Samtliche Werke, ed. Joseph Eiselein (Osnabruck: O. Zeller, 1965), vol. 6, 36S. 98. Richard Block, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 38; see also chap. 1, 17-48.

99, Alex Potts has equated the expression “still grandeur” (stille Gréfe)—taken from Winckelmannss famously coined phrase that classicism is characterized by “noble simplicity and still grandeur” (edle Einfalt und stille Gréfse)—with the actual stillness of death, or absence of signs of life; Potts, Flesh and the Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 1-2. Simon Richter developed a theory of the classic aesthetics of beauty as an aesthetics of pain in Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winck-

elmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). See also Harold Mah, Enlightenment Fantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany 1750-1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 100. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 72-73.

34 &© MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

argues that the conflict between “moral inwardness and corrupting sensual forms” is reflected in the distinction Winckelmann made between the “glance” (aesthetic appreciation of the classic whole) and the “gaze” (a meditative pleasure that opened up the viewer to hallucinations, the liminal, the undulating line, and dispossession of self).'°' Classicist sub-

jectivity is characterized, Mah postulates, by an ability to resist the physicality of the material world to attain rational self-possession. This sublimation is rarely complete, however, or even remotely successful, as resistance is in part futile. These contradictions lead the classical subject to have difficulty enacting itself as proscribed; instead, the subject is characterized by its contradictions. As a consequence, classicism oscillates between Platonic ideals and fetishism.'””

The discovery of hidden undercurrents of sensuality and pain in Winckelmann’s neoclassicism has led scholars to conclude that the eunuch or castrato (der Verschnittene) better represents his ideal of beauty than the more famous model with which he has long been associated: the Laoco6n statue unearthed in 1506 and housed in the Vatican. Castration left eunuchs with the “uncharacteristic” features (das Unbezeichnete) that

made them perfect models for Winckelmann’s androgynous ideal of beauty.*°? Winckelmann loved the castrato’s ambiguity—the simultaneous presence and absence of the markings of gender.” The beauty of the castrato, he wrote, “consists therein that the forms of lasting youth in the female sex are incorporated into the masculinity of a beautiful young man.’'> Winckelmann tried to recreate the “unnatural” ideal of the castrato body by reassembling the dismembered and reconstituted parts of

ancient Greek statues—such as that of Apollo—to create an illusory whole.'®° And yet he knew that the beauty of the castrato masked the hidden pain of castration—the cut that disrupted aesthetic pleasure by leaving the bodily trace of the scar. Simon Richter believes that the eighteenth-century castrato became the point of reference for all subsequent theories of classical beauty and that it gave evidence of aesthetic theory's persistent cruelty to the body.’”’ 101. Mah, Enlightenment Fantasies, 86-97, quote at 89.

102. Ibid., 73-86; 199-200n35-36. 103. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, 58-59. See also Catherine MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 30-32. 104. Block, The Spell of Italy, 45; Richter, Laocoon’s Body, SO. 105. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 201; Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, in Sdmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 7S.

106. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 118-32. 107. Richter, Laocoon’s Body, S8-59.

Introduction m 35

In part 2 of this book, I explore how the contradictions inherent in Winckelmann’s neoclassical aesthetics reach a breaking point in Perséphone. The extreme tension that is evident in this work between sensual experience and rational appreciation of beautiful forms in art is in part a consequence of the profound shifts in the discourse on desire and loss that had taken place in France since Winckelmannss time. Same-sex desire in 1930s France no longer remained unspoken as it had been for Winckelmann. Rather, as a consequence of the anthropological, criminal, and psychiatric categorization of “nonconformist” sexualities that had begun in France in the late nineteenth century, same-sex desire increasingly found

precise and varied literary, visual, and theatrical forms of expression.’ Michael Lucey describes the period in France from the 1870s to the 1940s

as a “reasonably fierce episode in the ongoing social and taxonomic struggle over the modalities of reference that would be permissible as regards same-sex sexualities. How these sexualities could be named and perceived was at stake, as was how the sexualities would be conceptualized—

by means of what categories and social divisions.”'” Michel Foucault has famously argued that homosexuality was “invented” during this period and that it did not exist as such before this modern drive toward categorization began. Critics in 1920s France began to use the umbrella term “homosexual” to describe male same-sex love in its binary relationship to the “heterosexual’—a term less often used but almost always assumed.''® This process of fixing sexualities accelerated after World War I, when natalists anxious about France's declining birth rates blamed homosexuals for destroying the French family and subjected them to ever more

ruthless scrutiny.'** In the late 1920s virtually hundreds of books and 108. Iam cautious throughout my analysis to use historically specific terms to describe sexuality. People used the term nonconformist frequently in French texts of the 1920s and 1930s to describe their feeling of standing outside the norm of heterosexuality. On the history of homosexuality in interwar France, see Laure Murat, La Loi du genre: Une histoire culturelle du “troisiéme sexe” (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Florence Tamagne, Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe: Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919-1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2000); and George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, eds., Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). 109. Michael Lucey, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 29. See also David M. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,” Representations 63 (Summer 1998): 96. 110. In this way the hetero/homosexual binary became solidified and naturalized. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1-63. 111. Martha Hanna, “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon,’ in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 205. Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou call this an era of “uncontrolled chatter” in Paris Gay 1925 (Paris: Presses de la renaissance, 1981), 101. They emphasize that natalist propaganda and fears of repopulating France after the war profoundly influenced the debate on homosexuality (142-47).

36 @& MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

articles on same-sex sexuality appeared, many of them by faux doctors and most of them by people who did not identify or associate with the populations or behaviors they were categorizing and labeling. Monique Nemer speaks of a “semantic flowering” of names for same-sex love. “Because if this love ‘[did] not dare speak its name,” she writes, evoking Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase, “it’s truly not for lack of names being attributed to it.”"* Gender trumped sexuality as the key category for constructing difference and determining prestige and social worth in these debates. Women served in many of these discussions as nothing more than a symbolic foil against which to affirm male sexual politics. The French debates about sexual desire arose in part as a consequence of the reception of Freud's ideas and the development of modern psychiatry in France, which coincided with the over forty-year gestation of Per-

séphone (1892—1934).' In these years French commentators shifted from considering homosexuality a “criminal act” to defining it as “a sickness” or mental illness. The German psychiatrist Kurt Westphal had initiated this “medicalization” of homosexuality in 1869 when he described it as a “congenital” condition in need ofa cure. In France the “epistemological caesura” between criminal and medical interpretations of same-sex sexual relations was marked by the publication of Georges Saint-Paul’s (aka Dr. Laupts) Tares et poisons of 1896. “Where our predecessors saw criminals we see sick people,’ Saint-Paul had written, “where the philosophy of long ago discovered a misdeed, we diagnose indeed a ‘mental defect, or ‘nervous illness?”''* A second seismic shift occurred with the French translation in 1923 of Sigmund Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905). And yet the criminal verdict on homosexuals by no

means disappeared after this date. Gide had grown up aware of both interpretations of his sexuality: as a young man he sought the advice of doctors on how to “cure” his desire for men while at the same time collecting extensive clippings on famous criminal trials involving homosexuals.

112. Monique Nemer, Corydon citoyen: Essai sur André Gide et l’homosexualité (Paris: Gallimard,

2006), 46. Francois Tamagne argues that this proliferation of terms blinded the French to the larger issue of gay rights; in contrast to England and Germany, there was no gay movement in France between the wars; see Histoire de Vhomosexualité en Europe, 138-169, and especially 158.

113. See Alain de Mijolla, Freud et la France 1885-1945 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010). 114. Dr. Laupts, Tares et poisons, perversion et perversité sexuelles, une enquéte médicale sur l’inversion,

notes et documents, le roman dun inverti-né, le procés Wilde, la guérison et la prophylaxie de linversion, with a preface by Emile Zola (Paris: Georges Carré, 1896), 280. This book was published in a second edition as Homosexualité et les types homosexuels (1910) and ina third edition as Invertis et homosexuels

(1930).

Introduction m 37

In part because of this legal ambiguity, discussions of sexual desire in this

period were almost invariably bound up with moral judgments. French modernist writers articulated their same-sex desire in response to these moral debates, rather than expressing it between the lines as Winckelmann once had. As a consequence of increased awareness of and interest in same-sex relations, Gide, Proust, Colette, and other writers of the period between the wars began actively exploring how to write about same-sex desire and construct nonconformist sexual subjectivities within the literary frame of the novel. They challenged the neoclassical ideal of literary aesthetic autonomy by writing in the first person, though by doing so they sacrificed their objective stance as writers.''’ This issue took on acute importance in the reception of Gide’s work in the late 1920s. Critics could not reconcile Gide’s deep investment in articulating his sexual subjectivity through the first-person pronoun with his modernist allegiance to the literary ideals of the French Symbolists, who had challenged the first-person perspective by celebrating the aesthetic objectivity of poetry as art in itself (lart pour lart). As I was to find, the fraught question of the “I” in literature played a key role in determining the nature of subversive expression of neoclassical desire in Perséphone.

Neoclassic aesthetics had changed by the 1930s not only because of modernist redefinitions of sexualities but also because the absent object of the art historian’s desire had shifted from Greece to the colonies—and that of émigrés to their lost homelands. The French no longer consistently defined their national culture in relation to Greece as the cradle of European civilization but rather increasingly understood themselves dialecti-

cally in relation to the ideal “primitive” they had discovered in their colonies. French ethnographers had described performance styles they discovered in Africa in terms of Greek tragedy at the turn of the century; in the wake of the fad of art négre in the 1920s, a wider range of commentators began blurring the distinction between Greek and colonial artistic ideals. Gide and Rubinstein follow this trend by mimicking in Perséphone desire they had discovered in the French colonies. Their practices demonstrate that desire in 1930s neoclassicism was intimately related to colonial and imperial relations. Leo Bersani writes in this respect that “there is no perspective on the real that goes untouched by desire; conversely, sexual desire itself may be nothing more than the appetitive form of the subject's

11S. Lucey, Never Say I, 9.

38 @& MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

painful consciousness of difference. It would be something like an appro-

priating reflex, a gesture designed to bring into the self what the self recognizes as alien.”'' By addressing imperial desire in Perséphone, I complicate the current view of relationships to alterity in musical modernism. Much research on this aspect is still framed theoretically by Edward Said’s now classic Orientalism, which has proven tremendously fruitful in unveiling imperial attitudes in a wide range of musical repertoire of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries.''’ Yet the methodological emphasis on Said has also led to a lack of subtlety, to a structuralist tendency to identify colonial difference based on musical and linguistic signifiers in scores and libretti, and to broad assumptions about the political meaning of such signs within Said’s general framework. There has also been a tremendous concentration on “musical exoticism,’ which I would argue is a problematic term, at best applicable in modernism only to a range of European musics composed before World War I. As an aesthetic, “exoticism” limits interpreta-

tion and confines historical analysis.''® Stylistic features of musical exoticism remained entrenched well after World War I and continue to be perpetuated today. But other aesthetic and musical relationships to alterity also developed in this period, including those that replicated the attitudes of missionaries, colonial administrators, tourists, émigrés, minorities in Europe, and others. Colonialism created not only an exoticizing gaze in art and music but also dramatic and musical equivalents for a variety of political relationships, including assimilation, association, exploitation, transculturation, and subaltern identification. Artists living in France in

the 1930s expressed numerous distinct attitudes toward colonialism, their perspectives reflecting their faith, relationship to God, personal priorities, sexualities, philosophies, social values, and the degree to which they felt they belonged in France. In part 2, I also discuss the gulf that opened up in neoclassical modernism between the sensual expression of desire and the attitudes toward the laws controlling it—an aesthetic split that Adorno noted but I believe incorrectly analyzed in Stravinsky’s music in Die Philosophie der neuen

Musik. Gide, Stravinsky, and Rubinstein were not only much more self-reflective than Winckelmann about the deferred desire implied in

116. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 134. 117. Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (New York: Vintage, 1994). 118. See Tim Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Introduction m 39

neoclassical aesthetics but also more willing and able to question, chal-

lenge, or explicitly confirm (in the case of Stravinsky) the state and Church laws that policed sexual behavior in their time. The disconnect between the sensual expression of desire and the recognition of its social regulation reflects the conflict between individual will and dogma that motivated the thesis on faith in part 1 of this book. In part 2, 1 create a story within a story by comparing the ways Gide, Stravinsky, and Rubinstein variously interpret the relationship between desire and the law in the mythical stories of Eurydice and Antigone. As George Steiner has documented, Antigone played a key role in the articulation of political theory for artists in twentieth-century France and Russia.''” In Sophocles’s play, Creon tries to secure the laws of the modern state by forbidding the burial of Antigone’s brother Polyneices. Antigone rejects his order and appeals to a higher natural law, the duty to god

and her family, to justify her disobedient act of burying her brother against Creon’s orders. She manifests her anger in what Walter Benjamin calls mythical violence, whereas Creon commits lawful violence (Rechtsgewalt) in service of the preservation of the state. Hegel thought the conflict between Creon and Antigone was morally symmetric and would be resolved in history. This is what Steiner refers to as “the conservative, proCreon Hegel paradigm.’ Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, in con-

trast, championed Antigone’s disobedience and interpreted her as the hero of the story.'*® Gide, Rubinstein, and Stravinsky took different sides

in this debate. That their perspectives coexist, albeit uneasily, in Perséphone reflects the open possibilities and fluidity of expression possible in modernist neoclassicism. The gap between Antigone’s desire and Creon’s law is evident in Stravinsky’s music and Gide’s text for Perséphone, where it results in a frag-

mentation of classical forms. Wolfgang Schadewaldt explains such fragmentation in a different context in terms of a shift from Winckelmann’s

“cyclic-centralizing” description of the parts that make up the torso of Apollo to Rilke’s “explosive-energetic’ description of the same torso in terms of the diverging energies that risk destroying its unity.’** Schadewaldt argues that classical models became “commodified” shortly after

Winckelmann’s death, when they already could no longer be enjoyed

119. George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 120. Steiner, Antigones, 41. 121. Wolfgang Schadewelt, Winckelmann und Rilke: Zwei Beschreibungen des Apollon (Stuttgart:

Neske, 1968), 26-28.

40 @ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

naively and had rather become the object of distanced reflection. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, one could say that neoclassicism shifted at this moment away from the Romantic symbol and toward modernist allegory.

Benjamin first presented his theory of allegory in his Habilitationsschrift (professorial dissertation), titled Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, which appeared in 1928, just five years before the production of Perséphone began, and yet remained largely unknown in this period.’” A victim of Nazi persecution, Benjamin spent much of the early 1930s, and especially the spring and summer of 1934, in Paris, where he familiarized himself like no other with the ideology and forms of French modernism. He revisited allegory in several essays on Baudelaire and in his Passagen-

werk, in which he linked baroque allegory explicitly to modernist aes-

thetics and late capitalism.’ On the night of Perséphone’s premiere, Benjamin lay depressed in a hotel room just a few blocks away from the Opéra.'** Benjamin's familiarity with French culture, and his perspicuity on modernism and modernist expression generally, makes his theory of allegory an ideal point of departure for analyzing the neoclassical aesthetics of Perséphone.

In Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin distinguished between ancient Greek tragedy and the German baroque Trauerspiel.

These two genres had erroneously been equated with each other, he thought, largely because of the false presumption that Aristotle had continued to influence poetics into the baroque period. Many philosophers

122. Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [1928 ] in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf

Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), vol. 1, pt. 1, 203430; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborme (London: Verso, 1977). George Steiner notes that the book was ignored and became “extinct” after 1931 with the rise of National Socialism (7). 123. Benjamin discusses the allegorical in “Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire [1939]”; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2, 605-54, and translated by Harry Zohn as “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 157-202; and in “Zentralpark [1938-39]”; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2, 657-90, and trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington as “Central Park,” New German Critique 34 | Winter 1985]: 32-58). See also the following excellent editions: Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Benjamin, Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 1938-40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Benjamin returns to allegory in an unpublished manuscript, “Baudelaire as Allegorist,’ kept in the Bibliotheque nationale. See Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 19-20, 215-19; and Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 151-83. 124. See Willem van Reijen and Herman van Doorn, Aufenthalte und Passagen: Leben und Werk Walter Benjamins, Eine Chronik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 117-52; Walter Benjamin, Ecrits francais, ed. Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); and Heinz Wismann, ed., Benjamin et Paris: Colloque international 27-29 Juin 1983 (Paris: Cerf, 1986).

Introduction m= 41

had followed Nietzsche in aestheticizing tragedy in the late nineteenth century, thereby ignoring the historical-philosophical insights of the myth of tragedy and the teachings of tragic guilt and tragic atonement

(tragische Schuld und tragische Stihne). As a result, they had freed tragedy from morality.’ Tragedy in Benjamin's view is based on the conflict between a hero and his surroundings and rooted in sacrifice. The hero's defiance grows from

speechlessness, which enabled what Lukacs described as the “pure ex-

perience of selfhood.”'*° The hero provides tragedy with its frame, within which laws are neither causal nor magical. In this context, the chorus creates a “speech edifice” beyond the conflicts of moral and religious communities. '*” The Trauerspiel, unlike tragedy, is a “melancholic” genre. Like Baudelaire’s poetry (with which Benjamin later associated it), the Trauerspiel is

rooted in history, not myth, and focused on a flesh-and-blood king and his power rather than on a mythical hero.'** History takes place in the courtroom.'” Benjamin called the Trauerspiel melancholic because he believed that it originated with the rise of Protestantism. ‘Ihe Protestants feared death, opposed everyday life, and were dismayed by the world in which they lived. This stance toward life allowed the rise of melancholia, which caused people to lose a direct connection to objects and instead become absorbed in their contemplation—an activity Benjamin famously referred to as “brooding” (griibeln). As a consequence, the Trauerspiel became trapped in the world of things and fixated on props, which had had no place in ancient tragedy. Trauerspiele were haunted by ghosts and involved communal rather than individual death. Alienation from the world and the act of contemplating things led baroque

dramatists to speak in the language of allegory rather than symbol. In Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin distinguished allegory

125. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 283; On the Origin of German Tragic Drama,

104-05. 126. Gyérgy Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen: Essays [1911], quoted in Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 287; On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, 108. 127. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 294-95, 300; On the Origin of German Tragic

Drama, 114-15, 121-22. 128. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 242-43, 249; On the Origin of German Tragic

Drama, 62-63, 69; see also Steiner’s introduction, 9, 16-17. 129. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 267-70; On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, 88-91.

42 @ MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

dialectically as a “form of expression” from the theological “symbol, which

he defined by “unity of the material and the transcendental object.’ The unity of the theological symbol—as in the symbol of Christ—eliminated the need for representation, and remained paradoxical. Such symbols occurred in a momentary flash, or what Benjamin called the mystic “Nu” or

‘instant.’ They promised a total unity of sign and meaning and evoked a feeling of transcendent purpose. Benjamin thought the Romantics had misinterpreted the theological symbol by aestheticizing it as the literary manifestation or “appearance” of an idea in the work of art.'*° He traced this Romantic misreading back to Winckelmann and Georg Friedrich Creuzer. The Romantics, Benjamin argued, had established a false “mythology of presence’ and a problematic form of criticism by adopting the symbol uncritically and by relying on the “momentary, the total, the inscrutability of the origin, [and] the necessary” associated with it. As a consequence, the symbol had become intertwined with appearances, beauty, aura, and the phantasmagoria. Most musicologists presume this Romantic symbol when they interpret music based on the signs or appearances they perceive in musical texts.

In contrast, the baroque or “borderline” allegory was a heterogeneous and dialectic mode of expression. Benjamin studied its use in more than

600 examples of baroque Trauerspiele that he found in archives and researched exhaustively.'*' The allegory he discovered there was ridden by “antinomies,’ or what he described as arbitrary references or profound disruptions in the relationship between an image and the idea or concept it potentially signified. This form of allegory had developed as a consequence of the discovery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which Benjamin inter-

preted within the context of the turn-of-the-century work of the art historian Karl Giehlow.’* The allegorist arbitrarily assigned meanings to objects, transforming them into the keys to a realm of hidden knowledge. Benjamin recognized the violence in this appropriation of objects for the sake of arbitrary signification and compared the allegorist to the rule of a “stern sultan in the harem of objects,’ or to a “sadist” who “humiliates his object and then—or thereby—satisfies it.” “And that is what the allegorist

130. Benjamin Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 336-37, 342; On the Origin of German Tragedy, 159-60, 165. See also Matthew Wilkens, “Toward a Benjaminian Theory of Dialectical Allegory, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 37, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 285-98. 131. On borderline allegory, see John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 132. 132. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 344-48. On the Origin of German Tragedy, 167-71.

Introduction m= 43

does in this age drunk with acts of cruelty both lived and imagined,” Ben-

jamin concluded.'” Benjamin also emphasized allegory’s artificiality. He thought that the constructed quality and displayed craftsmanship of allegory made it impossible to consider it within the context of the “radiance of transcendent effect” typical of the symbol. Allegories lacked the feeling of the “intimate and mysterious” associated with the symbol, which they replaced with the “enigmatic

and concealed.” Moreover, allegories did not create coherent wholes but, rather, piled up like ruins or fragments. Their purpose was “moral edification,” or what Benjamin called a “hidden theology.”

Allegories do not occur in the mystic instant as symbols do. In this sense they evince, in Max Pensky’s words, “a tremendous alienation from immediacy” just as neoclassical music did.** By disrupting the relationship between sign and signified, allegories draw attention to and acknowledge the temporal dimension of the profane world: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been

untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather, in a death's head. And although such a thing lacks all “symbolic” freedom of expression, all classic proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, of secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline.'*°

Benjamin considered the corpse to be the epitome of all the emblematic props of baroque allegory because it reminds us of the historical reality of death through its alienation as an allegorical object. The corpse represents nature in decay rather than nature transfigured. It does not

133. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 359-60. On the Origin of German Tragedy,

etre Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 353-58; On the Origin of German Tragedy, 172-73, 177-82. 135. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 116.

136. Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 342-43; On the Origin of German Tragedy, 166.

44 8 MODERNIST MYSTERIES: PERSEPHONE

symbolize or represent death but rather gives unmediated physical evi-

dence of it. And yet, when situated in allegorical arrangements, the corpse both denies profane meaning and elevates it by purporting to hint at something higher. John McCole has interpreted Benjamin as saying that “death ‘prepares’ the body for allegorical dismemberment, for an emblematic ‘distribution’ of its parts ‘to the manifold regions of significance.”**’

When Benjamin reinterpreted baroque allegory within the context of French literary modernism in the 1930s, he suggested replacing the allegory of the corpse with that of the “souvenir” (Andenken), which he thought served a similar function to it in modernity. The souvenir is the product of an alienated world of capitalism that leaves memories hollowed out, objects dislocated, and experiences sucked of their life and meaning—a world, in fact, first described in Baudelaire’s poetry.’ The souvenir is a commodity that is no longer in circulation and can therefore remind of the mythic character of capitalism. According to Susan Stewart, souvenirs have no need or use value and arise solely out of the “insatiable demands of nostalgia.” They give buyers or listeners the feeling of possess-

ing an authentic trace of experienced events “whose materiality has escaped |them], events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative. As exchangeable, commercial products, souvenirs substitute for lived experience, to which they relate metonymically as a sample.'” In Benjamin's words: The souvenir is the complement to the “experience” | des “Erlebnisses” ]. In it the increasing self-alienation of the person who inventories his past as dead possession is distilled. In the nineteenth century, allegory left [hat geraumt] the surrounding world, in order to settle in the inner world. The relic derives from the corpse, the souvenir from deceased experience | Erfahrung], which calls itself euphemistically “experience” [“Erlebnis” ].'*°

Benjamin's allegories, and especially the images of the corpse and souvenir, prove invaluable in analyzing the form that results from the dialectic of desire and loss in Perséphone. The conflict between tragedy and Trauerspiel—between the Romantic symbol and Benjamins allegory—is 137. McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, 141. See Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 390-93; On the Origin of German Tragedy, 215-20. 138. Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” 681, “Central Park,’ 48-49. 139. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 134-35, 151. 140. Benjamin, “Zentralpark,’ 681; “Central Park,” 49.

Introduction m 45

central to modernist neoclassicism. In part 2, 1 show Perséphone’s collaborators attempting to reinstate the Romantic symbol as a means of express-

ing their faith through art. They have to choose between the ghost (the symbol) and the corpse (or allegory) as appropriate images for the dead. Their Romantic aspirations are undermined by late capitalist production values, and their quest for experience (Erlebnis) is disrupted by reminders of everyday life (Erfahrung). The conflict between symbol and allegory in Perséphone reflects how obstinately its collaborators resisted the late capitalist transformation of their culture and how reluctant they were to aban-

don Romantic immediacy of experience, direct or “true” musical and theatrical memories, authenticity of production, and transcendent bliss, in spite of the modernist predicament in which they lived. The conflict between allegory and symbol, or the corpse and the ghost, becomes most evident in the third and final part of my book, “Hope,’ in which I bring together the various strands that have emerged throughout. I use Persephone’ overemphatic yet strangely moving rebirth in the third tableau of Perséphone as my final aporia and as a point of departure for a discussion of how each collaborator understood the relationship between past, present, and future—a topic that implicitly reveals their politics. Persephone's rebirth is a reminder of how important notions of the future are to political ideology. The reception of the third tableau on the night of the premiere exemplifies how a melancholic art can provide a form of political hope. I conclude that neoclassicism is not only a style but also a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past—and brimming with promise for the future.

** x

Rubinstein’s dinner party on 20 October 1933 ended on an uneasy note. Unable to relate to Stravinsky’s music and dismayed by Copeau’s plans for

the staging of the work, Gide left Paris and distanced himself from the project. Copeau tried to make up for his absence by closer collaboration with Stravinsky, but that ended abruptly when they became embroiled in a bitter dispute over whether André Barsacg (Copeau’s choice) or Stravinsky’s son Fyodor (Théodore) should provide the stage sets for Perséphone. Rubinstein departed on one of her fantastic voyages, leaving her collaborators without guidance. And before long Stravinsky, too, losing patience

with Copeau's intransigence and Gide’s lack of involvement, withdrew from the production. And thus out of comprehensive discord the failure of Perséphone was born.

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ee PAR ST ONE

Faith Experiencing Perséphone in 1934 Part I, “Perséphone ravie” (Persephone Ravished), in which Demeter entrusts Persephone to the nymphs.

Perséphone begins with a jarring invocation of the goddess Demeter. A shrill high B, a thirty-second note in the xylophone, harps, piano, and strings, leaps suddenly to an E a fifteenth below. This gesture is more abrupt even than the opening staccato of the Symphonie de psaumes,

which Charles-Albert Cingria described as functioning to “awaken people in the Biblical sense.”* The opening of Perséphone invokes all the

instrumental brashness of Stravinsky's Les Noces and bloodcurdling terror of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castlek—two works with which it shares many features—shattering any sense of complacency with which the audience may have been awaiting the performance to begin. Against the shuddering afterthought of an E tremolo in the piano and a held note in the trombone, the Belgian tenor René Maison projects Gide’s first alexandrine across the cavernous depths of the Paris Opéra. “Goddess of a thousand names, powerful Demeter” (Déesse aux mille noms, puissante Démeéter), Maison incants in a forceful voice with pronounced tremolo and impeccable diction.’ His “ritual words are interspersed, chopped up with brief pauses—apparent signs of religious emotion, the critic Robert Dézarnaux remarked.”

1. Charles-Albert Cingria, “L'Oeuvre de Strawinsky par Domenico de Paoli (Scheiwiller, Milan),” La Nouvelle Revue Francaise (hereafter NRF) 21, no. 241 (October 1933), 634-37; reprinted in Cingria, Oeuvres complétes (Lausanne: LAge d’ Homme, 1967), vol. 4, 251. To get a sense of how Stravinsky interpreted this opening, listen to his 1931 recording of the Symphonie de psaumes, included on Igor Stravinsky Plays and Conducts (EMI Classics, 1993). 2. René Maison did not record his performance of Perséphone. [have culled my observations from his recordings of standard repertoire in this period (including Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, Wagner's Lohengrin, and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette). In his performances of Bizet’s Agnus Dei and Jean-Baptiste

Faure's Le Crucifix from 1928 he displays impressive religious fervor. See René Maison ténor: Airs, mélodies, prod. Manuel Couvreur (Liége: Musique en Wallonie, MEW 0315, 2003); and Michéle Friche, Les Grandes Voix du Hainault a lépoque des 78 tours (Brussels: Lebeer-Hossmann, 1985), 140-45. In modern recordings after 1950, tenors rarely use such tremolo when performing this part. 3. Robert Dézarnaux, “A l’Opéra,’ Liberté, 2 May 1934.

47

48 m@ FAITH

Maison’s chant evinces a strange modality, highlighting a tonic on E, yet interchanging D-sharp and D-natural within the awkward ambit of an octave on F-sharp. It presents features of plainchant, recitative, oratorio, cantata, declamation, and simple narration, yet is not easily categorized. Guy de Pourtalés found the melodies “tender and noble like Gregorian chant, but Raoul Brunel heard them as “long, arbitrary, and basically very cold” and Henry Malherbe as “regrettably commonplace.” “They didn't remind me of the recitative of seventeenth-century Italian masters, as advertised,’ Henry Pruniéres wrote, “but rather of the liturgical chant of the Russian Church.” The audience is disconcerted by the historical ambiguity of the music. In spite of this, Maurice Brillant concluded that “like great classical works, in effect, [the piece] grabs you imperiously, and

dominates you irresistibly, luring you insinuatingly into the archaic yet modern mystery of Perséphone.* As the audience listens to Maison’s voice, they have the chance to take in André Barsacq's “austere” and monumental stage set.” Massive canvases painted by Georges Mouveau have replicated a close-up of the entrance to a gigantic Romanesque cathedral, viewed at an angle from the left. From

a contemporary perspective, the edifice’s classicism reminds of Giorgio de Chirico’s metafisica, its impossible dimensions of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s carceri. The 1934 critics likened it variously to a Roman basilica, the Cathédrale Saint-Cécile d‘Albi, and the architecturally precise Renaissance paintings of Andrea Mantegna.° The “curious combination of walls

and arches’ reminded Count Sergei Volkonsky of “immense railroad bridges spanning an abyss” (see figure 0.1 in insert).’

At the front left of the stage, Jacques Copeau has created what looks like a stone courtyard, framed on the right by the cathedral’s entrance and

4. Guy de Pourtalés, “Les Ballets Ida Rubinstein,’ Marianne, 9 May 1934; Raoul Brunel, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein a l’Opéra: Perséphone, Diane de Poitiers,” L’'Oeuvre, 4 May 1934; Henry Malherbe, “La Musique,’ Feuilleton du Temps, 9 May 1934; Henry Pruniéres, “Perséphone d'Igor Strawinsky aux Ballets de Mme Rubinstein,” La Revue musicale 15, no. 146 (May 1934): 380-82; Maurice Brillant, “Les Fétes dansées et Mme Ida Rubinstein,” L’'Aube, 7 May 1934. 5. Many critics referred to Perséphone’s staging as “denuded” (dépouillé) and austere. It is difficult

to access the validity of this critical response, given how few visual records of the production have survived.

6. Jean Chantavoine refers to the cathedral at Albi in “Opéra: Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,” Le Ménestrel, 11 May 1934; Le Vieil Abonné refers to a Roman basilica in an untitled article in Candide, 10 May 1934. André George comments on the similarity between Barsacq’s sets and Mantegna’s painting in André George, “Le Premier Spectacle de Mme Rubinstein,’ Les Nouvelles littéraires, 5 May 1934.

7. Count Sergei Volkonsky, “Ballety Ida Rubinstein” [The ballets of Ida Rubinstein], Poslednie novosti, 10 May 1934.

eee @ = ‘ Figure 0.1: André Barsacq, stage caer , design for Perséphone, MAQ 10125, hele >. 4"‘ :een slide 13974, BNE , bee a *y ‘ i ~*~ = Be } \ ar 4. °PROS RSS y= -j lates = See er : v ‘ r er ‘, ;=NE , oes ' . 7ws. ’ce t aLF bh%=;>}; wie . ~ a ™ : be } Pu 3 Bee’ me? oe ane

eg E 7s. tae a) ee .ao m Ad 4 Posy / ae M ’ aN — lhe Bie aM oe " oN i. J] i. ve a i} me (| ie if re ae: an Be te te bee Zs 2a

|‘j:;:., 13 A % r : : v a) t ¥ i | . : ) -e3 o ’ ¥ 7 . | q a " : *, Bs " ‘ : an : Bie q F al By 4 . Pa he: : * it3 ‘aad nut , ) .hy aie! Bey? =... vi road & 45 A — te} +s sjet ; ; Wt oe J | : ts ; tee ay -Ai,A . b Fo peas is ay 7Re \ >a: ‘;1ve :AM wy. 4Bi fy ad! PT ee, pa fe at a ‘»}: ‘d - PG > ~AY . »~*~ e. , j;a\ =\ySg%' \' )7 —, vt: ‘ i it‘ta . “aay ; ’ Ne £%;——_ atks = i —an; war = a .te O*)D at ain Seti =eS ——Tae —_. _ | Leta s Ht = —————— Figure 0.2: André Barsacq, stage design for Figure 0.3: André Barsacq, stage design for the L’Arbre de songes (The dream tree), Perséphone, temple, Perséphone, slide 12370, BNF. slide 12350, BNF.

Faith m 49 on the left by a low, bare wall. He has directed a mixed chorus to line up in “veiled” darkness against the steep incline of this wall; the bright bands on

their costumes are intended to give them the “color of spring,’ but they remind Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme of “thirteenth-century illuminations.”* Auguste Mangeot thinks they look silly in this pose, as if “amassed at an award ceremony ; André Schaeffner is reminded of the “live, petrified colonnade” of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. André Coeuroy and Pierre Michaut agree that they resemble “pilgrims” or “the faithfuland neophytes,

spectators of a mystery.” The chorus stands in utter stillness as Maison sings, their static presence contradicting the processional nature of his chant (R3:2 in the published score). In front of the chorus a “dream tree’ with metallic leaves suggests the presence of a garden (see figure 0.2 in insert). Copeau and Barsacq have accentuated the tree's alienating effect within the stony architectural context of the cathedral by placing a golden bush and single narcissus flower as isolated props on the stage next to it. They have further disrupted the scene by positioning a round Greek temple with Ionian columns under the arch of the cathedral’s nave in the back right-hand corner of the stage. Bathed in yellow light and decorated with leaves and a bird, the temple emits a “soft Mediterranean glow” that draws the viewers’ attention (see figure 0.3 in insert).'° The disparate scenic elements confuse critics, however. “What a nice idea, this myth that nourishes all religions and that allows the joining and mixing of pagan and Catholic elements in a crafty stage design, Coeuroy commented afterward, echoing the sentiments of others.'' “We would have wanted to situate this liturgy in a more Greek and less Russo-Byzantine basilica,” Pruniéres wrote. “|'The set] seems to

8. Copeau describes their lighting as “a bit veiled” (éclairage un peu voilé) in his notes; folder 733, subfolder 6, p. 1, FJC-BNF. He describes the bands on their robes as giving them the “color of spring” (la couleur du printemps) in his notes; folder 730, subfolder 2, p. 1. Jacques-Gabriel Prod’ homme refers to the chorists’ costumes as “imitating thirteenth-century illuminations” in “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Gazette de Monaco et de Monte-Carlo, 26 May 1934. 9. Auguste Mangeot, “Théatres: Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,” Le Monde musical, 31 May

1934; André Schaeftner, “Perséphone,” Beaux-arts, 27 April 1934; André Coeuroy, “A l’Opéra,’ ParisMidi, 1 May 1934; reprinted as “‘Perséphone’ d‘André Gide et Igor Stravinsky,’ =1934=, 23 May 1934; and Pierre Michaut, untitled notice in L'Opinion, 1 June 1934. 10. Copeau notes that the temple would be lit with “light coming from outside and from all sides so that the palms do not cast too many shadows on each other (lemon)” (Lumiére venant de l'extérieur et de tous cétés pour que les palmes ne s‘ombragent pas trop les unes les autres (citron) ), Copeau’s notes on the lighting; folder 733, subfolder 6, p. 1, FIC-BNF. Copeau also writes of his plans to have a “gold bush” and “narcissus” placed on the “round platform” in subfolder 5S, p. 3. It is not clear if all of Copeau’s plans were carried out in performance; I have thus focused here on effects noticed by the audience. 11. Coeuroy, “A l’Opéra.’

50 m FAITH

have been inspired primarily by the spirit of the music, which remains fundamentally Russian.”'” It is difficult to discern where Maison is standing on the busy, complicated stage set. Denyse Arnould wonders why Copeau has not positioned him at the front of the stage, as is the usual custom, where he would have been easily visible and his chant more readily heard. Instead, Maison is hidden “at mid height in the edifice, perched like a statue in a sort of niche, from where he watches the events of the drama unfold.” (see figure 0.4).'* Although Copeau

wanted him to be warmly lit “as if from a lamp,’ some audience members cannot see him and wonder what or whom he represents.'* “It looks as if he alone is carrying the whole edifice, like Hercules carrying a mountain on his shoulders,’ Mangeot wrote. Is he “some kind of priest, bonze [Buddhist monk] or sufferer perched on a pedestal like a bishop made of polychrome marble?” Coeuroy asks. He must be a “story-teller” or “officiant,’ Pruniéres suggests. Maybe he is a “Buddhist priest of gothic statuary,’ the renowned critic Jean Chantavoine chimes in. I assume he is a “hieroceryx, or early Christian descendant of an Eleusinian priest,’ Malherbe concluded with historical confidence.'* A quick glance at the program confirms that Maison is supposed to represent the original Eleusinian priest Eumolpus."®

Within a few minutes Maison (Eumolpus) has finished his first solo. “This is what Homer tells us” (C’est ce que nous raconte Homére), he concludes in his precise diction, ending on a striking open seventh chord on E (R6:1-4). With that it suddenly becomes clear to the audience that he is not only a priest but also a narrator, similar to the kind Stravinsky had called for in Oedipus Rex. But wait—if this pseudopriest is telling and commenting on the story, what then becomes of the chorus’s function in traditional Greek tragedy? The question can scarcely have arisen in the minds of the audience before the singers raised their choirbooks. The audience is about to find out what their role will be. With a sharp gesture of one upraised hand, the composer-conductor Stravinsky plunges the orchestra into a new section of music (R7:1): a

12. Pruniéres, “Perséphone d'lgor Stravinsky.’ 13. Denyse Arnould, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein seront lévénement capital de la saison de

Paris.” Le Monde musicale, 30 April 1934. For similar descriptions of the staging, see Henry Bénazet, “Premiéres Représentations,” Le Petit Parisien, 2 May 1934; and Malherbe, “La Musique.” 14. Copeau, notes on lighting; folder 733, subfolder 6, p. 1, F}C-BNF. 15. See Mangeot, “Théatres: Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein’; Coeuroy, “A Opéra’; Pruniéres, “Perséphone AIgor Stravinsky”; Chantavoine, “Opéra: Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein’; and Malherbe, “La Musique.’ 16. Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein: Programme Perséphone Diane de Poitiers, copies included in

carton 2238, BMdO; and in folder 709, FJC-BNF.

Faith m= 51

nervous background rhythm oscillates between B and D in the first violins, syncopated on the offbeat in the harps and hinting vaguely at a key of G. The melodic accent continually shifts, landing alternately on B and D

in three-quarter time. Soprano voices entering on the last beat of the fourth bar catch the audience off guard, for they introduce a melody that contradicts the rhythm of the accompaniment, which has just shifted its accent. The chorus seems to be pleading with Persephone. “Stay with us” (Reste avec nous), they call anxiously. Brunel finds it odd that the double basses are playing pizzicato, evoking the cortege rhythm of a religious processional, though the chorus remains perfectly still." The soprano voices resound across the stage, creating an aural backdrop to the gradual emergence from the half darkness of ten ballet dancers dressed as nymphs, seated at the front of the stage."* The audience sees the jazzy rhythm of the

choruss melody embodied in the dancers’ synchronized, repeated gestures of supplication. How “Munich 1920,” Ceeuroy thinks." The dancers direct their movement toward two women, Ida Rubinstein as Persephone and Nathalie Krassovska as her mother, Demeter, whose slender figures become visible in front of the glowing Greek temple at the

back right-hand corner of the stage. The diminutive Demeter unveils Persephone in what Copeau planned as a “liturgical movement” that should evoke a “ritual” and recall the sacred ceremony at the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries.*’ The scene reminds Paul Le Flem of “the stylization of Greek vases, particularly the one in which Hecate and Demeter welcome Persephone.’ Pierre Michaut feels that he and the audience are “entering the temple at Elysium to take part in an initiation ceremony, or ritual representation of the mystery of the ravishment and return of Persephone, as remembered in the prayers of her mother, Demeter.’ Marcel Delannoy, more cynically, wrote, “I had the feeling I was taking part in who knows what kind of liturgical Greek ceremony, with all the boredom and hermetic grandeur such a thing would bring, except that we're missing for that kind of mass the necessary communion of the spectators, who are too lowly and ignorant to participate.” 17. Raoul Brunel, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein a l'Opéra: Perséphone, Diane de Poitiers.’ The basses play pizzicato at rehearsal nos. 8 (“Reste avec nous”) and 23 (“Ivresse matinale”). 18. Copeau lists eight nymphs in folder 733, subfolder 3, p. 2, FIC-BNF. Ten dancers are listed in the published program. Many of their names are misspelled or otherwise listed incorrectly. 19. Coeuroy, “A l’Opéra.’

20. Copeau'’s note; folder 730, subfolder 2, p. 2, FJC-BNF.

21. Paul Le Flem, “Le Premier Spectacle de Mme Rubinstein,” L'Intransigeant, 2 May 1934; Michaut, untitled notice in L’Opinion; Marcel Delannoy, “L’Effort d’Ida Rubinstein: Le Premier Spectacle péche par un style un peu épars,’ Notre temps, 10 May 1934.

52 m@ FAITH

The unrealized solemnity of this crucial moment is further shattered by the age incongruence and disproportionate dramatic emphasis of the two dancers. Rubinstein outshines Krassovska in the luxurious Greek revival tunic that Barsacq has designed for her, which Arnould describes as “fa-

vorable to the sculptural attitudes” she strikes. Her long, androgynous body towers over that of Krassovska, dominating the woman who should represent her protective maternal guardian. Moreover, at age forty-nine Rubinstein looks much older than the beautiful and charismatic twentysix-year-old Krassovska. Many critics feel embarrassment at Rubinstein’s middle-aged representation of youth—it is, they feel, a breach of taste. “Why doesn't she dance with naked breast, as was Persephone’ custom?” Edouard Schuré asked facetiously. “Too faithful to D’Annunzio and Léon Bakst,’ André Rivollet laments; “she looks like a latecomer in pioneers’ eyes.”*

As the chorus’s prayer hovers suspensefully between E and D, Demeter guides Persephone to the nymphs gathered to the left of the dream tree at

the front of the stage (see figure 0.4). “Instead of embroidering divine figures on her sky blue veil, as the legend calls for’; Malherbe commented

later, “Persephone dances” and usurps Demeter’s place at the center of religious devotion and attention. Her “anxious” dance differs in style from

all the other movement on stage, disrupting the solemnity of the scene. After her “brief variation, the nymphs, her followers, execute several figures that are closer to mime than dance.’ A. Pecker asks, “Why have they given such a dominant place to this old woman in the middle of all these perfect dancers, she who feigns artificial charm while everybody else dances so beautifully around her?”” And then, against the nymphs’ slightly accelerated oscillating motif and a long-held low B in the piano (R15S:4), Rubinstein begins to speak. Photographs of the production show her gesturing with her arms. Yet, as Coeuroy described the moment, only “puffs” of her largely inaudible, “un-

relenting” alexandrines reach spectators in the balconies. Her first line, “The wandering breeze has caressed the flowers” (La brise vagabonde a

22. Arnould, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein seront lévénement capital de la saison de Paris’; Edouard Schuré is quoted in Malherbe, “La Musique.’ See also André Rivollet, “Le Retour de I’'Ida prodigue,’ =1934=, 9 May 1934. Nathalie Krassovskas considerable charisma is still evident more than seventy years later in her performance in the film Ballets Russes, dir. Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Zeitgeist Films, 2005). 23. Malherbe, “La Musique’; translated into English by Robert Craft in SSC, vol. 3, 482. For similar criticism, see Michaut, untitled notice in L’Opinion; and A. Pecker, untitled notice in La Concorde, 1S May 1934.

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Figure 0.4 “Mme Ida Rubinstein (on the left), rehearsing André Gide’s and Igor Stravinsky's ballet Perséphone on the stage of the Opéra,” unknown photographer, reproduced in “Ce que les 4 compositeurs des ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein disent de leurs propres oeuvres, Excelsior, 29 April 1934. Permission: Bibliothéque nationale de France.

caressé les fleurs), is almost incomprehensible. Nobody can understand the story. “I challenge any native French people to recognize the sound of their language, Chantavoine commented angrily in his review. Guy de Pourtalés enlarged the criticism of Rubinstein’s delivery when he reviewed her performance in Sémiramis: “The worst diction of the Théatre-Francais combined with the unbearable declamation of a resuscitated Sarah Bernhardt falls suddenly like a national misfortune from the high altar of the spirit, leaving the whole audience confused and embarrassed.”

24. See Coeuroy, “A l’Opéra”; Chantavoine, “Opéra: Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein”; and Guy de Pourtalés in reference to Sémiramis in “Les Ballets Rubinstein: Sémiramis,’ Marianne, 23 May 1934. Scathing critiques of Rubinstein’s accent are also included in “Les Ballets Rubinstein a Opéra,” Ecoutezmoi, § May 1934; and Raoul Brunel, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein 4 Opéra: Perséphone, Diane de Poitiers.’

54m FAITH

As the plush velvet décor of the Opéra swallows Rubinstein’s last words, the eight dancing nymphs stretch out their arms to detain her, si-

lently gesturing while the chorus sings in their stead poetic lines that remind of the past and evoke the future (R16:3-22:5). This act of ventriloquism puzzles the audience. The chorus, giving voice to the nymphs who are kneeling opposite of them, pleads with Persephone to come play with them (Viens, joue avec nous) and twice quotes a modified version of the line she has just spoken (La brise a caressé les fleurs), while in between anticipating the chorus that will follow, “It’s the world’s first morning” (C’est le premier matin du monde). During this jumbled appeal, Perse-

phone stands between the gesturing nymphs and Demeter, pulled in both directions, and her mother slowly leaves the stage. Persephone is shaking in what Copeau planned should be “a kind of ecstasy reflecting the trembling sensation of the dawn of creation,’ her melodramatic display exteriorizing all the existential tension of the tug-of-war she feels between her mother and playful sisters.” In a brief melodramatic interlude, she tells the nymphs that she is listening to them, and that she is ready to hear their “song of the world’s first morning” (Chant du premier matin du monde) (R22:5-6). “Morning drunkenness / nascent ray, petals /

glistening with liqueur / succumb without further ado / to the most tender advice / and let the future / softly invade you” (Ivresse matinale, / Rayon naissant, pétales / Ruisselants de liqueur. / Cede sans plus attendre / Au conseil le plus tendre, / Et laisse lavenir / Doucement t’envahir): they begin their second chorus (R23:1-R25:2), evoking the intoxicating sunrise play that will lead to Persephone’s life-changing encounter with the narcissus.

25. Copeau's note; folder 730, subfolder 2, p. 1, FJC-BNF.

1 Gide’s Anxiousness ue Proserpine/Perséphone

™ THE SYMBOLIST PAGAN REVIVAL Perséphone was born at a moment of religious rupture. André Gide first began thinking about the goddess after arriving in Paris from the province in 1891 as a young, newly published author. Swept into the intoxicating intellectual climate of literary Symbolism at its height, he bonded quickly with Paul Valéry and Pierre Louys, began socializing with Oscar Wilde, and eagerly attended Stéphane Mallarmé’s Tuesday afternoon gatherings. Inspired by his new friends and their creeds, he began exploring Greek myth as a vehicle for self-expression and source of symbolic truth. He pursued his investigations with the passion of a bibliophile, corresponding with friends, reading studies on myth by archeologists, classicists, philosophers, and philologists, and collecting and writing out poetic and prose reinterpretations that caught his fantasy. This research familiarized him with the Symbolist fashion for pagan cults and occultism and the strong religious skepticism of his contemporaries. Within months of discovering Mallarmé’s circle and Wilde, Gide began questioning his rigid Calvinist upbringing, shedding the fanatic mysticism of his teenage years, and seeking alternative possibilities of spiritual engagement.' Imitating his Symbolist friends, he redirected his energies toward the creative process, renouncing the self in the service of mystic experiences of beautiful form. ‘The ritual of creation put him in an exalted state. “I plunged back into my writing with unspeakable pleasure,’ he wrote Valéry in 1891. “I’m reading and dreaming more than I’m writing... here I am again in a state of quasi religious fervor, .. . Im embarrassed to speak, like Moses after he saw the burning but not self-consuming bush.”* This passion for the text led Gide to conclude that artists were morally obligated toward not their communities but only their work—a position he adopted tentatively, and about which he remained ambivalent throughout his life.

1. Catharine Savage, Andre Gide: L’Evolution de sa pensée religieuse (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1962), 48, 63. See also Jean Delay, La Jeunesse d'André Gide, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1956-57).

2. André Gide to Paul Valéry, beginning of August 1891, in André Gide and Paul Valéry, Correspondance 1890-1942, ed. Robert Mallet (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 117-18. Do

56 @ FAITH

Gide discovered paganism through Symbolist theory and such German Romantic writers as Goethe, Novalis, and Schopenhauer. He also derived many ideas and interpretive strategies from the German classicist and philologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer, whose Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der Griechen he may have first read in the 1890s and later kept at his fingertips—on his bedside table—for years. Written in 1811 and

reprinted in an important edition a decade later, Creuzer’s work had been

at the center of a long, heated debate among early nineteenth-century German classicists and historians on Greek historiography, symbols, and myth. Creuzer interpreted Greek myths as the expression of a syncretic religion that had originated in India, been developed in Greece, and ultimately laid the foundation for Christianity. An ancient class of priests

had first brought this primal religion to Greece, where they had interpreted its portentous signs for an unknowing population, creating images or pictographs that predated myths as symbolic forms. As a neoplatonist, Creuzer believed that all myth could be traced back to originary symbols

that made manifest secret meanings or transcendental experiences— ineffable wisdom that could not otherwise be translated or shown. He paid special attention to such symbols in ancient cults like the Dionysian and Eleusinian mysteries, which he explored at great length, especially in relation to the myths of Demeter and Persephone, in the impressively thorough fourth volume of his study.’ Creuzer's thoughtful research initiated a modernist reappraisal of the

Persephone myth. Creuzer also made a persuasive case for the value of mystic symbols as an alternative to Christian allegory. Gide and his contemporaries read Creuzer for different reasons, however, finding in his erudite tomes a doctrine for paganism, a welcome source of information on orientalism, or the foundation for reviving the Greek mysteries to replace Christianity. Ernest Renan, Edouard Schuré, and other French occultists celebrated Creuzer’s symbolic theory, which also left its impact on Nietzsche, Wagner, Jung, Benjamin, and other modernists. Gide’s exposure to Creuzer and the Symbolists broadened his knowl-

edge of myth as a source of symbolic truth and literary inspiration. He articulated the potential of myth for what he conceived as a new religion of writing in Le Traité du Narcisse (1891), where he echoed Creuzer’s neo-

platonic interpretation of myth as having emanated from a primordial Eastern religion based on a natural, originary symbolism. By embracing 3. Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der Griechen [1811], facsimile reprint of the 1819-23 edition in six volumes (New York: Arno Press, 1978).

Gide's Anxiousness m 57

Creuzer's relativist approach to religion, Gide questioned the capacity of national religions like Catholicism to control sacred truth or dogma. His Narcissus contemplates the eternally recurring symbols that float by in the “river of time” and guide him to the primal mystery or Garden of Eden, where man exists in Plato’s androgynous, unindividuated state, free of desire and thus of the struggle between form and content. “All phenomena are the symbol of a truth; the only task [of artistic form] is to manifest this truth; it’s only sin, preferring itself”’* Gide called on modern

poets to emulate ancient priests in deciphering the “hieroglyphs” of mythological narratives for the people and to echo Baudelaire in unveiling the archetypal truths behind “appearances” or “symbols.” The poet “infers meaning by examining everything, he wrote, acknowledging his own power to create truth: “One thing sufhices, a symbol, to reveal its archetype. ... Appearance is just a pretext, a garment that conceals and captures the profane eye, but that also shows us that it [the archetype] is also there.”> With this he ordained himself an imaginary priest of the new neoplatonic literary religion, which would explore its truths on the basis of myth and literary history. With his bare prose, intrusive footnotes and reduction of the Narcissus myth to its basic form, Gide also subtly critiqued Symbolism, hinting that his modernist mythical exegesis would lead to a new direction in his literary style. During these early Symbolist years Gide established the core of a new personal ethics and the foundation of his identity as a writer. He came to suspect that truth was not limited to one religion, or to religion at all, and he began to interpret all texts, whether myth, the gospels, poetry, or literature, with the same mixture of biblical exegesis and Romantic hermeneutics. Prone to naturalist observation and philology, he began tentatively copying out quotations and words from disparate sources related to the myth of Persephone. All this time his thoughts also circled around the question of faith; he read a wide range of texts on ethics and religion, engaging passionately in his journal with a multitude of conflicting ideas from his readings. Most truths reveal themselves only through a heterophony of voices, or differences of opinion, he believed. And yet the secularization of his belief did not happen without a struggle. The religious

4. Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse (théorie du symbole) [1891], in Romans: Récits et soties, oeuvres lyriques, ed. Yvonne Davet and Jean-Jacques Thierry, with an introduction by Maurice Nadeau (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1958), 8. 5. Ibid., 9. Gide argues here that “I call everything that appears a symbol.”

58 mm FAITH

temptations of Symbolist Paris had set in motion in him an existential crisis that he compared in its intensity and magnitude to that experienced by

Prometheus. This dilemma of spiritual orientation peaked in the early 1890s, when his life took a dramatic turn.

™ TEMPTATION In fall 1893 Gide embarked on the first of many extended voyages to North Africa. The lifestyle of an obsessive aesthete had weakened his health and left him frail; doctors encouraged him to take a break and travel. Moreover, he had begun to feel trapped as in a glass house of Symbolist hermeticism and so gave in to the urge to break loose, discover the world, and live in the moment. “It seemed that literature urgently needed to ground itself again, or at least to poise one naked foot on the ground,’

he later wrote about this time.° On his voyage he read Dante, Goethe, and Virgil’s Bucolics. He wholeheartedly embraced the philosophy of Nietzsche, from whom he learned to break with the established order, abandon the Christian morality of his youth, and trust himself with the dissident intellectual gesture of speaking out in his writing.’ “We must hurl literature into an abyss of sensuality from which it can emerge only completely regenerated,’ Gide wrote a friend.* In Tunisia he had his first sexual experience with an adolescent boy—Ali, one of the porters in his

entourage—and for the first time confronted the moral dilemma of whether to follow his “virtue” and Puritan upbringing or the passion and feeling of the moment: “On the brink of what is called ‘sin, would I still

hesitate?” Gide asked himself more than thirty years later, when he remembered the event in his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (1926). “No. I would have been too disappointed if the adventure had ended with the triumph of my virtue, which I had already started to consider with disdain, and horror. ... | Ali’s] body was probably burning but felt as fresh

6. Gide, introduction to Les Nourritures terrestres (Paris: NRF, 1927), 5. This introduction is not reproduced in the edition of the work reprinted in Romans. 7. Didier Eribon, “Ce que Nietzsche fit a Gide et Foucault,” in Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 65-112. Gide later read Henri Lichtenberger, La Philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Alcan, 1898). 8. Gide to André Ruyters, 10 September 1896, in André Gide and André Ruyters, Correspondance

1895-1950, ed. Claude Martin and Victor Martin-Schmets, with an introduction by Pierre Masson (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1990), vol. 1, 10.

Gide's Anxiousness m 59

as a shadow in my hands. The sand was so beautiful! And how the light enveloped my joy in the enchanting splendor of the evening!” According to Gide’s autobiography, the passion of this moment miraculously improved his health and caused a minor revolution in his thinking, setting feelings in motion that crystallized about a year later, when he met up with Oscar Wilde in Biskra, Algeria. Wilde invited him to what Gide later described as a “vulgar” Moorish café, where “old Arabs were smoking hashish” and where he met, and became overwhelmed with desire for, an

adolescent Arab boy named Mohammed. Wilde welcomed the boy to play the flute at their table, creating an indelible link for Gide between erotic desire and music. Mohammed knew many of the English visitors, possibly, as Gide vaguely realized and yet only later consciously acknowl-

edged, because he was a prostitute. Wilde arranged for Mohammed to meet Gide in a hotel near the port in an ugly part of town, where, protected yet frightened by the police, Gide had what he later claimed to be the most ravishing experience of his life. “Since then,’ he wrote in Si le grain ne meurt, “every time I’ve looked for pleasure, I have chased after the memory of that night.’"" Gide remembered his first sexual encounter in the pastoral mode, exot-

icizing Mohammed, distinguishing his passion from the moral commitments of love, and trusting in the capacity of jouissance to blur social and political reality: “My joy was immense, and such that I cannot imagine it any fuller even if love had entered into it. How could it have been a question of love? How could I have let desire take over my heart? My pleasure was free from ulterior motives and was not to be followed by remorse. But how should I name the transports with which I clasped in my naked arms this perfect little body, wild, ardent, lascivious, and mysterious | ténébreux|?”'! For Gide, desire became intimately intertwined with music (the flute), narrative retelling, temporal confusion (fantasy overriding in importance a precise memory of events), the visual, sensory, and corporeal memory of a boy’s beautiful body (Mohammed), the renunciation of bourgeois pleasure (the dirty port, etc.), and a blurring of the relationship between sex and politics (with laughter or joy erasing difference and power relations).

9. André Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, in Souvenirs et voyages, ed. Pierre Masson, with Daniel Durosay

and Martine Sagaert (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 2001), 279-80. 10. Ibid., 308-9. 11. Ibid., 310.

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During this period in his life, if not beforehand, Gide began to question whether he should follow his desires (and draw his own conclusions about the morality of his actions) or agree to established moral codes, religious commandments, and the laws of the societies in which he lived. His exploration of his sexuality relied on police protection (police stood outside the hotel room in Biskra where he met with Mohammed) and other privileges he enjoyed as a French tourist.'* Although he lived in denial of these political realities, they shaped his relationship to alterity and the law: he came

to experience ecstatic spiritual or erotic union only when his partners overwhelmed his senses through their notable difference (in age, race, skin color, location, education, social class, etc.) and when it took place under the protective eyes of authority or within the frame of “law’—his mother, the police, the French literary establishment, and later his wife, Madeleine. These representatives of authority observed and judged his actions, thereby setting limits on them and in this sense establishing for him the bounds of his public/private closet. Very little sexual activity occurred in Gide’s life without this sense of permitted hiding from a watchful and controlling gaze—a subject position that shaped both his relationship to Church dogma and, more important, his development as a writer. It is important to remember, as Monique Nemer has noted, that Gide remained silent about these events at the time they occurred. Although in

the 1890s in France, unlike England, sex between men was not punishable by law, it could be considered “indecent exposure” (loutrage public a

la pudeur), which had been illegal since 1810, and thus fell into a gray zone of erratic tolerance. This was demonstrated by the Renard affair of 1909, in which a butler, Pierre Renard, was convicted of murder on no evidence but that of his sexuality, which, as announced publicly, made him “a repugnant and despicable monster.” In these years, Gide lived in constant fear of exposure and condemnation. He did not feel comfortable discussing his experiences even with intimate friends, and spoke only cautiously to Henri Ghéon, Francois-Paul Alibert, and Eugéne Rouart, with whom he also traveled together in North Africa, and visited the “strip” and public baths in Paris.’* The silence and shame surrounding his sexuality shaped Gide's writing, which began to show a split between its classicist outer form and between-the-lines personal expression.

12. Michael Lucey, Gide’s Bent: Sexuality Politics Writing (New York: Oxford, 1995), 21-41. 13. See Catherine Boschian-Campaner, Henri Ghéon, camarade de Gide: Biographie dun homme de désirs (Paris: Presses de la renaissance, 2008), 42—SS.

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During his years of travel, Gide tried to separate his carnal desire for boys from the chaste love he felt for women—especially his first cousin and fiancée, Madeleine, who awaited him in France—by associating chaste

love with his Christian faith. He did not always compartmentalize his desires and feelings along gender lines, however. While living in Biskra, Gide also explored relationships with female prostitutes, and he developed an intense, nonsexual friendship with a fourteen-year-old servant, Athman Ben Salah, whom he allowed into his life to a greater extent than any of the other Arab boys he befriended. He taught Athman French, invited him to Paris, welcomed him into his literary circles, and remained in contact with him for several decades. In 1895 he tried to use an inheritance from his grandmother to purchase land in Algeria to open a café for Athman. He also tried to persuade his mother, Juliette, to allow him to bring Athman to France to live in their home, where he intended to sleep with him in the guest room while his wife slept alone in his bedroom. His mother recog-

nized that such a challenge to the existing racial, colonial, and gender boundaries would be socially unacceptable, and in one angry letter after another she enumerated the obstacles, begging him to “promise” not to tell anybody his secret. Athman was the cause of the most heated exchanges in their long years of correspondence, just months before her death. In 1895, within months of his mother’s funeral, and relieved of her opposition, Gide married Madeleine, who had been his intimate confidant in prayer and religious playmate since childhood. She became his muse, Christian ideal, reprimanding superego, Ersatzmutter, moral conscience, and the model for many of the female characters in his books. He could not reconcile the faith he found in her with his desire, however, and thus lived in chastity with her for forty-three years while exploring his sexuality elsewhere: “In order not to disturb her purity,’ he wrote before their marriage in his fictionalized account of his life, Les Cahiers d’‘André Walter, “abstained from

the slightest caress—in order not to worry her soul—and even from the most chaste holding hands ... for fear she would desire more afterwards, which I would not be able to give her.’"’ When she died in 1938, he described

his remorse for their unconsummated marriage and his cruelty in having

14. Lucey, Gides Bent, 42-67; and Guy Dugas, “André Gide et Athman: Le Roman d'une amitié vraie,’ Cahiers de Tunisie 30 (1982): 247-69. See Gide’s correspondence with his mother from March and April 1895 in Correspondance avec sa mére 1880-1895, ed. Claude Martin, with a preface by Henri Thomas (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1988), 619-60. 15. Gide, Les Cahiers d'André Walter [1891], in Oeuvres completes d’André Gide, ed. Louis Martin-

Chauffier (Paris: NRF, 1932), vol. 1, 81-82.

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subjected her to such a life in Et nunc manet in te. “What I was afraid she wouldn't have been able to understand is that it was precisely the spiritual force of my love that inhibited all carnal desire,’ he explained."® In the first decades of their marriage Gide lived a split spiritual life, privately celebrating the orientalized mysticism he associated with his erotic, vagabond self in his

writings and letters to Ghéon, Jean Schlumberger, and other intimate friends, while maintaining the normative appearance of a bourgeois public intellectual integrated into his community, married to a pious woman, and engaged in Christian debate at home. He frequently interpreted this bifurcated emotional and sexual existence as a sign of a fundamental contradiction in his character, caused by the fact of his parents’ divided religious heritage (Huguenot/Catholic)."’ And yet he insisted that he did not suffer because of the split but rather welcomed it as a rich plurality in his life.

Gide based the personal faith he developed during his years of selfdiscovery in the 1890s on the two distinct yet inseparable spiritual directions in his life, which were also foreshadowed in the two principal books his father had read him as a child: the Bible and Les Mille et Une Nuits. He

remained fervently attached to the Protestant teachings of his youth but had now also become critical of all organized religion, especially Catholi-

cism, which he felt had brought more misery than happiness into the world. He disliked dogma and moral codes and blamed the Catholics for presuming to declare what constituted proper behavior for others. In a planned pamphlet on Le Christianisme contre le Christ, Gide defended Christ's joyful message against St. Paul's distortions—joining a debate cen-

tral to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in France.'* “The thought of joy [as revealed in the music of Mozart] must be my permanent preoccupation,’ he wrote in his diary.” His pursuit of such pleasure led him to reject a sedentary life, family, and national attachments in favor of Christ's vision of a “nomadic” existence: “Oh accession of this ‘nomadic state, my entire soul wishes for you! In which man, without a confined home, will no longer place his duty or affection higher than his happiness,’ Gide rhapsodized in his “Réflexions sur quelques points de littérature” in 1897.°° Gide 16. Gide, Et nunc manet in te [1939/47], in Souvenirs et voyages, 943. 17. Kenneth L. Perry, The Religious Symbolism of André Gide (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 15-25. 18. Gide, entry for the end of April 1893 in J-I, 160-61. 19. Gide, entry for 21 September 1893, in J-I, 175. See also Sandra Travers de Faultrier, “La Joie, un mot gidien,” BAAG 32, no. 142 (April 2004): 145-82. 20. Gide, “Réflexions sur quelques points de littérature” [1897], in Oeuvres completes d’André Gide, ed.

Louis Martin-Chauffier (Paris: NRF, 1934), vol. 2, 430-31. In 1898 Gide reviewed Maurice Barrés’s Les Déracinés (The uprooted). This was the first of many essays by Gide in which he questioned French literatures relationship to French nationalism and situated himself outside of both. See “A propos des Déracinés de Maurice Barrés [1898],” in Essais critiques, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1999), 4-8.

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worked toward developing what scholars refer to as his personal “gospel of joy’—the subject of his first major work, Les Nourritures terrestres (1897). In this book, echoing Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Oscar Wilde's call to embrace the “task” of pleasure, Gide celebrated his

“new self,’ the earths sensual pleasures, rejection of sin and transcendence, spiritual rebirth, pantheism, his feeling of liberty as an “uprooted” vagabond traveling in the French colonies, and the interconnectedness between pagan and Christian belief. “Act without judging if your action is good or bad. Love without worrying whether it’s good or bad,’ his narrator cries. “In reality I would have liked to reconcile them all, even the most diverse points of view, and not exclude anything, and entrust Christ with the task of solving the dispute between Dionysus and Apollo,’ he reflected at this time.” Ever since his first trip to Algeria in 1893, religious and sexual exploration had gone hand in hand for Gide with musical discovery. Erotically awakened by Mohammed's flute, he began playing Chopin at the piano.”

His musical activities became intertwined with his sexuality: he spent hours alone practicing, enjoyed playing four-hand duets socially, and visited concerts with his confidant Henri Ghéon before cruising the streets of Paris for men.~ Gide’s love of music was tactile and emerged from his intimate relationship with the piano; he never bought a gramophone and stopped visiting concerts when his friendship with Ghéon ended. Inspired by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he associated music with a transcendent force, the Dionysian, the will, and the power to create inner joy; music often made him cry uncontrollably. In Les Nourritures terrestres he transferred these associations with music to the mystic, homoerotic sphere; to singing and flute playing he accorded the power to transport the listener into an ecstatic state, thus confirming the connection between music and

homoerotic desire. Gide's musical attitudes were unusual for his time. “I threw myself... into what I call ‘pure’ music—that is, music that doesn't signify anything. As a form of protest against Wagnerian polyphony, I preferred quartets to

21. Gide, “Réflexions sur quelques points de littérature,” 435. 22. Bernard Métayer, “Gide et Chopin,” BAAG 18, no. 85 (January 1990): 67; and Pamela Genova, “L’Orphée mal enchainé: André Gide et la polémique de la musique,” BAAG 29, nos. 131-132 (July-

October 2001): 461-62. 23. Walter Putnam, “Si le grain ne meurt: une vie réglée comme du papier a musique,’ BAAG 24, no,

109 (January 1996): 19; and Boschian-Campaner, Henri Ghéon. Boschian-Campaner writes that around 1905 Gide and Ghéon often played Chopin together and then cried over their mutual passion for the young Maurice Schlumberger (99). 24. Patrick Pollard, “Sit Tityrus Orpheus: Gide et la musique,” BAAG 18, no. 85 (January 1990): 25.

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orchestras, and the sonata to the symphony,’ he wrote in Si le grain ne meurt.> Although interested in modernism (and especially Debussy, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov), he found his melopoetic ideals most perfectly realized in Mozart and Chopin. Their music communicated intense emotion within classical limits, he thought, never losing form to passion as Wagnerian drama could.” Chopin's nonheroic and non-Polish works became Gide's lifelong classic ideal, epitomizing the mixed nationality, understatement, secretiveness, economy of means, simplicity, antivirtuostic style, dynamic nuances, subtle treatment of melodic line, and metaphysics of serenity he admired and emulated as a writer. “Chopin suggests, assumes, insinuates, seduces, persuades, he never asserts himself,’ he wrote in Notes sur Chopin—a book that gestated along with Perséphone, starting as an idea in 1892 and finding completion only in the early 1930s.” Yet Gide also associated music with his rigid Puritan upbringing, his mother’s dutiful practicing, and the formal piano lessons he had received as a child. When she was on her deathbed, his mother, no longer able to speak, tried to write him a note. But instead of words, her fingers created only the impression of playing the piano across the sheets of her bed. ‘This moved Gide to tears and led him ever after to associate music with inflex-

ible surface norms of behavior and the inexpressible emotions lying hidden beneath them. He often remembered his mother’s performing hands with fondness, a symbol of the harmony he wished they had shared.**

Gide began researching Persephone during this period of intense self-exploration starting around 1893. He initially approached the myth from within the dichotomous frame of his religious, sexual, and musical life. His primary source was the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which he read in Leconte de Lisle’s popular translation.” This Greek classic was

part of a canon of ancient works celebrated in nineteenth-century France as precursors to French classicism and symbols of Greece, the cradle of European civilization; the Homeric Hymn highlights the goddess Demeter over Persephone (whose story is secondary) and describes

an ancient tradition of cult worship in Elysium with proven ties to

25. Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, 252.

26. Pollard, “Sit Tityrus Orpheus,” 30-31. 27. André Gide, Notes sur Chopin [1931] (Paris: LArche, 1948), 8; see also Métayer, “Gide et Cho-

pin, 65-92. 28. Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, 325. 29. Homer, L’Odyssée, vol. 2, trans. Leconte de Lisle (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1868), 441-56.

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Christianity. In many senses, it represented the “official” voice on Persephone and represented the law of the mother. Gide was also interested in interpretations of Perséphone by authors who spoke to his homoerotic desire and appealed to his inner, mystic self. Indeed, his first inspiration may have been Nathaniel Hawthorne’ story “The Pomegranate Seeds’—a children’s version of the myth his father had lovingly read aloud to him as a child.°® Gide frequently associated his more tender self with the books his father had shared with him—this split literary allegiance reflecting yet another dichotomy, the parental one, in his life. Hawthorne's story emphasizes Demeter the grieving mother and Persephone the innocent child. Gide took little content from this version for his work, perhaps because of his resentment toward his mother. And yet the fond memories associated with Hawthorne's version instilled him with a strong desire to “humanize” Persephone and tell her story from a sentimental and personal, even autobiographical, perspective. Throughout much of his life he referred to Persephone by her Latin name, Proserpina (in French, Proserpine), as Hawthorne had done and as was common in the Romantic and especially the German literature Gide read.

Gide may also have found inspiration to embark on his Persephone project in several poems and stories by Oscar Wilde related to the subject.

In A House of Pomegranates, the 1881 collection Poems (including “Ravenna, “Charmide,’ “The Burden of Itys,’ “The Garden of Eros,” and “Theocritus: A Villanelle”), and other works, pomegranate red symbolized for Wilde the sensual splendor of young men, the narcissus homosexual love and his relationship to Gide, and green homoerotic desire.*’ In the poem “The Garden of Eros,’ Persephone is a symbol of homosexual desire and erotic pleasure—the innocent nymph who escaped society's crushing laws. Can it have been a coincidence that Persephone became interesting to Gide at the most intense moment of his relationship with

Wilde and his first homoerotic experiences in Algeria? Later, Roland

30. Gide read Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Grains de la grenade,” in Le Livre des merveilles: contes pour les enfants tirés de la mythologie, trans. Léonce Babillon (Paris: Hachette, 1858), vol. 2, 189-241; see Patrick Pollard, introduction to PevP, 8. Gide describes how profoundly this experience influenced his lifelong engagement with myth in André Gide: Les Jeunes Années (1891-1909), entretiens avec Jean Amrouche [1949], 2 CDs (Paris: INA/Radio France/harmonia Mundi, 1996). See also André Gide: Entretiens avec

Jean Amrouche 1949, 4 CDs (Paris: Ina/Radio France 1997); and Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Pomegranate-Seeds,” in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, included in Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1409-35. Lucey discusses Gide’s antimaternal leanings in Gide’s Bent, 66-67. 31. Didier Eribon, “Les Grenades d’Oscar Wilde: Une étude en rouge et vert,’ in Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité, 159-68.

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Barthes recognized that Gide learned at this time to create literary characters by modeling people whom he wanted to be. Barthes added, “But the creation of new characters becomes a natural need only in those who are tormented bya pressing complexity that their own actions do not exhaust.’**

From the start of his Persephone project Gide showed a pronounced interest in the symbol of the three pomegranate seeds with which Pluto tempted Persephone in the underworld. These seeds represent a fundamental moral question that preoccupied Gide for the rest of his life: how do an individual's unique decisions and choices relate to the morals and laws of the society in which he lives, or to the dogma promulgated by the Church? Pierre Masson brilliantly argues that Gide interpreted the “seed” from two contradictory sides, as a malleable yet fixed simple vegetable grain. To Gide, the seed represented both forbidden temptation and sensual pleasure, fecundity and self-denial, Christian self-renunciation and self-renewal, and metamorphosis, and the stubborn resistance of salt. The grain became Gide’s talisman, a symbol for the challenge his lifes work presented to Church morality.** In the first notes he made in preparation for a possible literary work on the subject, Gide focused on the symbolic moment of Persephone'’s sur-

render to the temptation of the pomegranate seeds in the underworld.” Gide felt that in this moment Persephone at once acknowledged her true inner self, as he had in Algeria, and denied that self. He considered both perspectives of the act equally important. From Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Gide copied out a passage in which Persephone's action is equated with “sexual satisfaction” as an “afhrmation of the will to life beyond the individual life, as a falling prey to life consummated only

through that act, as a quasi renewed prescription to live.’ Schopenhauer argued in this passage that the will strives to maintain the individual and assure the survival of the species through sexual desire and procreation. He observes that Christian doctrine links this desire to death, suffering, and sin. Persephone, he thought, afirmed life by biting the pomegranate seeds. Schopenhauer emphasized this point by quoting from Goethe's melodrama Proserpina, in which the invisible chorus of Fates sings to Proserpina upon biting the fruit:

32. Roland Barthes, “Notes sur André Gide et son Journal [1942],” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 42.

33. Pierre Masson, “Les Trois Grains d’André Gide,” BAAG 29, nos. 131-132 (July—October 2001): 407-20. 34. These notes are in the private collection of Catherine Gide; see Pollard, introduction to P&P, 7-24.

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Du bist unser!

Niichtern solltest wiederkehren: Und der Bif§ des Apfels macht dich unser! | You are ours!/You were supposed to return sober:/And biting the apple makes you ours! ]

Gide jotted down this excerpt in German, followed by Schopenhauer’s

citation on the same page of the third-century Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria's expression “He who abandons all sin will reign in

heaven. Blessed are those who renounce the world.’ Gide twice wrote down Schopenhauer's last three words, “renounce the world,’ and they spelled a lesson he returned to often. Gide also copied out, though on a separate piece of paper, Schopenhauer’s conclusion that “The fact that the sexual instinct constitutes both for man in a natural state and for animals

the final purpose and supreme quest of life confirms that it is the most decisive and strongest afhrmation of life.” Schopenhauer’s reference to Goethe’s melodrama Proserpina resonated with Gide, who sought answers to his moral questions and literary suste-

nance from Goethe on an almost daily basis during these years.°° This melodrama from 1778, a product of Goethe's Italian voyages and the mythologizing of Italy in German Romanticism, seems to have held special significance for Gide. From this work, he learned that Proserpina could never achieve a higher spiritual state as long as she remained entrapped in carnal desire. This view of a struggle that so closely mirrored Gide’s own led him to think more broadly about morality. He thought that individuals distinguish themselves from the masses through their “originality, and yet that this also prevents them from going beyond themselves. Goethe's solution to this dilemma was to allow originality to go beyond the individual

and live in all things. Gide thought this a potentially dangerous state, because a person could lose himself entirely if his spirit were not as large as the world. As an artist, Goethe had risen above the moral dilemma by suggesting the possibility of succumbing to temptation without punishment, 35. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Lohneysen (Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960/1986), vol. 1, paragraph 60, 451. In his notes Gide copies out the quotes from Schopenhauer in French from Le Monde comme volonté et comme representation, trans. J. A. Cantacuzéne (Paris: Didier, Perrin, 1886), 526; quoted in Pollard, introduction to PeP, 10. Gide copied out the quote from Clement of Alexandria in Greek and Latin.

36. See Goethe, Proserpina: Ein Monodrama |1778; 1787; 1815], in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Samtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Hartmut Reinhardt (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1987), vol.

2, pt. 1, 161-64; and the excellent notes at 625-29.

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or finding a path beyond temptation—a personal morality.’ In September 1893, just before departing for Africa, Gide wrote in his diary: That is why you have the two states: first, the state of a struggle; the world is a

temptation; one must not give in to things. And then there is the superior state, which Proserpina does not achieve, because she always remembers having taken the pomegranate seeds. This is where Goethe enters the picture and is able to say, no longer denying himself anything: “I felt enough like God to mingle with the daughters of man.”**

In spite of his appreciation of Goethe's self-confident handling of temptation, Gide continued to struggle with the notion, and to seek out literary sources that could help him understand his own feelings about it. Among his single-page notes to his Persephone project is a copied-out section from Hippolyte Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise, in which Taine interpreted a passage about Orpheus and Eurydice in Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae as a warning about what happens when one refuses to abandon past vices.*’ Gide found this message summarized in a passage from the New Testament that he first mentioned in his preface to Paludes in 1895 and later adopted as his motto, and as the title of his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John

12:24-25).” This teaching was rooted in the pagan symbolism of the myth of Persephone, goddess of the grain, with which Gide associated it. This motto indicates that although Gide appeared to follow Wilde in pursuing earthly pleasure, he did not abandon his Christian belief in renunciation or self-abnegation: the overcoming of temptation and desire through self-affrmation in writing and through a sacrifice or “destitution” of self in the service of a greater good, or love of God and others.” In Le Traité du Narcisse Gide had written that it was the artist’s moral obligation to “manifest” these moral ideas, which when “exaggerated” gave art its symbolic

37. See Masson, “Les Trois Grains d'André Gide,” 410. 38. Gide, entry after 13 September 1893 in J-I, 173-74. 39. Pollard, introduction to P&P, 9. See Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 3rd ed.

(Paris: Hachette, 1873-74). 40. Gide, “Postface pour la deuxiéme édition de Paludes et pour annoncer Les Nourritures terrestres

[summer 1895],” reprinted in Romans, 1478; quoted and discussed in Masson, “Les Trois Grains d'André Gide,’ 412-13. The parable can be found in Matthew 13:31; Mark 4:31; and Luke 13:18. 41. Perry, The Religious Symbolism of André Gide, 70.

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order.* He later became widely known, despite his conflicted relationship to that term, as a moralist. During the fall of 1893, Gide announced that he was planning Le Traité des grains de grenade (Treatise on the pomegranate seeds) —a title that reveals his fascination with the moment of temptation in the Persephone

myth, the pomegranate seeds, Hawthorne, and Wilde.* Yet it remains unclear whether he agreed with the condemnation of Persephone or, rather, supported that interpretation because of his desire to invert its outcome. In his own life he compartmentalized these two options by separating erotic experience from chaste devotion to God through Madeleine. Gide encountered a representation of Persephone more in line with his erotic self during his honeymoon with Madeleine in 1896. On their way to North Africa through Italy they stopped in Syracuse, Sicily, a former Greek colony and site of an important Persephone cult that potentially predated the Eleusinian mysteries—details of which were just coming to

public attention through Creuzer’s and others’ extensive research on myth and its artistic representation, and through Paolo Orsi’s archeological excavations. In Sicily, Proserpina (or Kore, as she was called there) outshone Demeter in local cult practices and was worshipped in her own right as an independent goddess, young maiden, nubile nymphé (nymph or bride), and initiate into sacred marriage.“ Federica Mazzara describes the goddess as representing “instinctiveness,’ “active emotions,’ “an ingenuous Eve, “eternal spring, and “spontaneous nature.”* It was widely

> . ” ‘< IAS alae ;

believed in Gide’s time that Pluto (the Roman Hades) had ravished Proserpina in Sicily (although this remained a subject of historical debate, with Homer situating her ravishment in Nysa near Elysium) and that this

colony had been the first to adopt agriculture. Linked to the erotic, chthonic, theatrical, and playful, the Sicilian Proserpina intertwined in her imagery Dionysus, the maenads, madness, ecstasy, death, and rebirth. Gide knew of this imagery and Proserpina’s connections to Venus, Diana, and Minerva through Creuzer’s analysis of etymology of names, surviving 42. Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse (théorie du symbole), in Romans, 8n*(a * as footnote in text).

43. Pollard claims that this work was announced in La Tentative amoureuse [1893] (reprinted in Romans, 69-86) and in the first issue of Le Centaure 1 (1896); see Pollard, introduction to P&P, 25S. 44, Anna Maria Corradini, Enna: Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche (Enna: Papiro Editrice, 1991); and Guiseppe Martorana, II Riso di Demetra: dee, eroi e santi di Sicilia (Palermo: Sellerio, 1985). 45. Federica Mazzara, “Persephone: Her Mythical Return to Sicily,” in Arco Journal, e-journal del Dipartimento di Arti e Comunicazioni dell’ Universita di Palermo, online at www.arcojournal.unipa.it/

pdf/mazzara_24 11_03.pdf, accessed 7 July 2011. Others deny this interpretation of a Sicilian cult of Proserpina, including, in Gide’s time, Emanuele Ciaceri, Culti e miti nella storia dellantica Sicilia (Catania: F. Battiato, 1911).

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coins, and literature.*° Moreover, he felt at home in the Sicilian version of the myth because of three key literary sources that celebrated it: Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a book that was outrageously popular in nineteenth-century Europe), and Goethe's Proserpina.”

The misty grottos and luscious vegetation surrounding the stony remains of the Proserpina cult in Syracuse exuded an exotic sensuality and occult erotic presence that felt palpable to Gide during his honey-

moon, evoking the book that mirrored the Bible in his split psyche, Les Mille et Une Nuits. He identified above all with the ProserpinaLolita whose descent into hell and rebirth resembled his own illness, travels to Africa, and return to France, and whose gentle adolescent sexuality captured what he admired most about himself in his erotic relationships with men. Syracuse also reminded him of Biskra; when

he later fictionalized this trip in L’Immoraliste, he remembered spending the vacation with “vagrants and drunken sailors” in the “stinking, “muddy” old port. For Gide, rough trade and nubile, gentle femininity were two sides of the same coin, each reflecting and reciprocating the other.* During this stay in Syracuse, Gide experienced a vivid theatrical reenactment in the Greek theater, which was located below a nymphaeum, or nymph’s cave, that was later (in 1900) excavated by Orsi, and next to the Via dei Sepolcri, or “street of tombs.” The scene awakened in

him the most exotic memories of Les Mille et Une Nuits. Unfamiliar with the history and literature of Greece, where he had never traveled, Gide approached its mythology from within the orientalist frame and imbued it with the sensuality of Hafiz’s and Ferdowsis mystic poetry,

which he read on this trip.” The natural surroundings, moonlight, papyrus shoots on the river bank, and fields of asphodels moved him physically and inspired an empathetic bond with the mythical goddess that he cherished for the rest of his life.

46. Creuzer discusses Proserpina’s history in Syracuse in Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker,

vol. 4, 182-98. 47. See Stephen Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Mazzara, “Persephone: Her Mythical Return to Sicily? 48. Gide, L’Immoraliste | 1902], in Romans, 463.

49. Gide wrote several articles on Hafiz and Ferdowsi, including one published in L'Ermitage 2 (1899): 155; and two published as “Deux chroniques,” in La Revue blanche, on 15 March and November 1900; reprinted in Essais critiques, 60-64.

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This is a place of stupor, murder, and abominable passion, one of those underground gardens like you hear about in Arab fairy tales, where Aladdin seeks fruit of precious stones, or the King’s wife at night meets her wounded black slave who has been kept from dying by magic spells. Saw Greek theater at night as the moon rose in the sky. Above the theater is the alley of tombs that leads to the field of asphodels. I have never seen anything more silent.”°

As was the fashion in the 1890s, Gide approached his tourist experience from a sensual and Nietzschean rather than intellectual perspective, submitting himself to Syracuse's and Proserpina’s physical charms in the hope of experiencing real and true communion with his mythical sources.*’

He interpreted his theater evening as an authentic part of an artistic education in Greek mythology, which would lead him to a visceral rather than mediated engagement with ancient myth and promote a sensual involvement with archetypal sources. Just months earlier he had spent days in Florence gazing at Renaissance painting and sculpture. Italy’s natural beauty had aroused in him memories of North Africa and incited feverish desire, causing him repeatedly to abandon his wife in the hotel while he indulged in solitary promenades. An encounter with the Italian playwright Gabriele D’'Annunzio had refreshed his interest in decadent Symbolism and reminded him of Proserpina’s occult charms. Earlier, during the visit to the Eleusinian temple at Paestum in February, while picnicking with Madeleine, he had gazed at the sea and read out loud a text perhaps closer to her heart, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. “For the first time, truly, we thought we could see Greece,’ he wrote Marcel Drouin.’ After these ex-

periences he conceptualized Proserpinas story as an amalgam of the Homeric Hymn and his sensuous experience in Syracuse.’ During the last leg of his trip to Biskra, Gide revised “La Ronde de la grenade” (The lay of the pomegranate), a poem he had written in 1894, which strongly echoes Wilde.** It begins with the epigram “Truly, three 50. Gide, entry for “Syracuse,” ca. January 1896, in his “Feuilles de route (1895-1896)”; reprinted in J-I, 216-17. 51. Gide's attitude toward his tourist experience may have been influenced by Henri Bremond’s “Le Charme d’Athénes [ 1902],” in Le Charme d’Athénes et autres essais (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1925), 7-26. 52. Gide to Marcel Drouin, 11 February 1896, quoted in Claude Martin, André Gide ou La Vocation du bonheur, vol. 1, 1869-1911 (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 281.

53. “Iam preparing a Proserpina with a tilted head,” Gide wrote Drouin on 26 March 1898, “som-

ber, somber, like a Roman emotion.” See “Lettres d’Italie 4 Marcel Drouin (Note de Dominique Drouin),” in Hommage a André Gide (Paris: NRF, 1951), 389-90. 54. Gide read the poem to friends privately a year later and published it in 1896 in Centaure and as part 4 of Les Nourritures terrestres. “La Ronde de la grenade,” Le Centaure 1 (1896): 51-58; reprinted in Les Nourritures terrestres, in Romans, 193-97. The poem was translated into English by Dorothy Bussy in The Fruits of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1952), 79.

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pomegranate seeds sufficed to make Proserpina remember” and celebrates the pomegranate fruit sold in oriental markets as a symbol of desires of the flesh, which Gide now associated with poetry (a rare form of expression for him) and (later in the poem) with music. Sixteen years later, Gide composed four “chansons” that celebrated the Syracuse landscape in lines like “the wandering breeze caressed the flowers” (la brise vagabonde a caressé les fleurs), which eventually made their way into the opening of Perséphone. “Soul that my vagrant soul / Claims / It’s the calm soul of my sister, Gide wrote in an unpublished portion of the first chanson, sealing his religious quest and fate with that of his sister, Proserpina.* Gide immortalized his feeling of displaced religious fervor in the short story “El Hadj,’ in which he describes a prophet who follows a king and his devout people through the Algerian desert. The prophet realizes that the king does not know where he’s going and possesses no truth. And yet he falls in love with the king’s supernatural beauty, falling at his knees in tender erotic devotion and choosing to lie for him, though it means his own death, to convince the people of his vacant purpose. The prophet expresses his false beliefs in song, replicating Gide’s real experience of listening to Athman sing during his honeymoon trip in the Algerian desert with Madeleine. In “El Hadj,’ Gide’s expression of spiritual dislocation is complete: though questioning the laws of his Christian fathers, he abides by them, yet in his heart he seeks refuge in Sufi Islam, mystic eroticism between men, and music.”

M FREE CHOICE: PROSERPINE 1909 AND 1913 Gide did not return to Persephone for more than a decade after completing his revisions of “La Ronde de la grenade” in 1896.°’ During the intervening period, he published two books dealing with the religious and existential struggle of his youthful years and the “question” of the pomegranate seeds: L’Immoraliste (1902), which explored the hedonism 55. Gide, “Quatre Chansons, no. III [1910],” included in PerP, 121; first published in Jean Royére, “Formule d'André Gide,’ in Hommage a André Gide: Etudes, souvenirs, témoignages, ed. Henry Bernstein

and Arnold Naville (Paris: Editions du Capitole, 1928), 173-75. The lines “LAme que mon ame vagabonde / Réclame / C’est l’4me calme de ma soeur” are included in a manuscript in the Fonds André Gide, Bibliothéque littéraire Jacques Doucet (hereafter AG-BLJD). This chanson was reprinted as part of “Quartre Chansons” in Oeuvres complétes d’André Gide, ed. Louis Martin-Chauffier (Paris: NRF, 1934), vol. 6, 23-24; see also notes by Yvonne Davet in Romans, 1498. 56. See Pierre Lachasse, “El Hadj ou la démystification,’ BAAG 14, no. 71 (July 1986): 33-44; see also notes by Yvonne Davet in Romans, 1504-12. 57. Gide mentioned Persephone only rarely in this period, for example, in a letter to Marcel Drouin in 1901-2. See Jean Claude, “Proserpine 1909,’ BAAG 10, no. 54 (April 1982): 253-54.

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and “immoralism” of his Persephonic self, and La Porte étroite (1909), in which he painfully documented the asceticism of Madeleine’s Christian love. At the same time, he also gradually rose to prominence in French literary life, founding La Nouvelle Revue Francaise to fight for classical literary values with such colleagues as Jacques Copeau and engaging in a

wide range of debates and activities with such contemporaries as Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry.

Gide returned to the subject of Persephone when in 1909 Florent Schmitt solicited from him a text “for about an hour’s worth of music,” to which he replied that he would “pull out a subject from behind the firewood that he had been keeping in reserve for many years.”** That summer he wrote a draft scenario for a theater piece with a prologue and three acts, which he titled Proserpine. This is the text he revisited for inclusion in his Oeuvres completes in 1933 and that first attracted Ida Rubinstein’s attention and landed in Stravinsky’s hands when the two began collaborating.’ In the interim, in 1913, Gide had drafted a second ballet scenario, a “dramatic symphony in one act and four tableaux” (symphonie dramatique en 1 acte et 4 tableaux), also titled Proserpine and possibly written for Paul Dukas, but this was never set to music and not published during his lifetime.” Gide seems to have written his two scenarios on Proserpine based on his memory of his literary exploration of the myth of Persephone in his youth. In 1909 Schmitt had requested merely an outline, just enough to indicate whether Gide could come up with a subject that might interest him. Gide

had therefore supplied an incomplete draft, using quotes from Homer, Dante, and others to indicate actions and moods. Returning to thoughts

58. Gide to Florent Schmitt, 16 July 1909, in Claude, “Proserpine 1909,” 260. 59. The manuscript is kept in folder 892, pp. 13-17, AG-BLJD. It is copied in the hand of Gide's secretary, Pierre de Lanux. This Proserpine from 1909 appeared in Oeuvres completes d'André Gide, ed. Louis Martin-Chauffier (Paris: NRF, 1933), vol. 4, 341-65. This volume was released on 28 June 1933 and reprinted by Patrick as version B in P&P, 57-85. See CGC, vol. 2, 402-3; and Justin O’Brien, Index détaillé des quinze volumes de lédition Gallimard des Oeuvres completes d’André Gide (Asniéres-sur-Seine:

Prétexte, 1954). When Gide revised this manuscript for publication in 1948, he called it a “dramatic symphony in four tableaux” (symphonie dramatique en quatre tableaux) and changed the format to a prologue and four tableaux. See Thédtre complet d'André Gide, postface by Richard Heyd (Neuchatel: Ides et Calendes, 1948), vol. 4, 139-53. 60. The manuscript of this version is kept in folder 892, 18-28, AG-BLJD; Pollard published this manuscript as source A' in Pe’P, 6-86. He also consulted a second source, A’, in the private possession of Catherine Gide, which he believed Gide intended to include in his Oeuvres completes but never did. On the convoluted history and indeterminate dating of Gide'’s two Proserpines, see Pollard, introduction to P&P, 24-28, 48-52; and Claude, “Proserpine 1909,” 251-68. Claude argues convincingly that Gide wrote version A! of Pollard’s edition of Proserpine in 1913 for Paul Dukas (254), and version B for Florent Schmitt in 1909, thus revising Pollard’s chronology.

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of Persephone aroused strong emotions in Gide, which he thought could best be expressed through music. He told Schmitt that he thought most opera librettos, apart from Boris Godunov and Pelléas et Mélisande (both written independently of music, as he noted), were second rate and that he did not want to write anything like that. Rather, he would be interested in a “vast symphony, consisting of a prologue and three acts that “interpenetrated,’ creating a large, mystic, cyclic whole. He stressed the importance of continuity between the acts as a means of countering what he considered to be the disruptive, episodic nature of modern theater. He hoped the Ballets russes, which he considered the epitome of an inspired, sensual, modern theater, would perform his Proserpine. “I ask you not to get scared off by the somewhat philosophical appearance of my drama,” he wrote Schmitt. “That it’s not only on the surface seems like a good thing to me. And anyway, the philosophical aspect should be almost completely

submerged by the human emotion that is already emphasized in my text and will be even more so, I hope, by your music.”®! In writing his 1909 Proserpine, Gide appears to have been motivated by

the question of an individual's free choice in relation to state or Church law, a subject that was certainly preoccupying him during these years. In his preface to Satil and Le Roi Candaule (1904)—the former of which daringly thematized male same-sex love—he had argued that the theater permitted passions forbidden by law. The modern Christian pretention to live a moral life had led people to pretend to be who they were not, in other words, to wear masks.” In contrast, the pagans (by which he meant the Greeks), had not known Christian morality and could thus present tragedy with masked actors. Gide criticized Christian theater for requiring abject, modest heroes who forfeited their unique individuality by submitting themselves to universal laws. He suggested that the artists of his time

could change this deplorable situation by creating models that encouraged free morals in society and constraints in art, and also by inventing strong, unique heroes who challenged the status quo. This theatrical journey into the unknown, he concluded, resembled Sinbad’s exploration of uncharted territory in Les Mille et Une Nuits.®

61. Gide to Florent Schmitt, 16 July 1909, in Claude, “Proserpine 1909," 261. 62. Gide, “De lévolution du théatre: Conférence prononcée le 25 mars 1904 a la ‘Libre esthétique’ de Bruxelles [1904],” in Essais critiques, 433-44. 63. Maureen Carr draws a faulty connection between this essay and Stravinsky's Poétique musicale (Poetics of music) in Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002), 5-9.

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In 1909, at the very time when he was penning Proserpine, Gide challenged existing morals by acknowledging in defiance of the Church's “universal” indictment of homosexuality that he was a pédéraste, a lover of boys in the Greek tradition. That summer he completed his first version of Corydon, a defense of pédérastie that he was always to hold close to his heart. And yet at the time he wrote it, he had felt far from ready to reveal this statement to the public: he had given his book the initials C.R.D.N., an opaque reference to Corydon, a shepherd in Virgil's second ecologue who “ardebat Alexim,’ or “burned for the beautiful Alexis, the delights of his master.’ Terrified by the Renard affair of 1909, Gide waited until 1911, when he personally carried C.R.D.N. to the Presses Saint-Catherine in Bruges to avoid the risks of using the postage service or having the manuscript fall into the wrong hands (and this though he had daily contact with the most prestigious publishing houses in France). He had only twelve

anonymous copies printed—but even so it was an act for which he thought he might land in prison. The publication of Corydon transpired in an atmosphere of deepest fear and trepidation, followed for Gide by years of writerly silence.” Gide's experience of the unjust treatment of homosexuals in European courts of law provided a strong motivation for him to publish Corydon. During these years, he meticulously collected articles on famous trials and considered the relationship between desire and law.® In his youth, he had seen the devastating consequences of breaking antihomosexual laws in the example of Oscar Wilde, to whom he offered affectionate support during the latter’s exile in France.” In 1913, he followed closely the literary debate on whether Walt Whitman was a homosexual.”

64. A copy of the original edition of C.R.D.N. is kept in folder 885, subfolder 26, pp. 33-48, AGBLJD. It is moving to see this edition of the two dialogues spread out on a tiny foldout pamphlet of linked pages, rather than bound. See Andries van den Abeele, “André Gide, Bruges et les Presses Sainte Catherine,” BAAG 32, 142 (April 2004): 189-200; Monique Nemer, Corydon citoyen: Essai sur André Gide et l’homosexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 55-59; and Patrick Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 1-36. 6S. Nemer, Corydon citoyen, 83-120; and Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist, 121-37. Gide collected numerous articles on famous trials as preparatory material for Corydon. See folder 885, AGBLJD; and Alain Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,’ BAAG 35, no. 15S (July 2007): 419-37.

66. Gide kept one lengthy article on Wilde in his Corydon file (folder 885, subfolder 25, AGBLJD). See Carl Dietz, “Oscar Wilde,’ Preussische Jahrbiicher 124, no. 1 (28 March 1920): 1-40; reprinted in Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,” 427-28. See also Gide, “Le ‘De Profundis’ d’Oscar Wilde [1905], in Essais critiques, 142-49. 67. These articles are also kept in folder 885, subfolders 29-34, AG-BLJD. See Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,’ 428-31; and Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist, 270-78.

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Gide engaged with the question of individual choice in relation to state laws and Church morality in several notable publications of these years, including Le Retour de l’enfant prodigue (1907) and the Souvenirs de la cours dassises (1913—14).°* In the latter, Gide described his experi-

ence in serving jury duty. As the son of a professor of law and legal expert, he had long been interested in the relationship between an individual’s free choice and the laws to which that individual is subject, and in the role the law plays in constituting a social subject or “person.” His experience of a jury's deliberations led him to believe that jurors make their decisions in the moment and based on multiple factors, and that their judgments are subject to personal and contingent circumstances. This led him to question universal laws, especially those propagated by the Church. He wanted to examine the people behind the administration of laws, to catch them in moments of insecurity, uncertainty, and anxiousness (inquiétude).© In Proserpine Gide put into practice his developing ideas about individual action in relation to law by establishing Proserpina as a contemporary heroine who creates a new morality by succumbing to the narcissus and thus enabling the constraints of art. To understand how this worked, and how Gide's heroine expresses her free choice and sexuality through music, it is useful to go in detail through the draft scenario of Gide’s Proserpine from 1909 (in the version published in his Oeuvres completes in 1933 and again by Pollard in 1977). In basing his original Persephone story on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Gide confirmed that he had accepted his established life in France, where this version of the story served as the standard source. He used the Hymn only as a blueprint, however, modifying it at will by adding unrelated visual references, revisions, quotes in foreign languages, oblique references, and music, and throughout he personalized

the characters and actions with references to his lived experience. In his version, the Homeric emphasis on Demeter's grief recedes into the background, and Proserpina takes center stage. Gide stripped her of the symbolic rigidity Homer had given her and transformed her instead into a personable individual making a thought-out decision; Gide’s Persephone

68. Gide, Souvenirs de la cour dassises | 1913-14] in Souvenirs et voyages, 9-70. These memoirs were

first published as “Souvenirs de la cour d’assises (I),” NRF 10, no. $9 (1 November 1913): 665-700; “Souvenirs de la cour d’assises (II), NRF 10, no. 60 (1 December 1913), 893-933; and as a separate volume in 1914. 69. Gide, Souvenirs de la cour dassises, 60-67.

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goes to the underworld without consulting her mother, Ceres (the Roman name for Demeter), and she is not necessarily the cause of her mother’s grief.

Gide wanted the prologue of Proserpine to begin with a nymphs’ cho-

rus at dawn, followed by an action he describes as “Ceres entrusted Proserpina to Calypso.’ (Although he listed Ceres and Calypso as speaking parts, he did not write out any dialogue for them.) This opening action is unusual, for almost no classic versions of the myth, including the Homeric Hymn, show Ceres/Demeter in the act of “entrusting” Proser-

pina/Persephone to anybody. Gide appears to have borrowed this idea from some Sicilian sources, including Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae, in which the fourth-century writer describes Ceres as fearing for Proserpina

and thus sequestering her in Syracuse in the temple with the water nymphs to protect her. Ovid, too, hints at this idea in Metamorphoses, but he stops short of saying it, as does Hawthorne, who dwells only on Ceres's fears for Proserpina and relief when the nymphs take care of her. This moment in Gide’s text is doubly ironic, in that Calypso is the nymph who entraps Odysseus for seven years in Homer's Odyssey, leading readers to

question Ceres’ motherly judgment in choosing Calypso as guardian. Gide refers to a nymph whose name appears in the Homeric Hymn, but she appears there only in the brief moment when Persephone takes responsibility for her own life.” By opening Proserpine with this crucial action involving a mother’s action, he may have been saying that he still needed his mother in the picture but could not resist one last ironic resistance to her authority. Already in the next paragraph, Gide describes Proserpinas irresistible attraction to the narcissus, “the flower Homer talks about, and in whose

chalice ‘all of starry Uranus appears’’—a quote not from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter but from Leconte de Lisle’s embellished French translation.”' And yet instead of seeing the false heaven Gide has just erroneously

cited, Proserpina sees the mysterious world of Hades. The music Gide calls for here, “idyllic to that point,” is to become “penetrated with an unknown anxiousness” as Proserpina recognizes her attraction to “that

70. Homer mentions Calypso as one of the nymphs Persephone plays with in the fields. Helene P. Foley argues that a mature Persephone emerges at this point in the Hymn—a woman who knows of the violence to which she has been subject; see Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60. 71. Gide, P&P, 61. See Homer, Hymne a Déméter, published in L’Odyssée, trans. Leconte de Lisle (Paris: Lemerre, 1868 ), vol. 2, 441; reprinted in PeP, 127. Foley translates this as “starry heaven’ in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 4, line 133.

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unsatisfied world.’”” The use of the term “anxiousness” (inquiétude) is striking, given its associations with Symbolist dandyism, the individual who has taken off the mask of hypocritical laws, and Gide’s sexual explorations of the 1890s. In an essay on Dostoyevsky from about the same time,

Gide also links anxiousness to political action by describing that what motivates all reformers is the “dissatisfaction of the flesh,” “anxiousness,” and “imbalance.”” As this passage indicates, Gide gave music a privileged place in Proserpine. Through music he thought could be expressed not only the indeci-

siveness of a heroine who makes choices and pursues her own path but also his homoerotic desire and the beliefs, hopes, and shame bound up with it. By approaching the narcissus, Proserpina defies the laws of her time and engages in a free act. She admits to desire and pursues her fulfillment of it. Gide gives prose indications of the orchestral music he envisioned to accompany the stage action of this moment. His indications appear to be suggestions for a composer—and so they were taken by Schmitt and, later, an irate Stravinsky. But in fact, Gide probably intended them partly for himself, as a means of breaking the silence about his unspoken feelings through an imaginary music vividly present

in his aural memory. Pamela Genova and Elaine Cancalon speak of

33 * . 3 ° ee 3)

music in this sense in Gide’s work as a “sign that prefigures something else” or, in Derrida’s terms, as a sign “under erasure” (sous rature), because

it is necessary yet ineffectual and ambiguous in its meaning.” Gide later spoke of how the orchestra in Proserpine should “translate” emotions into sound, as if music could perfectly recreate emotions in a language that bypasses the revelatory impact of words, thus keeping those emotions under the radar of the French literary community.” When discussing the project with Schmitt, he urged the composer to keep Proserpine “a secret,’ a further hint at the intimate link between this first musical venture of his and his hidden sexuality.”

72. P&P, 63. In the edition published in 1948 this line reads “this unsatisfied and agitated world” (ce monde insatisfait et agité). In Gide’s original manuscript, however, the line reads: “ce monde insatisfait et [blank space],” as Pollard acknowledges in ibid., 63n8. 73. Gide, Dostoievski { Allocution lue au Vieux-Colombier] [1923],” in Essais critiques, 643. See also

Henry Petiot, “André Gide et Dostoievsky: Notes de Critique,’ Tentatives 1 (June 1923): 61-72. 74. Genova, “L’'Orphée mal enchainé,” 460; and Elaine Cancalon, “L’Ecriture gidienne ou comment mettre la musique sous-rature,” BAAG 24, no. 109 (January 1996): 9-14.

75. Gide describes how the orchestra “translates Proserpina’s nascent anxiousness” (traduit l’inquiétude naissante de Proserpine) in his 1913 Proserpine, PeP, 60. 76. Gide to Schmitt, 16 July 1909, in Claude, “Proserpine 1909," 260-61.

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At the key narcissus moment in the scenario for Proserpine, Gide radically alters the original myth: he omits both Proserpina’s plucking of the flower and ravishment. Instead, Proserpina leans precariously over the precipice on which the narcissus grows and from below which Pluto will emerge to take her into the underworld. Pluto remains out of view, however, and Proserpina experiences his presence as welcoming rather than threatening. Gide’s scenario includes a description of how the stage manager should effect an effortless transition from this liminal scene into act 1

by darkening the lights and changing scenery; in the 1933 edition, the transition is disrupted by a blank page with a solitary “I” on it to indicate the beginning of act 1, followed by a second blank page. By saving Proserpina from ravishment and instead allowing her to fade amorphously into the abyss of the underworld, Gide voids the myth of its violent motivation (and of the source of Demeter’s grief). His Proserpina wanders between life and death as if in a daze, or half sleep, mystically united with all things around her, yet largely oblivious of her goals and motivations. Carnal desire invites her, as it did Gide, “to melt into and merge with surrounding nature. .. . [the] most perfect memories of sensual pleasure being those that accompany an enveloping landscape that absorbs it and in which [one] could be swallowed up.”” Michael Lucey has pointed out that Gide frequently described his sexuality as being realized in a problematic place between sleeping and waking, a blurry pastoral space of rose-tinted memories of Aliand Mohammed.” Gide celebrated the idea of experiencing desire without possession, “loving for love itself.’ “Sensuality, he wrote in one of his essays, “consists of considering the present object and minute as ends in themselves, not means.”” Gide’s most dramatic departure from the Hymn to Demeter occurs in his description of Proserpinas experience in the underworld, the subject of

act 1, which he divides into three scenes to distinguish dramatically between Proserpina’s impression of the underworld (scene 1), her encounter with Eurydice (scene 2), and her vision of home after gazing into the narcissus (scene 3). These aspects of Proserpine were his invention and relate only obliquely to the Homeric depiction. Gide also added numerous extraneous quotes and sources in this act to strengthen the symbolic image

of unfulfilled desire. For his description of the setting of this act—the

77. Gide, Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits [1952] in Souvenirs et voyages, 10S1.

78. Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 123. Lucey went on to ask “How does desire speak in sleep, and how do we represent ourselves in relation to that desire and our sleep?” 79. Gide, “Lettre 4 Angéle [X],” in Essais critiques, 63.

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“Champs-Elysées,” a gloomy, gray field covered with asphodels, the mythical plant of Hades—Gide lifts passages from Leconte de Lisle’s translation of chapter 11 of Homer's Odyssey: “After him I saw huge Orion in a meadow full of asphodels driving the ghosts of the wild beasts that he had

killed upon the mountains, and he had a great bronze club in his hand, unbreakable for ever and ever.’*° In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero is not in Hades but rather Oceanus, where he offers a sacrifice to the dead; Persephone, the queen of the dead, thereupon sends the ghosts of Hades to greet him. Gide uses Odysseus's description of a particularly unsatisfied ghost, Orion the perpetual hunter, to depict the unfulfilled world Proserpina witnesses when she enters Hades for the first time. The souls and chorus of Danaides who dwell in Gide’s Hades are much more purposefully representative than those depicted in Homer: they are

the undead, the unformulated artistic idea, perhaps even desire beyond police control. This is the home of unsatisfied souls (groupes dames insatisfaites), whose “vague anxiousness” (inquiétude vague) Gide indicates

should be expressed through the music. These souls wander between being and nothingness, trapped in the pattern of “relentlessly restarting the imperfect action of their life,’ as Gide writes in the 1909 scenario. “They know no other torment than the vain pursuit of a possession that relentlessly slips away from them, than the eternal renewal of desire.’** Proserpina mirrors their liminality by herself wavering between child and

adulthood. Although dressed in her maiden veil, she is no longer the “young girl Kore,’ Gide writes, but has not yet become the Homeric “implacable Proserpina, or queen of the dead. Rather, she escorts Pluto in

this act as “anxious Proserpina—expressions Gide puts in quotation marks.** It is tempting to think of this scene as mirroring the young Gide in Syracuse and North Africa. In scene 1 of act 1, Gide describes how Proserpina will ask Pluto about all the individual, unsatisfied souls that populate the underworld. Pluto

80. On the original manuscript, Gide preceded this quote with the partly crossed-out line: “It’s the line that my Homer expressed admirably” (C'est celle-méme que mon exprime Homére admirablement); folder 892, p. 14, AG-BL]D; and P&P, 65n13 and n14. 81. Gide changed the word “torment” to “torture” (torture) in the 1948 edition of the work. PeP, 65n12. 82. Ibid, 67. Gide borrowed these adjectives from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and from Anatole France's obscure article “M. Becq de Feuquiéres,” Le Temps, 16 October 1887. In his notes Gide referred

to the mature Proserpina as “threatening” (sinistre), borrowing a term from Victor Hugo, passage 15, chap. 5, in Les Contemplations (Paris: Hachette, 1858). See Pollard, introduction to PerP, 17-18.

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begins describing them, one by one (starting with Orion and Eurydice), and after each description the nymphs respond that this soul has become an artwork and no longer wanders through Hades. Gide breaks off this dialogue, however, after the reference to Eurydice. He proceeds to a description of Mercury arriving to offer Proserpina jewels and the cup of

Lethe (or oblivion). She ignores the jewels and cup but, resisting the advice of her nymphs, bites the delicious pomegranate that Mercury has offered her. Rather than binding her through consummation to Pluto, as in the Homeric Hymn, this act has no immediate consequences here. Scene 2 consists of one paragraph, in which Gide describes how Proserpina meets Eurydice, who remarks that they are all waiting for Orpheus to transform their dissatisfaction into song. Here Gide most dramatically links Proserpina’s free choice in descending into the underworld to the act of establishing constraints in art. In scene 3, Proserpina gazes into the narcissus, witnessing through its inverted mirror events happening back on earth. In an extended monologue she describes to the nymphs her mother’s horrific grief and relentless search for her. She cries out, but Ceres cannot hear her, a reversal of the Homeric Hymn, where her cry alerts the goddess Hecate to her ravishment at the opening of the story and thus sets in motion her mother’s grief. Gide’s Proserpina is completely alone and unable to communicate with her mother or call for help. She sees her mother, whom she now calls Demeter, holding Demophon, the beautiful mortal baby who played such a key role in Demeter's grief in the original Homeric Hymn. There, Demeter nursed him in vain to immortality as a means of revenging herself on the gods for the loss of Persephone. Here, however, Gide frames Demophons story within Proserpinas crystal-ball moment of remembering her mother, which robs him of any narrative significance. Gide slips between different myths by conflating Demophon

with his mythical brother Triptolemus (he uses the two names interchangeably). Triptolemus is mentioned only briefly at the end of the Homeric Hymn,—he is described as one of several “kings” whom Demeter initiated into her mysteries and sacred orgies—but Homer does not connect his story with that of Demophon; Gide’s conflation of the two is pure invention. The scene then collapses in asides and commentary. By

83. Gide did not include this monologue in the original manuscript of Proserpine, but rather created a placeholder for it by typing the words “transcription of passage,’ indicating that he had composed

or would compose the monologue separately. See Gide’s draft for Proserpine; folder 892, p. 18, AGBLJD; and P&P, 75n34.

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the end of the scene, Gide is again referring to Proserpinas mother as “Cérés [sic], a clear indication that he wrote these verses at different times. In a final note to this scene, Gide suggests that the entire scenario he has just described can be replaced bya scenario that presents an “imprecise’ staging of Proserpina’s vision in which it would be the role of music

to express everything. The events in hell would be “in a special mode,’ whereas the “all too human, ‘of the outdoors’ | de plein air| pathos” would be reserved for what belongs to the earth (and Proserpina’s vision of earth while she is in hell).** Gide based his scene 3 on Goethe's Proserpina. Goethe had followed

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Benda in conceiving of his melo-

drama as a vehicle for the expression of feeling. Goethe therefore limited his account of the Proserpina story to one scene: she bites the pomegranate and in an extended monologue, with choral interjections, laments her state of entrapment in the underworld. Gide copied this model exactly, designing act 1, scene 3 as a formal monologue for Proserpina in poetic lines, of alternating eleven and twelve syllables, that are interrupted at regular intervals by the nymphs’ chorus. In the 1933 edition, the sudden appearance of poetry in italics on the page (set off from the prose text preceding and following it by dotted lines) dramatically announces to the reader that Gide has switched modes; the informed reader may understand that he is now channeling Goethe and Racine to escape the narrative continuity promised by the work’s symphonic genre. Gide’s moment of inspired melodrama disrupts the framework of the Homeric Hymn and inverts its focus. The affective focus of the story shifts from Ceres’s grief to Proserpina’s lament to her sister nymphs (who have

defied death and tradition in following her into the underworld), from the matriarch to the child. In this section, we hear the story not from the perspective of the mother watching but rather from Gide’s familiar perspective of a child feeling watched—especially a child feeling watched as

she explores a life on her own in a foreign place. Gide keeps Ceres at a safe narrative distance arbitrated by the narcissus. Gide’s nymphs do not

admonish Proserpina for biting the pomegranate, as they do in the Goethe passage cited by Schopenhauer that inspired Gide in his youth. Instead, he does not appear to think that the act has any significance or consequence for her whatsoever. She coolly splits her priorities and allegiances,

84. P&P, 79.

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just as the young Gide had done. The boundaries between her two lives remain vague, however, like the music that Gide hoped Schmitt would write to allow the acts of his drama to interpenetrate. This moment in Proserpine holds tremendous significance for Gide's faith and sexuality: by devaluing the pomegranate, Gide erases the moral questions that had plagued his youth, led him to question his religion, and drawn him to the myth in the first place. In the interpretation he has here achieved, succumbing to temptation (Proserpina and the pomegranate) does not prevent access to higher spirituality but rather enables it because it opens a pathway to creating art. This symbolic inversion required Gide to revise the pomegranate’s mythological relevance (which he had felt, ever since Le Traité du Narcisse, that a writer has the power to do). The pomegranate still symbolizes carnal temptation, but this matters less than the fact that Proserpina, after biting it, gazes into the narcissus, as that triggers her memories of a sensual past on earth. Through the narcissus— which once aroused her desire and now functions arbitrarily as a point of access to memory—Proserpina sublimates her desire into sensual memories articulated in craftily structured verse. In this moment of heightened melodrama she takes on the moral omnipotence of a Romantic writer, realizing Gide’s self-professed aim of overcoming temptation through “self-affirmation’ in writing. Her neatly regulated verses substitute for the real renunciation that Gide has refused. By transferring it into the aesthetic sphere, Gide freed himself of the moral dilemma presented by his Christian faith. The arbitrary act of art allows such inversions, he thought, because it has only its own end as a goal and does not have to engage with the politics or morals of real life. In act 2, where Gide describes how Ceres teaches Triptolemus to cultivate the field, he diverts his story still further from its Homerian origins. Ceres watches as Triptolemus, to whom Gide gives a mimed role, me-

thodically “returns to the scene in intervals, at each extremity of the furrow.” Proserpina tentatively approaches them. Ceres reunites Triptol-

emus with Proserpina, but Gide disrupts that scene by interjecting Orpheus’s “song of pathos” (chant pathétique)—a word Gide had earlier associated with artistic expression on earth.* This reminds Proserpina of

Eurydice and the underworld—at this point Gide’s storyline departs most radically from all other existing versions of the Persephone myth.

85. I did not find this line about Orpheus in the original manuscript, but Pollard includes it in PerP, 83.

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Triptolemus’ss role in Gide's interpretation of the myth is tremendously curious: although Gide describes him as the reason for Proserpina’s return, she appears to care very little for him. This may be because of his connection to her mother, toward whom she also remains distant, but she pays little attention to her two “arranged” marriages, either, or to the fact that she has just

entered a complicated relationship of bigamy. Triptolemuss presence negates the very raison détre of the Homeric Hymn, in which it is Demeter’s grief that causes Zeus to send Mercury down to Pluto to fetch Persephone back. Gide’s Mercury, however, rather than aiding Demeter, serves Pluto, for it is he who hands Proserpina the object of temptation—the pomegranate— that binds her to Pluto and prevents her from returning to her old life with her mother. It is as if Gide, as he had done with the pomegranate and the

narcissus, had emptied Mercury of his symbolic function. On the other hand, he gives Triptolemus, the character who does not belong in the story, unquestionable symbolic status: presented as the first cultivator of grain, he would appear well suited to wed Persephone, the “seed” or progenitor of spring. And yet this union, beyond its symbolic utility, has no inner dramatic motivation and thus remains two-dimensional. Despite the nymphs’ “joyous grand hymn’ at her return to earth in act 2, Proserpina remains “anxious,” describing to her mother (again Gide calls for “pathos”) the “twilight and doubtful world” below. Yet when Mercury

arrives to fetch her, she follows him back into the underworld without resistance. She solemnly bids farewell to Triptolemus and Ceres, declaring her “committed faith” to both her earthly husband and her infernal one.

Gide appears to have found an autobiographical solution to the story: whereas on earth Proserpina will wed Triptolemus and accept bourgeois heterosexual married life, her “anxiousness” and Orpheus’ song will always lure her back to the relentless desire and detached temptation of the underworld pomegranate. But she will never have to choose between them. Gide described act 3 in his draft scenario as a recapitulation of act 1 and

drew a relationship between this dramatic structure and a one-act symphony in sonata form. In this last act of his 1909 Proserpine, he calls for Proserpina to be sumptuously dressed and appear proudly on Plutoss arm, having accepted her fate as the queen of the dead through “calm” and “pacified” versions of the musical motives Gide hoped Florent Schmitt would

have composed for act 1.°° She has lost any remnant of sentimentality;

86. The words “calmed and pacified” were added later in his original manuscript; folder 892, p. 17, AG-BLJD. Pollard notes that Gide chose the variant “purified” (purifée) for pacified in 1948, P&P, 87 and 87n76.

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only her faithful nymphs express her former anxiousness and agitation.

When Eurydice arrives to announce that Orpheus came to the underworld but was overwhelmed by his desire and thus unable to create art forms, the whole cycle is set in motion again. And with that, Gide indicates, the drama should fade away, without a proper conclusion, leaving the sound of the “expansion” (élargissement) of the chorus to accompany an image of Proserpina teaching the Shadows to live in newfound peace with their destiny. The final act of Proserpine suggests that Gide has conceived of his dramatic symphony as an allegory of artistic creation, in which Proserpina overcomes temptation (and anxiousness) through the self-abnegating act of creating art. In Nietzschean terms, she experiences a struggle between the Dionysian, or insatiable, creative drive of the artist and the Apollonian, or perfect, form of Orphic song. Yet Gide modifies Nietzsche's understanding of the role of desire in classic artistic forms by resisting the

idea of the two as opposites. As Eurydice explains in act 1, scene 2, Orpheus can bring the underworld into this harmony by shaping the Shadows’ unquenchable desire in the lasting forms of artistic truth. “Orpheus is the poet who fixes things in place,” Gide reflected on a scrap of paper grouped with his Proserpine sketches. “The eternal recurrences in the underworld stop when he arrives there. Proserpina sees all of this in the narcissus flower. The chorus of nymphs explains to her that everything stands still only in song. ... Everything stands still. The role of the poet is to immobilize everything into an eternal posture.”*’ And yet as Gide makes clear in act 3, art also requires a vivid memory of its passionate origins, or what in Proserpine he repeatedly refers to as “pathos’—now unveiled as a code word for the desire or “anxiousness” insinuated between

the lines in classic art and necessary to its vitality. In her dual role as maiden and queen of the dead, Proserpina symbolizes the possibility of anxiousness within serenity, free choice within the law, and pathos within classic form. Gide changed little when he revised Proserpine as a dramatic symphony in one act and four tableaux in 1913 for the Ballets russes. He had started attending the ballet in 1909, falling for Nijinsky and visiting his box after the premiere of Prince Igor, and feeling “true regret” for not “taking advantage” of the male dancers who lingered in exotic costume during rehearsals for

87. Gide, note in the private possession of Catherine Gide, quoted by Pollard, introduction to P&P, 36.

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Shéhérazade. He frequented Misia Sert’s salon, attended ballet productions with his friend and confidant Henri Ghéon, and sometimes visited Stravinsky’s box during the shows. Just weeks after the sensational premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in May 1913, Gide met with Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, and José Maria Sert at the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris, where he read them Proserpine.** Perhaps as a result of his exposure to the Ballets russes, his new draft was less literary and more dramatically compact than its predecessor. Gone were the erudite allusions and awkward quotes, replaced by detailed, visually inspired descriptions of solo and group dances. He reduced the action to one act in four tableaux and reinserted essential aspects of the Homeric story, perhaps to make his narrative more coherent. He also emphasized gestural action as a source of plot development more than before, allowing movement to take over the function of music in his previous draft. When he mentioned music, it was often to indicate a violent function, for example to express sexual possession and revenge—emotions that seem oddly out of character for Gide. A small section of the final manuscript of this draft is in the hand of his friend Henri Ghéon, suggesting that the two friends might have been collaborating on the work.”

The first tableau of the 1913 Proserpine parallels the prologue of his 1909 Proserpine and describes how Proserpina and the nymphs “dance and chant, plucking flowers,” and “play with garlands,’ directly evoking Botticelli's Primavera—a source Gide freely associated with the Sicilian Proserpina. Gide tries to capture his character's sensuousness more dramatically than before by setting this tableau in a beautiful, precisely

described natural setting that is animated by the vivid movement of dancers and dominated by the sight and smell of the narcissus. Although Calypso and Ceres are, as before, listed as having speaking parts only, they

are no longer included in this scene. Gide doesn’t mention anybody having entrusted Proserpine to the nymphs. He doesn’t introduce Ceres until far later in the drama; even then her actions remains distinct from Proserpinas story, as if Gide now considered her a goddess utterly apart.

As before, Proserpinas discovery of the narcissus leads her to feel “growing anxiousness’ and causes the nymphs to be “anxious about her anxiousness” (inquiet de son inquiétude).” In this 1913 rewrite, however, 88. See Pollard, “Sit Tityrus Orpheus,’ 39, 47; and introduction to PevP, S0-S1. See also Claude, “Proserpine 1909,’ 254-57. 89. For Ghéon’s portion of the manuscript, see folder 892, p. 21, AG-BLJD. 90. Pollard uses the variant “nascent anxiousness” (inquiétude naissante) from draft A’ in place of the “growing anxiousness” (inquiétude croissante) in the original manuscript. See Gide, draft for Proserpine; folder 892, p. 20, AG-BLJD; and P&P, 60n14.

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Proserpina has a much stronger reaction to the narcissus. “The flower's smell troubles her and she enters into a kind of funeral ecstasy and starts to talk about another world that she glimpses in a dream.”’' Gide may have modeled this moment on his memories of Ida Rubinstein’s youthful and exuberant performances of similar moments of decadent Symbolism. Gide also includes the act of plucking the narcissus this time. He asks the orchestra to be “silent” as Proserpina plucks, and to start up with new music pianissimo once the deed is done. Proserpina then walks slowly toward Hades, which is on the left side of the stage. The set moves as she walks through the rocky cliffs leading down into the underworld, the stage slowly filling with steam and the lights dimming to complete darkness as an orchestral interlude begins. A crescendo leads to “a great, dark burst” (un grand éclat sombre) in the orchestra, indicating that Pluto has taken possession of her.” The second tableau takes place in the underworld, which Gide, as before, pictured according to the Homeric description of a field of asphodels in twilight, with the grim door to Pluto’s palace on the right and “pale rocks” bordering the river Lethe on the left.”* Gide amalgamates the three scenes of act 1 of his 1909 Proserpine into one continuous tableau here. On asecond level of the stage, he describes Tantalus’s tree growing next to the other bank of Lethe and burdened with fruit that falls to the ground,

creating a scene at first obscured by clouds. Here Gide calls for the Shadows to follow the movement of the Danaides, who, incessantly, as in all eternity, mime filling jars with water and passing them on. They whispera chorus without words, to which the nymphs, who have again accom-

panied Proserpina into the underworld, respond. As the Shadows and nymphs tentatively approach each other, an “anxious and serious” Proser-

pina appears with her husband Pluto, and she asks him to explain the scene. This time Gide displays the lost souls of the underworld through mimed movement; he suggests a “heroic dance, more marched and articulated than danced” for Hercules, a “dance of vain desire” for Tantalus, and a pas de deux for Hippomene and Atlanta.”* (Homer mentions these

91. P&P, 62 and n17. 92. Gide suggested the alternative of “a great dark wave” (une grande vague sombre) in draft A’; see Pe P, 64n28. 93. This description is in Henri Ghéon’s hand in the original manuscript; folder 892, p. 21, AGBLJD; and PeP, 64. 94. Gide originally used the word “articulated” (scandée) for Hercules’s dance but replaced it with “leapt” (bondie) in draft A’; see P&P, 66nS3.

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souls in his Hymn to Demeter, but only in passing and without conferring particular symbolic significance on them.) Eurydice, whom Gide

gives the only singing role in the ballet, then appears on the second level of the stage and sings to Proserpina about the unfulfilled desire in the underworld, which will be resolved by Orpheus’s arrival. She points at a mysterious spot at the back of the stage that will soon fill with light,

and to a path that will open. Her song makes Proserpina “worried” (soucieuse ) and reminds her of the earth and spring. She tries to distance herself from Pluto, who urges her to stay and calls on Mercury to offer

her gifts. Mercury, naked except for a wreath in his hair and winged sandals, springs on the scene in a “clap of thunder,’ leaping like Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la rose.”> When Proserpina refuses his gifts, he plucks a pomegranate from Tantalus’s tree, dancing a “pas de la grenade”

with the nymphs. For the moment when Proserpina bites the pomegranate, Gide calls for a “desperate burst and pathos-filled outburst in the orchestra” (éclat désespéré et déchainement pathétique de lorchestre)

and diabolic laughter from Mercury.”° As in the first tableaux, Gide gives music the function of expressing sexual possession, which is otherwise invisible on stage. Proserpina grieves for the earth, which she sees when she gazes again into the narcissus she is still holding in her hand. Into his libretto Gide here inserted two single pieces of paper on which he had copied out the lines of Goethean melodrama he had envisioned in 1909, which he wants sung at this point in the drama “in the manner of a plainchant.””’ He obviously thought of this section of the melodrama as an independent entity, for he had published it separately as a fragment in 1912.”° Gide wants the vision of the frozen earth to be visible behind Proserpina on the second level of his split stage during

the end of her monologue, to contrast the underworld in which she dwells. At the end of the tableau, Ceres and Triptolemus appear on that upper stage.

95. Gide uses the stronger variant “glorious thunder burst” (éclat de foudre glorieux) in place of “clap of thunder” (coup de foudre) in draft A*. Cf. folder 892, p. 23, AG-BLJD; and PerP, 70.

96. PevP, 72 and n108 for variants. Gide used “rupture” (déchirement) as a replacement for “outburst” (déchainement) in A’.

97. This section of the melodrama is written on larger paper than the rest; see folder 892, pp. 26-27, AG-BLIJD; and PeyP, 49-50, 74. 98. The opening of the melodrama, from lines 86-130 of Pollard’s edition of Gide'’s 1909 Proserpine (PeP, 75-79), was published as “Proserpine (fragment d’un drame),” Vers et prose 28 (January-March

1912): 19-21.

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The third tableau in the 1913 version replicates the second act of Gide’s 1909 Proserpine, but here he describes the scene more extensively, and there is even the suggestion of spoken lines for Ceres. Gide imagines the tableau, which is to take place on the second level of the stage, resembling a “bas relief” showing Ceres teaching Triptolemus to plow. Light fills the stage and the orchestra pit as spring returns, and Proserpina, Ceres, and Triptolemus are united to the tune of a “glorious and joyous symphony.’ This time, though, Gide plans a grand danced finale with a “summer festival” that includes nymphs and peasants. He also decides to follow Homer in letting Proserpina talk to her mother about the underworld. Proserpina

turns away from Triptolemus, admitting to him and Ceres that she has eaten the pomegranate seeds and that this has given her “nostalgic desire” for the underworld; she goes on to describe to her mother the Shadows’ anxiousness (inquiétude). The tableau ends with Proserpina saying goodbye to Triptolemus and Ceres. In the final fourth tableau, which resem-

bles the third act of Gide’s 1909 Proserpine but is more conclusive, Proserpina solemnly returns to the underworld, where she finally accepts Pluto and Mercury’s gifts in a “glorious apotheosis” accompanied by the Shadows’ “pacified dances.” Neither Schmitt nor Paul Dukas chose to set Gide’s Proserpine, much to the writer’s dismay. Perhaps he had posed an impossible aesthetic task by asking them to compose symphonic music for a ballet based on gesture, riddled with literary references and elusive symbolic meaning, and disrupted in its third tableau by a moment of outright melodrama. “I would have liked something closer to me, more alive, more human,’ Schmitt told Gide in 1909, after reading the combination of ballet, tableau, classical text, melodrama, and Symbolist theater that Gide had sent him.” Gide hid his failed projects away in a drawer, where they languished for more than twenty years.

™ GIDE THE MARTYR Gide's life changed dramatically between 1913 and 1933. During this period he fell in love, many say for the first time in his life, with Marc Alleéegret. In 1918, he traveled with Allégret to Cambridge, causing the first

99. Schmitt to Gide, undated letter [c. July 1909], cited in Claude, “Proserpine 1909,” 264. I believe

Paul Dukas did not even know of Gide’s 1913 scenario for Proserpine, although it may have been intended for him.

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major break with Madeleine, who had intuited the depth of his feeling for Allégret and felt it as a betrayal. She reacted by burning more than thirty years worth of Gide's intimate correspondence with her, throwing tens of thousands of pages into the fire in a fantastical auto-de-fé that revealed the

intensity of her pain and emotional bond to Gide. Her act traumatized Gide, who had considered those letters to represent the very heart of their

relationship and an expression of his deepest and most private self. In 1923, without telling Madeleine, Gide fathered a child with the daughter of his close friend Maria van Rysselberghe (known for her Cahier de la petit dame), Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, who was at the time romantically involved and trying to have a child with Marc Allégret. Gide's relationship with Elisabeth called into question his reasons for maintaining an unconsummated marriage with Madeleine. Gide was devoted to his daughter, Catherine, but he never told Madeleine about her. Madeleine never knew of her existence, even though Catherine was fifteen when Madeleine died in 1938.

Initiating what was probably the most dramatic change in his life, Gide in 1924 published Corydon in 5000 copies with the prestigious publisher Gallimard. With this book, he came out publicly as a pédéraste. Pierre Masson believes that this action enabled Gide to come to terms

with the “internal dialectic” of the pomegranate seeds that had dominated his life. Through his love for Allégret and proclamation of his sexuality, Gide came to understand that he did not have to renounce himself to achieve renewal but could reconcile his opposites, or at least live with

them. He could live in accordance with the law, without opposing it, while following his own path and living his life. This transformation in his approach to life is suggested in the title he first considered for his autobiography in 1917, when he jotted in his diary “Ifthe grain died...” (Si le grain ne meurt ...), referring to a universal seed; he left open what happens if the seed died by ending with an ellipsis." Gide acted publicly on his moral beliefs again in 1926, when a lengthy voyage with Allégret through the Congo and East Africa led to the publication of two books—Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad—and to a political campaign against concessionary companies’ treatment of workers in the colonies, his lifetime love of Africa transformed into political action.’ At a time when politicians in the Third Republic were proudly promoting

100. Masson, “Les Trois Grains d'André Gide,’ 416-19. See Gide, entry for 11 January 1917, J-I,

meer Gide, Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad [1926-28], included in Souvenirs et voyages, 332-515 and 516-710, respectively, and Daniel Durosay’s notes, 1194-211.

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the economic advantages of colonialism, Gide’s pointing to abuses hit a nerve. Many of Gide’s friends (and subsequent scholars) saw this trip to Africa as a moment of political awakening, and they associated it with the sudden and discomfiting public embarrassment caused by the publication of the two books from his 1925 trip. Gide strongly resisted such causality, however, arguing that he had wanted to write a political book about Africa since the turn of the century and that he felt that Saiil (1904), too, had been a political work because it thematized same-sex love. Lucey agrees that scholars have tended to devalue Gide’s activism as a pédéraste and ignored the “scandalous association between politics and politically inassimilable sexuality.’'°* Walter Benjamin recognized the connection between Gide's sexuality and his politics in 1936 when he described Gide as incarnating the “ideal character of the “inguiéteur—or one who makes anxious’—a term central to Proserpine.’°°

Between 1929 and 1932 Gide made yet another bold political statement by becoming a communist—a controversial move in the era of Stalin’s rise to power.’ In spite of his fiery passion for the cause, however, Gide read very little communist doctrine and rejected many basic communist precepts. He adamantly opposed the Soviet idea of an official state policy on art, and in December 1932 he wrote to the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires to warn them that literature should not be inhibited by social or political constraints." In a message addressed to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (held on 8 August 1934), he countered the doctrine of Socialist Realism with what he called “communist individualism’—an aesthetically inflected, humanist version of communist politics combined with a Mallarmean derived individualism and artistic freedom.’ In 1936 he abandoned the communist cause as quickly

102. Lucey, Gide’ Bent, 145, 152-53. 103. See Walter Benjamin, “Pariser Brief (I): André Gide und sein neuer Gegner [ 1936],” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. 3, 482-95. Didier Eri-

bon used the term “heresies” to describe the relationship between social and political dissidence and literary writing. See Eribon, Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité, 13. 104. See André Gide, Pages de journal 1929-1932 (Paris: Gallimard, 1934); and Retour de l’U.R.S.S.

[1936] in Souvenirs et voyages, 749-804. Gide’s political involvement in the 1930s is documented in André Gide, Littérature engagée, ed. Yvonne Davet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). This engagement is still contested and disputed. See Daniel Moutote, André Gide: L’Engagement, 1926-1939 (Paris: Sedes, 1991); and Tim O’Conner, André Gide’s Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 10S. André Gide, “Aux membres du bureau de l'Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires,” 13 December 1932; reprinted in Pages de journal 1929-1932; and in Gide, Littérature engagée, 17-19,

106. Georges Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 15. See Gide, “Message au ler congrés des écrivains soviétiques,’ NRF 23, no. 254 (1 November 1934): 749-50; and Gide, “Littérature et révolution, discours du 23 octobre 1934 | Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires|”; reprinted in Gide, Littérature engagée, 6-63.

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as he had embraced it, writing Retour de ’U.R.S.S.,a scathing report after a visit to the Soviet Union about what the country had become under Stalin’ rule.

During these years Gide's writings and actions ignited furious debates. The publication of a selection of his writings under the title Morceaux choisis in 1921, for example, sparked a vicious response from the Catholic intellectual who was to become Gide's greatest nemesis between the wars: Henri Massis. In a report in La Revue universelle, Massis criticized Gide’s attempts to bring together Nietzschean hedonism and Christian faith and accused him of using classical style to hide the deeper, scandalous aspects

of his works. Massis concluded that Gide was “demonic’—not in the sense of decadent symbolism but because he used his gifts as a writer to corrupt French youth. Francois Mauriac leapt to Gide’s defense, but other authors, among them Félix Berlaux, joined forces with Massis and con-

demned Gide for championing moral freedom.’ Attacks on Gide increased after the publication of Corydon, which made him the target of vitriolic criticism and debate for the rest of his life and beyond.'” Gide paid for his coming out, Nemer writes, with “a surge of public insults and

private expressions of hatred, the violence of which stupefies today’s readers.’'””

Gide’s “anxious” politics became the subject of even more intense public scrutiny in the early 1930s during the literary debates instigated by writers involved in the Renouveau catholique, or Catholic revival (sometimes also called the Renaissance littéraire catholique or Catholic literary renaissance). This movement had its roots in Pope Leo XIII’s promulgation of the Rerum novarum of 1891, in which he established “social action” as a central aim of the Church and suggested ways of engaging the working class as a means of

halting the insidious influence of two movements the Church despised: socialism and communism. The Renouveau catholique had received further impetus as a consequence of the “modernist crisis” in the Catholic Church at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Pope Pius X issued decrees against a disparate group of “modernist” Catholics influenced by liberal Protestantism, Enlightenment values, and Kant’s philosophy. In his encyclicals Pascendi dominici gregis (1907) and Lamentabili sane exitu

107. For an overview of this debate I recommend the reviews of Morceaux choisis kept in the AGBLJD.

108. Eva Ahlstedt reviews this reception in André Gide et le débat sur l'homosexualité de L'Immoraliste

(1902) a Si le grain ne meurt (1926) (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1994). I discuss this topic at greater length in chapter 4. 109. Nemer, Corydon citoyen, 10.

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(1907) the pope had condemned scientific method, thus damaging the relationship between the Church and intellectuals in the Third Republic, which was already crippled by the Dreyfus affair, the Association law (which expelled all religious orders from France in 1901), and the law on the Sepa-

ration of the Churches and the State from 9 December 1905."'° During World War I, the Renouveau profited from the thawing of relations between Church and state as a result of the union sacrée, or uniting of political forces in France for the purpose of the war effort. The movement had also profited from Pope Pius X’s promulgation in 1922 of the Ubi Arcano dei consilio, which condemned materialist society, criticized the separation of Church and state and breakdown of family values, and inspired a concerted “Catholic Action” to reevangelize Europe.

Hervé Serry believes that the Renouveau first gained strength around 1910, when disenfranchised Catholics turned to literature as a means of regaining their cultural position and when many Jews and Protestants joined the movement to gain social recognition. Among the prominent writers who joined were Léon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Henri Ghéon, Francois Jammes, Charles Péguy, and later Jacques Maritain—all at one time friends of Gide. Many of the Renouveau writers promoted social action to ally themselves with the highly secularized Third Republic. Yet their greatest allegiance was to the pope as supreme authority and to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the official doctrine of the Church.'" Serry has concluded that “although the Catholic army of

the pen that mobilized between the wars did not succeed in bringing Catholicism into the limelight or defining a coherent Catholic aesthetic, it

nevertheless contributed to establishing the reality of the figure of the Catholic intellectual.”*"”

The Renouveau reached its apex in the mid- to late 1920s, when Jacques

Maritain, Paul Claudel, and Francois Mauriac rose to prominence in literary and musical circles. Among these three, Maritain had by far the most

110. See Pierre Colin, L'Audace et la soupgon: La Crise du modernisme dans le catholicisme francaise

1893-1914 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997). 111. Gilles Routhier describes two phases in the restoration of the teachings of Thomas of Aquinas in the Catholic Church. The first began with the Aeterni patris (1879). The second, which began after Pius X condemned modernism, coincided with the development of social Catholicism in the encyclicals Rerum novarum in 1891, the Studiorum ducem (1923), and the Quadragesimo anno (1931). See Routhier, “Restaurer ordre du monde: l’horizon médiéval de la pensée des années 1920 et 1930," in Musique, art et religion dans lentre-deux-guerres, ed. Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau (Paris: Symeétrie, 2009), 85-96. 112. Hervé Serry, “Declin social et revendication identitaire: La “Renaissance littéraire catholique’ de la premiére moitie du XXe siécle,” Sociétés contemporaines 44 (December 2001): 91-111.

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lasting influence on modern music. He reached out to different constituencies as the others did not, drawing critics, composers, and writers into his fold and convincing many others to convert to Catholicism. Part of the attraction was his first “best seller,’ Art et scholastique—an idiosyncratic interpretation of scholastic aesthetics of art. Steeped in Thomist and Aristo-

telian thought, Maritains tome likewise reflected his dialogues with contemporary artists and writers such as Léon Bloy, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Georges Rouault, and Erik Satie and his readings of modernist texts by Baudelaire, Eugene Delacroix, Edgard Allen Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, and the surrealists. In 1926, Maritain and Cocteau engaged in a sensational public debate that convinced many contemporaries of the importance of Catholicism to contemporary intellectual life and that a

reconciliation between Catholicism and modernism was possible.” Maritain’s Art et scholastique appeared in a second edition in 1927 with an extensive new section “Frontiéres de la poésie,’ and in 1930 Religion et culture came out.''*

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, many Renouveau writers turned on Gide, enraged both by his “conversion” to communism and the public revelations of his homosexuality. René Schwob, a Maritain dis-

ciple and friend who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, attacked Gide’s sexuality and character in a 1932 monograph, Le Vrai Drame d‘André Gide.'' Schwob’s theories led to an open debate on “anxiousness —the word Gide had used to describe his same-sex desire in the 1890s, Proserpina's state, and his politics. At a widely advertised panel organized by the Union pour la vérité on 23 January 1935, Gide found himself having to defend his life choices before a group of moderate and reactionary Catholic writers.'!° This debate raised such a furor that it

113. Jean Cocteau, Lettre a Jacques Maritain: Jacques Maritain, Réponse a Jean Cocteau [1926] (Paris: Stock, 1964); reprinted as “Réponse 4 Jean Cocteau,” in Jacques et Raissa Maritain, Oeuvres completes, ed. Cercle d'études Jacques et Raissa Maritain (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul/ Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1982; hereafter JMOC), vol. 3, 659-748. 114. Art et scholastique was first published in installments in Les Lettres in September and October 1919. The first monograph edition appeared in 1920, second in 1927, and third in 1935. See Henry Bars, ed., “Bibliographie,” in Jacques Maritain, Oeuvres (191 2-1939) (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1975),

53-54, 165-222. 115. René Schwob, Le Vrai Drame d'André Gide (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1932). See also Schwob, Moi, juif, livre posthume (Paris: Plon, 1928).

116. The discussion at the Union pour la vérité took place on 23 January 1935. The proceedings were published in Guy-Grand's André Gide et notre temps and in the Bulletin de l'Union pour la vérité 42, nos. 7-8 (April-May 1935). See Claude Naville, André Gide et le communisme suivi d'études et fragments (Paris: Librairie du Travail, 1936); and Pierre Angel, ed., Lettres inédites sur l'inquiétude moderne, with a preface by Maurice Mignon (Paris: Les Editions universelles, 1951).

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became something of a Parisian event. The dialogue continued during

the highly publicized Congrés international des écrivains pour la défense de la culture (International congress of writers for the defense of culture) organized in Paris in 1935S. The Union pour la vérité debate pitted Gide against Claudel as the two prominent writers with different messages about how to solve the problems facing Europe in the early 1930s. Whereas Claudel proposed a Cath-

olic or “metaphysical” solution, Gide spoke in favor of individualist communism, which outraged some listeners. Many speakers at the debate praised Gide’s good taste and literary contributions yet condemned his moral choices. Ramon Fernandez introduced him as “an ‘anxiety-provoking’ author” (un auteur ‘inquiétant’) who had tried to liberate youth from

the yoke of family and social ties without producing any positive morality."'’ Gide’s refusal to mix politics and art troubled them; they could find nothing to connect his self-professed faith, sexuality, communist beliefs, Symbolist aesthetics, and classic prose. What was Gide’s message,

many of them asked, and was it really what the French at that moment wanted to hear? The Union pour la vérité debate and other debates prove very useful in retrospect for clarifying Gide’s positions on faith, writing, sexuality, politics, free choice, and the law, and for assessing his response to the public antagonism he was facing in 1933 when he returned to the Persephone project. In the Union pour la vérité debate, Gide defended what his detractors called his “conversion” to communism by implying that it served the same purpose that his religion did: as a forum for pursuing the ethical and humanist questions that had preoccupied him as a writer since his earliest days. In other words, he had not changed; he was the same moralist he had always been—someone who expressed his faith by vigorously pursuing questions of moral good in his writing and helping the

oppressed in his personal life. He had joined the communist cause, he told his opponents, not because he believed in a Marxist or proletarian revolution but because he wished to fight injustice. He wanted to help others who were less privileged than he was, because “this situation of the entitled is intolerable to me.’*"* In Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Gide had used the metaphor of being in a lifeboat not large enough to save all its drowning victims. During the Union pour la vérité debate, he clarified this position: 117. Ramon Fernandez, quoted in Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps, 13. 118. Gide, quoted in ibid., 61.

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I have voluntarily and almost systematically become an advocate for everybody whose voice is normally silenced (peoples, oppressed races, human instincts), for everybody who has not yet been able or known how to speak, for everything that we have not yet known how to listen to, or not wanted to hear. ‘This is surely what motivates me to emphasize certain human instincts in a manner I would find excessive if I wasnt so often the only person listening to their voice."”

Inspired by a profound empathy born of his own experiences of prejudice, Gide had sworn to dedicate himself to the politically, racially, and sexually

oppressed. Christianity had failed him partly because of the betrayal of Christ, he announced, pointing the finger at the Catholics in particular; now it is communism’s turn to try to save humanity.’*° Gide’s arguments allow us to conclude that his faith will reveal itself in Perséphone as it had in his Persephone notes from the 1890s and his two Proserpines, through an exploration of moral questions and acts of free choice in writing.

Gide's interpretation of communism as faith and the role communist thought played in his writing troubled writers on all sides of the literary political spectrum. The Union pour la vérité debate thus catapulted him into the center of an intense French debate about littérature engagée (engaged or politically committed literature) that lasted from the late 1920s well into the postwar period through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre.'*' Critics passionately argued over Gide’s ambivalent position as a modernist classicist who embraced political battles in an aesthetic frame many of them found inappropriate for that purpose. Dismayed by how Louis Aragon and other surrealists had blindly embraced Gide after his turn to communism, Claude Naville reminded readers in the 1930s of Gide'ss indebtedness to Mallarmé and Nietzsche—writers whose aesthetics were incompatible with the historical materialism at the root of communist doctrine. Gide had never abandoned the Symbolist teaching of Le Traité du Narcisse, Naville warned, and he still believed that phenomena in the world were symbols of platonic ideas, an idealist stance that went against the fundamental tenets of Marxism. Naville thought

119. Gide, quoted in ibid., 35. 120. Gide to Daniel-Rops, 20 May 1933; reprinted in Gide, Littérature engagée, 32-35. 121. My understanding of these issues was strongly influenced by Jacques Brigaud, Gide entre Benda et Sartre: Un artiste entre la cléricature et | engagement (Paris: Minard, 1972); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu estce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Sartre later rehabilitated Gide in “Gide vivant,’ Les Temps modernes 65 (March 1951), 1538-42; reprinted in Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 85-89.

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that Gide could not commit to a political cause because of his fundamental “duality,” or struggle between God and Satan, caused by his devotion not only to the Bible but also to Les Mille et Une Nuits. “That’s a way of saying that in Gide’s education pagan and Christian elements counterbal-

ance and combat each other,’ Naville concluded.'” His analysis offers rare insight into the bifurcated spirituality at the heart of Gide's interpretation of the Persephone myth. Gide’s modern classicism and emphasis on form also posed a problem for Renouveau authors who were invested in Christian aesthetics. Maritain felt that in focusing on individual struggle, Gide remained a bourgeois who prioritized the social, everyday life and the “now” over

the eternal teachings of the Catholic Church.'** Other Renouveau

writers disliked Gide’s autobiographical revelations, which ran counter to these writers’ aesthetic project of celebrating in literature Catholic teachings, spiritual themes, and moral attitudes adapted to a

universal notion of the human subject. They also worried, just as Massis had a decade earlier, about the impenetrability of Gide's classic

forms as a vehicle for communicating Christian messages. On the whole, Gide’s work appeared contradictory to them. His religious sin-

cerity as a “converted” communist inspired their admiration, yet he rejected the pope's authority, favored literary form over the Church's spiritual teachings, and remained too committed to worldly causes for their taste. During the Union pour la vérité debate, the Catholics universally condemned Gide’s “Protestant” claim that individuals could decide rationally for themselves how to behave based on life experience. They countered his claim with urgent pleas to their audience to remember that only the pope, the highest authority of the Church, could determine ethical standards. They also insisted that Church dogma and the Gospels prescribed the bounds of acceptable sexual behavior. In their own lives, some championed complete renunciation or chastity as the highest moral good, followed as an acceptable alternative by heterosexual “sex for procreation.’

Jacques and Raissa Maritain and many other heterosexual couples involved in the Catholic revival took lifetime vows of chastity. For them, sex between women, in contrast, did not warrant mention. And although they condemned heterosexual prostitution, they widely tolerated it.

122. Naville, André Gide et le communisme, 18-19, 23. 123. Maritain, quoted in Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps, 38-43.

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The Renouveau writers reserved their most ruthless criticism for Gide's promotion of sex between men. They described homosexualité— the term they used—as being material and immoral and resulting from an alliance with Satan and inappropriate attachment to a worldly pleasure mistaken for spiritual joy.'** Even the communists hated homosex-

uals, they argued, citing Maxim Gorki, who considered “depraved homosexuality” a social crime.’** The Renouveau writers used extreme language and psychological analysis to condemn Gide’s sexuality as the root of his immoralism and incapacity for any true faith. In choosing pédeérastie, they argued, Gide had rejected God, Christ, and his Christian obligations, and he was deluding himself if he believed that he could

escape the devastating psychological and spiritual consequences. Schwob, who feigned friendship with Gide, apostrophized Gide as “abnormal,” “not completely human,” and “unbalanced” (déséquilibré— Gide’s own word); this list only offers the tip of the iceberg of his prejudice and contempt.'” But Gide’s most virulent and unforgiving critic was Paul Claudel. In a letter to Schwob of January 1931, he refers to Gide as “a leper” whose writings are “vulgar and crude.” “If only the abominable

scourge of Protestantism could be definitely condemned through his person!” he wrote, following that wish with a succinct account of how Kant’s philosophy, modernity, and Protestantism had caused “inversion” or homosexuality: | Gide thinks] we can find supreme rules within ourselves. Kant invented a

saying to express this principle: Always act in such a manner that the maxim of your action could be established as a universal principle. What is

more logical than that this monstrous moral and intellectual aberration

would translate into an equivalent physical deformation and that a perversion of intelligence would lead to an inversion of instinct? ... Everything that diverts us from God, whether paganism or heresy, always leads to inversion, to that hideous communion with Satan that is a parody of the Eucharist.'”’

Much to Gide’s sorrow, many of his colleagues, including Mauriac, converted to Catholicism as a means of controlling their homosexuality—a

constant, painful struggle that Gide discussed in countless exchanges

124. Léon-Pierre Quint, quoted in Angel, Lettres inédites, 30-32. 125. Naville, André Gide et le communisme, 26. 126. Schwob, Le Vrai Drame d'André Gide; also summarized in Angel, Lettres inédites, 33-38.

127. Claudel to Schwob, 25 January 1931, in Angel, Lettres inédites, 153-54.

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with his friends.'** Gide’s close friend Henri Ghéon wrote about his conversion to Catholicism in the hope that his experience would serve as an example to young homosexuals.'”” During the attacks on him, which were so virulent Mauriac called them an “inquisition, Gide neither gave in nor changed his mind, reminding everyone that he accepted the personal choices they made and had never tried to persuade anybody to adopt his."*° “I fear, dear friend,” he wrote to Schwob in 1927, “that you exaggerate my inquiétude; I even believe that

may be the most hopeless aspect of my situation, namely that I don't suffer.”’*'! Gide felt proud, and moved to tears, when he received letters

from young men who felt that his public coming out had saved their lives.'** “There are forces in man that are considered bad, but that can become in turn elements of force and progress,’ Gide insisted during the Union pour la vérité debate.*”°

™ BRICOLAGE Gide’s politics of anxiousness shaped the writer he became in the 1920s and 1930s. During these years he invented multiple writing strategies for

voicing moral concerns in relation to his life experience while never neglecting what he felt was his artistic duty to write the most beautiful and perfect classical prose possible. One of the most powerful ways in which he did this was through a continuous stream of carefully planned and published letters, diaries, commentaries, and speeches that, collectively, create a running, almost day-by-day commentary on his private and sexual life. Barthes later recognized the “patchwork,’ fragmentary confessions of Gide's journals as a postmodern means of expressing homosexual

128. Gide frequently joked that he was holding down the fort while his closest homosexual friends converted to Catholicism. See, for example, Gide to René Schwob, 26 December 1930, in Angel, Lettres

inédites, 103, where Gide remarks that only Jean Schlumberger, Roger Martin du Gard, and Dorothy Bussy were standing strong and resisting conversion. 129. See Henri Ghéon, L’'Homme né de la guerre: Témoignage d'un converti (Paris: NRF, 1919). As we have seen in this chapter, Ghéon was one of the young Gide’s closest confidants in matters of both music and sex. See Boschian-Campaner, Henri Ghéon, camarade de Gide, 187-223. 130. Francois Mauriac, quoted in Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps, 69. 131. Gide to Schwob, 14 March 1927, cited in Angel, Lettres inédites, 102. 132. Gide sometimes sent these letters to his detractors. See Gide to Schwob, 12 October 1931, in

ibid., 109-10. 133. Gide, quoted in Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps, 30.

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identity.'** Lucey called them a “carefully constructed private space made public,’ a subversion of the existing order, and an attempt to “use writing as an experimental realm in which to understand how his politics and his

sexuality interrelate, how they play themselves out on a stage where nothing is purely public, nothing purely private.’ In his journals and reports Gide returned repeatedly to the moral issues that had drawn him to the myth of Persephone in his youth: How does one resolve tempta-

tion (the biting of the pomegranate) as a religious and philosophical issue? What moral responsibility do writers have in relation to homoerotic experience? And what positive role can pédérastes play in modern society? Gide hoped that his confessional writings would enable skeptics to judge his life by its material reality rather than against harmful universal types or abstract virtues. His many rewritings of classical Greek myths, including that of Persephone, were part of this project of self-justification, revelation, and refashioning. Gide refined in these years a second writing practice that I call, in conscious reference to the surrealists although aware of their historical distinction, “bricolage.’ In Gide's case, bricolage consisted of using for the creation of his works a conglomeration of facts and existing materials carefully collected from a wide range of sources. This term is not usually associated with Gide, but it describes well the process by which he wrote out quotations from classic and secondary literature on scattered pieces of paper, meticulously collected excerpts from newspaper articles, and jotted down random ideas that became the basis for formulating the arguments in his essays and the plots in his books and theater pieces. We have already seen how Gide followed this process in the 1890s in formulating his first thoughts for a theater piece on the myth of Persephone. The collection of materials he gathered for Corydon is striking evidence of his continued investment in this form of writing process throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The Corydon material includes dozens of quotes that Gide wrote out at various times on odd pieces and scraps of paper—quotes from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, Ernst Curtius, Tagore, Calderon, and other authors—as well as lists of statistics and carefully cut-out newspaper articles that he

134. Barthes, “Notes sur André Gide et son Journal,’ in Oeuvres completes, 23-33. Emily Apter also makes this connection in André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1987),

v—viii. See also Frédéric Canovas, “La Traversée du désir: Notes sur les ‘Notes sur André Gide et son journal’ de Roland Barthes,’ BAAG 32, no. 142 (April 2004): 153-66. 135. Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 16.

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found relevant to the topic, with information about Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, trials against homosexuals, and Edmund Perrier’s popular scientific explorations of sex in nature. These meticulously ordered materials show a man who wanted to mold a new reality in his writing out of the experience of daily life and the raw material he found around him.'°° Yet even as a bricoleur, Gide remained convinced of the importance of an author's developing a unique, sincere voice. This stance led to conflicts with Renouveau and other Christian writers, aesthetic disagreements that became explicit during the debate on pure poetry (querelle de la poésie pure) that rocked the Académie frangaise in the mid-1920s. This incident is of interest to Perséphone because it pinpoints the differences between Gide's aesthetics of faith and those of his Christian contemporaries, including some of his Perséphone collaborators. On 24 October 1925, Abbé Henri Bremond, a former Jesuit turned secular priest and literary historian, gave a controversial speech in the Académie frangaise in which he broke down the institution's century-old boundary between faith and reason by

suggesting that modern poetry aspired to the state of prayer.'’’ “Every poem owes its proper poetic character to the presence or radiance of a mysterious reality,’ Bremond claimed, “a transforming and unifying action

that we call ‘pure poetry’ [poésie pure].’’* This mystery reveals itself through the poem's formal perfection, an uninterrupted flow resembling “verbal music” or the “pure music” of Wagner. The words do not communicate meaning in this context but rather function as a conduit for mystic experience: “They are talismans or spells, magic gestures and formulas, charms in the primordial sense of the word.’ Such poems overwhelm listeners, blinding their capacity for rational thought, and Bremond thought that they resemble “reaped magic, as the mystics say, inviting readers to tranquility and asking them to do nothing more than to let something be done to them, but actively, by a force greater and better than themselves.” Reason has no place in poetic contemplation, in Bremond's mystic interpretation. He believed that hermeneutics, written culture, and interpreta-

tion only destroy poetic purity.’

136. This collection is kept in folder 885, “Corydon (Notes),” and includes five subfolders, AGBLJD; reproduced in Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,’ 391-440. 137. Henri Bremond, La Poésie pure avec un débat sur la poésie par Robert de Souza (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926). Bremond’s article originally appeared in installments in Les Nouvelles littéraires on 31

October; 7, 14, 21, and 28 November; 5, 12, 19, and 26 December 1925; and 2, 9, and 16 January 1926.

138. Bremond, La Poésie pure, 16. Carolyn Abbate revives this debate in her notion of drastic music. 139. Ibid., 23-27.

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Gide had followed the debate on “poésie pure” in old issues of Les Nouvelles littéraires that he read while traveling through Chad in 1926, when he combined erudite literary reflection with daily exposure to politics, as was his custom. In his diary he had lambasted Bremond for suggesting an aesthetic equivalence between poetry and music, thereby “piously intellectu-

alizing poetry” and burdening music with a signification foreign to its nature. “His ut musica poesis is just as ruinous for poetry as Horace’s ut pic-

ture, Gide wrote, reiterating his fundamental belief in the autonomy of artistic forms. “What is Abbé Bremond thinking,” he had continued, “and why doesn't he see that it’s enough that poetry is essentially untranslatable because of its rhythms and sonorities, and that one doesn't have to go so far as saying that those rhythms and sonorities sufhce for us.” Bremond simply did not know how to analyze poetic form, Gide wrote bitterly; that was why he resorted to effusive claims about prayers—a remark that reveals Gide's utter rejection of any link between art and mystic contemplation.'*” For Gide, the only reliable truth—and recourse—was literary form, the rules of French grammar, etymologies of words, and classical style. Gide’s response to Bremond’s thinking and the attacks by Renouveau writers in the 1930s gives clear insight into the aesthetics that motivated Perséphone. Gide stood by his belief in personal revelation as the most effective means of achieving moral truth and the basis of his ethics and faith. And yet he also insisted on the importance of expressing self-knowledge in measured, classic, and perfect French. He adhered to a Kantian position of understanding art as an end in itself, distinct from the realms of politics and faith. And yet he didn't felt quite at home in the rarefied world of Symbolist “Tart pour lart,” which irritated his sense of human empathy and involvement. This often led him to turn his aestheticism on its head, insisting on a material basis to both spirituality and the mind. “What Descartes needed first, to think, was his frying pan. Without a frying pan, there would be no cogito at all,’ he commented during the Union pour la vérité debate, adding a few minutes later: “I think spiritual reform depends on material reform.” Classicism remained Gide'’s safe haven during the trials of the 1930s literary debates. He never changed his belief in beautiful form, his sexual orientation, Christ, or the gospels. Critics overlooked the consistencies of his beliefs, in part perhaps because they seemed unrelated but also because Gide made no attempt to formalize his beliefs or reconcile his life choices

140. Gide, Le Retour du Tchad [1927], in Souvenirs et voyages, 651-2. 141. Gide, quoted in Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps, 65-66.

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with a religion that condemned them. Unlike his opponents, he did not feel that the different parts of his life had to be synthesized into a coherent

whole; as far as he was concerned they coexisted, were related yet not joined—in short, a bricolage. “Gide remained consistent and militant about only two issues throughout his life,” his close friend Maria van Rysselberghe wrote in 1931, “Christianity and pédérastie.”"” She omitted the third important issue in Gide’s life: literary form, the part of the trivium that motivated Gide's creative work, providing its multidirectional, pluralistic, and equanimous core. In 1933 Persephone came back into his life, once again providing him with a vehicle for communicating his consistent beliefs about faith, sexuality/love, and art. This time he intertwined these independent threads in a kaleidoscopic form that left all his critics baffled.

M PERSEPHONY Gide's ballet scenario from 1909 must have seemed anachronistic to him when he pulled it out of his drawer in 1933, planning to dust it off for inclusion in the publication of his complete works. When he happened to mention the piece to Ida Rubinstein in January, she expressed interest in producing it in her upcoming season. She immediately thought of José Maria Sert as the stage designer and Stravinsky as the composer. Gide expressed polite enthusiasm, but he may have felt some skepticism about the venture, given a less than satisfying collaboration with Ida Rubinstein and, initially, Stravinsky (who dropped out) on a translation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra from 1917 to 1920.'* “Me, I don’t care,” Gide told his friend Maria van Rysselberghe, “I believe less and less in the theater. I don't attach any importance to this, but the attempt amuses me, it will take me a month to finish it, with little text, and otherwise just

142. Entry for 1 July 1931 in CPD, vol. 2, 190. 143. Stravinsky had agreed to compose the music for Gide's translation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with Ida Rubinstein in the main role but dropped out of the production after disagreeing with Léon Bakst about creating a “progressive” staging of the play in modern dress. See Jean Claude, “Gide et les artistes: Antoine et Cléopdtre 1917-1920,’ BAAG 36, no. 158 (April 2008): 160-73. Gide met with Stravinsky in Diablerets in August 1917 and gave a report to Rubinstein of the meeting in a letter of 14 August 1917 (ibid., 167). See also Gide to Stravinsky, 8 March 1918, and Stravinsky to Gide, 7 April 1918, ibid., 182-84. In 1917 Gide had also sent Ida Les Nourritures terrestres and Nouveaux prétextes,

both of which she said she had enjoyed (see Rubinstein to Gide, 24 September 1917, ibid., 175). The correspondence between Rubinstein, Stravinsky, and Gide concerning Antoine et Cléopatre is kept in microfilm 102.1, pp. 956-83, PSS. Stravinsky's correspondence with Bakst is published in English translation in SSC, vol. 2, 89-97.

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pretexts for gesture and dance.” This conversation, which van Rysselberghe recorded (as she did all her talks with Gide), occurred during a period of conspicuous nonproductivity for Gide: during his communist years he so feared that politics might contaminate art that he refrained from writing novels and dramas.'* This may in part explain his remaining detached and uninterested during most of his involvement in Rubinstein's production of Perséphone. Some biographers even forget that he worked on a revision of the work at this time—or, indeed, that he wrote it at all. Gide began revising Proserpine after he met with Stravinsky in Wiesbaden from 30 January to 1 February 1933.'*° Both Gide and Stravinsky appear cautious in their letters of this period, and their expressions

in a photograph snapped during their Wiesbaden meeting are frosty (see figure 1.1).*” Stravinsky later described this meeting as a “business conversation” in which they had decided to split the authorial and

scenic rights equally.'* But they also discussed the work, and when Gide listened to what Stravinsky had to say about his 1909 Proserpine, he allowed the composer to inspire him to think about the myth as he had in his youth. In a letter to Stravinsky on 8 February, he summarized their discussion. Stravinsky had apparently suggested radical changes to Gide’s libretto, including a reconceptualization of the ballet as “the celebration of a mystery,’ and asked Gide to “remove the episodic element—which | Gide] had originally been tempted to included” because it “smacked of ‘entertainment.” Infected by Stravinsky’s energy, Gide, ignoring his innate skepticism about sacred experience, had agreed to layer

Stravinsky’s idea of a “mystery” onto the original Homeric texts. He planned to send Stravinsky the Homeric text in Leconte de Lisle’s French

translation. “I don't doubt that you will find there the extraordinary

144. Entry for 19 January 1933, CPD, vol. 2, 283.

145. At the Union pour la vérité debate in 1935 Gide announced that he had not written in four years, indicating that he did not consider Perséphone a work, or at least not a new work. He believed he had sacrificed his creativity to communism. See Guy-Grand, André Gide et notre temps, 1S—16. 146. See Jean Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,” BAAG 15, no. 73 (January 1987), 25. 147. Gavriil Paichadze wrote Stravinsky on 6 February 1933 that “it’s a pity that you told me so little,

or rather nearly nothing, about the details of your meeting with Gide and about the tone of your conversation with him. Familiarity with the conditions and moods of your adversary is very useful during negotiations”; Paichadze to Stravinsky, 6 February 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 507. It is interesting to compare this photograph with a jovial shot of Gide and Stravinsky with drunken smiles and toasting to each other outside the chalet “Le Revenandray” of the student group Les Bellettriens in Diablerets, Switzerland in 1917; see photo no. 1876, “SO STRAV 10006,” PSS. 148. Stravinsky to Paichadze, 13 February 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 507.

Gide’s Anxiousness m 105

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Figure 1.1 Igor Stravinsky with André Gide, Wiesbaden, 1933. Foto 50, Stravinsky 1479, unknown photographer, DN S63, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Permission: Paul Sacher Stiftung.

exaltation that I drew on the first time I read it,” he wrote Stravinsky, revealing that his admiration for Homer had withstood his rejection of much of the content of the Hymn. “I will concentrate my efforts on sustaining the nobility of this exaltation inherent to the subject,’ he added, cautiously reminding Stravinsky that a broader and more complex set

of interests had long since replaced the sacred communion of the Church as the foundation of his belief system.'” Gide and Stravinsky agreed to base their ballet on a Roman interpretation of the myth as an allegory of the cyclical rhythm of the seasons. This topic interested Stravinsky throughout his life and had received previous emphasis

149. Gide to Stravinsky, 8 February 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 26; and SSC, vol. 3, 187.

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in his most famous work, Le Sacre. However, when Stravinsky suggested starting the action of the ballet in autumn, so as to represent all four seasons more explicitly, Gide revolted, reminding Stravinsky (ironically, given his own proclivities for rearranging myth) that Persephone was “the personifica-

tion of spring” and that the myth could be reinterpreted only so far. In the course of their negotiations, Proserpine quickly transformed into Perséphone,

a postmodern mixture of allegory and cross-cultural modern-day mystery that Gide thought lay “between the natural interpretation (the timing of the seasons, the seed that falls into the earth must die and be reborn through the apparent sleep of the winter) and the mystical one, for the myth is related both to the cult of ancient Egypt and to Christian doctrine.”'° In later years, Stravinsky remembered that he and Gide had decided in Wiesbaden to introduce a narrator, like the one Stravinsky had used with such great success in his recent Oedipus Rex. They left Wiesbaden agreeing on the figure of Eumolpus, the “founder and first officiant of the Eleusinian Mysteries,’ who would frame their melodrama by narrating the events

of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. This source predominated in their exchange, which may have led Gide to change Proserpina’s name to Perse-

;)y’

phone. The two men also discussed Rubinstein’s condition that she receive a dance-mime role in the new work and the possibility of giving the drama a “three-part form.” Invigorated by Stravinsky’s input, Gide withdrew to a luxury hotel in Lavandou, Provence, for several weeks in February 1933, and there he rewrote the first two tableaux of Proserpine.'*” He no longer conceived of his work as a “dramatic symphony” as he had in 1913, but rather as an “opera”

or “melodrama” in three tableaux.’ Eager to please both Rubinstein and Stravinsky and to ensure Stravinsky's compositional freedom, Gide composed an open text of closed numbers divided into clear sections with verses for Stravinsky to repeat or shorten as necessary. Gide replaced much

150. Ibid. 151. M&C, 175. 152. Gide chose Lavandou because Elisabeth van Rysselberghe and their daughter, Catherine, lived there. Gide arrived on 20 February 1933. At this point Gide and Stravinsky thought the work would be premiered in the fall of 1933; they were thus working as quickly as they could. Gide expressed his enthusiasm about the project to Ida Rubinstein, who conveyed this information to Stravinsky in a telegram sent by Gavriil Paichadze in his letter of 13 February 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 507; see also CGC, vol. 2, 405. 153. Gide seemed to use the words opera and melodrama interchangeably to describe the genre of his new work. He used the label opera in the published version of Perséphone in NRF 22, no. 248 (1 May 1934): 745-61, but switched to the word melodrama when the scenario was published in book form by the NRF the same year. In a letter to Jacques Copeau Gide put the term melodrama in quotation marks; see CGC, vol. 2, 404—5; and Pe P, 89n1.

Gide’s Anxiousness m 107

of the descriptive synopsis of his original Proserpine with classical verse, delighting in the poetic game of crafting perfect alexandrines and octosyllables that would be suitable for Rubinstein, whose skills as a tragédienne he admired.'** “The thing that characterizes poetry and differentiates it from prose, he wrote in his diary after rereading an old article by Paul Souday about Valéry on 16 January, “is that you can’t move or change a word.”** A few weeks later, on 12 March, he noted in the diary, “The notions of perfection and of duration are closely related. Only the formal perfection of a skiff will allow and promise that it makes a longer journey.”*° While in Lavandou, Gide also “eliminated the anecdotal aspect, even the part of Eurydice,” as Stravinsky had suggested. “I fear that the scene of the encounter with Eurydice dragged, like all of the episodic passages,’ he wrote Stravinsky, “but it could be restored if the text is insufficient to cover the development of the music.”’’ Gide did not, however, rewrite the third tableau in Lavandou but rather almost half a year later. This lapse in time proved deeply significant for the final production of Perséphone, for by that time disillusionment and boredom with the project had set in. While the freezing rain beat down on Gide'’s hotel rooftop, the innocent Proserpina of Gide’ss Symbolist youth underwent an unrecognizable transformation, emerging in the new drafts as a mature woman with a hu-

manitarian conscience and sense of charity and duty, who acts for the good of others.'** Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager—one of the Weill works Gide listened to while working on the revision of Perséphone—may have played more than a passing role in this transformation, for Brecht’s text for this work, which problematized the notion of loyalty to community, had left a

deep impression on Gide and others in French literary and musical circles. At some point that spring, Gide contacted Weill about a possible collaboration and sent him his Le Roi Candaule. Weill responded in July that he had read the work “with great enthusiasm” and felt an affinity between this type of theater and his music. He confessed that he had become obsessed with Gide's idea of proposing to Ida Rubinstein a future

154. Years later, Gide remembered that he had never heard alexandrines spoken as beautifully as they were by Rubinstein in a performance of Racine’s Phédre in a charity benefit of the Red Cross on 27 June 1917. See Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits in Souvenirs et voyages, 998, and Claude, “Gide et les

artistes, 159. 15S. Gide, entry for 16 January 1933, in J-I, 398. 156. Gide, entry for 12 March 1933, in ibid., 402. 157. Gide to Stravinsky, 24 February 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 27; and SSC, vol. 3, 188.

158. Pollard, introduction to PeP, 4-7, 40-48.

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collaboration based on a piece by Calderon and wanted to consider doing the piece even if Rubinstein wasn't interested. “The idea of collaborating with you on a folkish musical theater based on Calderén’s human dramas is definitely attractive to me,’ Weill admitted to Gide.” Persephone’s moral awakening reflects not only the possible influence of Weill’s Der Jasager but also Gide’s development as a writer during the

twenty years since he had last thought of the project and, even more important, Gide’s political preoccupations of the moment. Hitler's appointment as German chancellor on 10 January had precipitated a personal crisis for him and led him to abandon his creative work in favor of political engagement. The Reichstag fire in late February unsettled him profoundly and disrupted his work on Perséphone, which he left waiting on his desk while he formulated an elegant protest for L’Humanité.' In the months that followed, Gide published numerous articles on social and political issues, attended several much-publicized antifascist, pacifist,

and pro-Soviet meetings in Paris, and corresponded with such wellknown pacifists as Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and André Malraux, though situating himself only tenuously in their camp. Just as Stravinsky finished the score to Perséphone in January 1934, Gide and Malraux flew to Berlin to demand from Joseph Goebbels the release of Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev, and Blagoi Popov, the Bulgarian communists falsely accused of having set fire to the Reichstag.'®' Gide also attended a gathering for the German communist Ernst Thalmann on the last evening of

the Perséphone production, and he missed two other performances as well. The creation of Perséphone thus coincided with the course of his antifascist Reichstag engagement. In some ways, Gide’s new Persephone was a shadow of her former self.

Gide kept his main storyline, ignoring the ravishment central to the Homeric story and retaining Triptolemus as the incentive for Persephone's glorious return to earth. The opening tableau, too, closely resembled its predecessors, although Gide had now solidified the singing and speaking

159. Weill to Gide, 12 July 1933; folder 870-1, AG-BL]D. Gide apparently listened to Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper and Der Jasager while in Levandou; see entry for 23 February 1933 CPD, vol. 2, 285. No recording of Der Jasager existed, but Gide had attended the Parisian premiere. 160. See Gide, “Fascisme [speech given on 21 March 1933 in a meeting of the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires],’ published in L’Humanité, 6 March 1933; Marianne, 29 March 1933;

Lu, 31 March 1933; reprinted in Gide, Littérature engagée, 20-25. See also entries for 3 and 4 March 1933, CPD, vol. 2, 287-88. 161. Gide and Malraux wrote a letter to Joseph Goebbels on 4 January 1934, published in L’'Humanité, 26 January 1934; reprinted in Gide, Littérature engagée, 41-42.

Gide’s Anxiousness m 109

parts and composed the previously envisioned yet missing poetic verse. The narcissus-plucking episode likewise retained much of its former sexual mystery, though now imbued with stronger moral connotations and polit-

ical, even communist, meaning. The underworld scene was drastically changed, however. Gone were the fantastic solo dances and the key episodic moment of Eurydice’s explanation of desire, replaced by a series of somewhat disconnected scenes that mixed and matched new and old and included a lullaby for Persephone at her tomb, the Shadows’ presenting Pluto's gifts, Mercury's offering of the pomegranate, and Persephones key moment of gazing into the narcissus, remembering the earth, and breaking into melodrama. Gide sometimes used preexisting verse and at other times invented something new. He also retained numerous notable indications for music and stage action from the1909 and 1913 drafts for Proserpine. And yet these remnants of stage action, music, and verse were now interrupted by Eumolpus’s lengthy narration, which in many instances contradicted the meaning of those remnants. Gide’s new Perséphone presented such a heterophony of different voices that it risked becoming a cacophony. Knowledge of Proserpine and Gide’s personal history add surprising light to Gide’s revisions of winter 1933. ‘The typescripts of the first and second tableaux that Gide sent Stravinsky and Rubinstein in late February and early March 1933 represent a remarkable amalgam of everything he had written about Persephone since the 1890s, tossed together with newly composed alexandrines and the addition of Eumolpus’s narration of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.'” It is unclear whether Gide jumbled together these different fragments out of lack of interest and time—he did not even spell names consistently, fluctuating between Roman and Greek variants such as Demeter and Ceres—or whether this constituted a premeditated artistic strategy. He arranged the libretto in three columns: on the left-hand side of the page he typed what he envisioned as sung text for the chorus; in the middle, the

162. Three undated typescripts of Gide's first tableau of Perséphone are kept at the PSS. I will refer to

these typescripts for the first tableau as drafts la, 1b, and 1c, following Maureen Carr’s cataloguing policy in Multiple Masks, 160. Draft 1a is eight pages long and includes Gide’s handwritten corrections. It is included in microfilm 226.1, pp. 936-43, copy in microfilm 95.1, pp. 576-83. Draft 1b consists of a corrected typescript of la and is kept in microfilm 226.1, pp. 944—S1, copy in microfilm 95.1, pp. $84-

91. Draft 1c is eleven pages long and includes Gide's and Stravinsky's handwritten corrections and Stravinsky's musical sketches. It is kept in microfilm 226.1, pp. 952-61, with a copy in microfilm 95.1, pp. 592-602. Craft publishes a portion of draft Ic in examples 1-6, SSC, vol. 3, 490-492. In the following I will refer only to the drafts in microfilm 226.1, and not to their copies in microfilm 95.1. Jacques

Copeau's archive contains a copy of the first tableau with Copeau’s comments and a copy of the first tableau with Gide’s comments and additions in folders 726 and 727 respectively, F]C-BNF. A clean copy of Gide's typescript is kept in folder 728.

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spoken lines for Persephone; and on the right-hand side, extensive notes for mise-en-scéne and musical setting.'®’ Rubinstein had warned him that the chorus would not be able to dance, nor the dancers to sing. This may have contributed to Gide's decision to compartmentalize theatrical activities. In

the format he used music, text, and gesture could coexist conceptually without needing to be synthesized into a cohesive whole. Each of the three columns in his libretto seemed to speak to itself rather than in dialogue with the others.

Gide's pastiche approach is evident on the first page of the original typescript (draft 1a) that he sent Stravinsky in February 1933. This version did not yet include Eumolpus’s opening lines. Although Gide had agreed to include an incongruous narrator, he disputed with Stravinsky about Eumolpus more than about any other character. ‘The idea of including a narrator/priest not only conflicted dramatically with his sensuous and visual interpretation of Persephone but also took the drama in a religious and moral direction he may have resisted. Moreover, Eumolpus's addition to the libretto significantly diminished Persephone’s dramatic role, reafhrming the central authority of organized religion in a manner most likely contrary to Gide's wishes. Draft la includes most of Eumolpus'ss part except for his narrative introduction to each tableau.

Gide originally planned for Eumolpus to have a speaking part but changed his mind and crossed out speaking and replaced it with singing in draft la, perhaps after speaking to Stravinsky. In a letter of 24 February,

he suggests to Stravinsky that the role be sung by a baritone to contrast with Pluto’s deep bass.’ He refers to Eumolpus’s introductory opening lines to the first tableau for the first time in his third undated typescript (draft 1c), perhaps in response to a request from Stravinsky. Even then he had still not written them. “Before the curtain rises, Eumolpus— standing at the front of the stage—should announce with four or six lines (that I still have to write) the performance of the ELEUSINIAN Mysteries,’ he indicated in draft 1c.'®° He finally sent Eumolpus’s opening

lines on a separate sheet of paper shortly before 28 March, probably

163. On the title page for draft 1a, Gide wrote: “On the left sung in the center spoken. On the right, indications for staging”; microfilm 226.1, p. 936, PSS. 164. See Gide to Stravinsky, 24 February 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 27; and SSC, vol. 3, 188. Gide misspells baritone: “barriton (is that how one spells it?).” 16S. Gide, draft 1c; microfilm 226.1, p. 952, PSS (published as example 1, SSC, vol. 3, 490).

Gide’s Anxiousness m I11]

directly after having met with Stravinsky and Rubinstein for three days in Paris.'© The first page of Gide’s draft 1a lacks these lines. That version starts with a brief description of scenery lifted directly from the 1913 Proserpine, but shortened, because Gide now finds it “no doubt useless to indicate.” Despite Stravinsky's request for a modern “mystery, Gide still wants a lovely naturalistic stage setting on a field next to the sea, with cliffs leading

to the underworld. He harps obstinately on this scenery, resisting whatever suggestions Stravinsky may have made to the contrary in Wiesbaden. Gide liked to speak about sensuous merging with nature as a means of rebelling against the Calvinist asceticism of his youth, and he clearly wanted this experience to remain present in Perséphone.'’ Gide adds his first stage direction to draft la by hand: “We can see Démeter [sic] led by Mercury entrusting and recommending Persephone to the nymphs with a gesture of farewell (but no pathos whatsoever).”'®

He may have added this prominent stage action, already present in embryo in his 1909 Proserpine, because he understood, as he had told Maria van Rysselberghe, that his new Perséphone required “little text, and otherwise pretexts for gestures and dance.”'” Or perhaps Stravinsky had asked him to include it. In draft 1b, Gide or his assistant have typed the gesture on the right-hand side of the page. In draft 1c, Gide has shortened it to read: “Deméter | sic], warned by Mercure who guides her, says goodbye to Perséphone and entrusts her to the nymphs.”'”” This stage indication corresponds with that in the published libretto, although Gide there spells Demeter as Démeter. It is puzzling that Gide, who was fastidious with language, keeps misspelling Demeter’s name, and that he inserts the presence of Mercury, who has nothing to do with the story at this point.

166. Gide, draft 1c; microfilm 226.1, p. 959, not included in Craft's facsimile in SSC. Gide indicates to Stravinsky that he had just sent Eumolpus'’s lines in a letter dated 28 March 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 31-32; and SSC, vol. 3, 190. On 27 March Gavriil Paichadze had forwarded Stravinsky a letter from Gide that included “the Priest’s poetry” (see Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album,

1921-1971, text from Stravinsky's interviews 1912-63, including 258 photographs selected by Vera Stravinsky and Rita McCaffrey with captions by Robert Craft (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982; hereafter IVP), 88. A piece of paper with Eumolpus’s opening lines is taped onto Copeau’s copy of the typescript, a clear indication that this was a later addition and suggesting that Copeau may have received a copy of the typescript before Gide wrote these additional lines; see folder 727, p. 1, FJC-BNF. Copeau wrote out these new lines in the typescript kept in folder 726. 167. Gide, entry for 14 March 1933, J-I, 403-04. 168. Gide, draft la; microfilm 226.1, p. 937, PSS. 169. Entry for 19 January 1933, CPD, vol. 2, 283. 170. Gide, draft 1c; microfilm 226.1, p. 952, PSS (published as example 1, SSC, vol. 3, 490).

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Gide’s draft la continues with the nymphs’ first chorus “Stay with us” (Reste avec nous), which he separates into individual lines, encouraging Stravinsky to repeat each as necessary. The nymphs echo the stage direction Gide has just indicated, transforming his assertion into declarative speech by announcing to Persephone: “Your mother Demeter, queen of the beautiful summer, has entrusted you to us.” Gide seems at pains to emphasize this gesture, either because he has no other ideas about how to start the show or because somebody has told him that he needs to highlight Demeters presence. He indicates that he will add a few verses to the nymphs’ minimal chorus of three lines here but ends up sending those extra four lines only later as a “paste-on” (béquet) to draft 1c. Just before Persephone speaks, he adds a second stage direction describing her posture on stage: “Persephone, no doubt still seated, and as if half asleep.’ His repeated use of the phrase “no doubt” suggests resentment or annoyance at having to submit to the authority of a stage director who will tell him what to do. His description of Persephone as “half asleep” indicates that the libretto is about to enter the drugged, blurry erotic realm of his 1909 Proserpine. Persephone's first spoken line comes as a bit of a shock to readers familiar with his early work. Gide has grafted directly into his new libretto one of the four “chansons” that he had written in 1910, inserting a nymphs’ chorus between existing verses, splitting the lines between Persephone and the nymphs, adding stage directions and changing words. This insertion gives the impression, oddly, both of Symbolist déja vu and Gide's resistance to reinventing Perséphone as a modern mystery. Why in fact is he quoting his most sensual lyrical expression of the Sicilian Proserpina of his youth?'”’

Chanson, 1910 Perséphone (R15:4-R32:1) Persephone’ spoken part:

La brise vagabonde La brise vagabonde A caressé les fleurs A caressé les fleurs | Nymphs interject with “Come! Come play with us, Persephone” (Viens! Viens joue avec nous,

Perséphone) and lines Gide adds as paste-on no. 2 (béquet no. 2) to draft Ic. ]

171. Chanson, 1910, from Gide, “Quatre chansons, no. III {1910].” P&P, 120-21. See also Gide, Les Nouvelles Nourritures, in Romans, 253; and the commentary on 1492-502.

Gide’s Anxiousness m 113

Chanson, 1910 Perséphone (R1S:4-R32:1) Persephone spoken part:

Je técoute de tout mon coeur, Je técoute de tout mon coeur, Chant du premier matin dumonde. Chant du premier matin du monde.

Nymphs’ chorus (with repetitions):

Ivresse matinale, Ivresse matinale,

Rayon naissant, pétales Rayon naissant, pétales Tout poissés de liqueur... Ruisselants de liqueur Cede sans plus attendre Cede sans plus attendre Au conseil le plus tendre Au conseil le plus tendre

Et laisse l'avenir Et laisse l'avenir

Doucement t’envahir. Doucement t’envahir Persephone’s spoken part:

Voici que se fait si furtive Voici que se fait si furtive

La tiéde caresse du jour La tiéde caresse du jour Que l'Ame la plus craintive Que lame la plus craintive S’abandonnerait a l'amour. S‘abandonnerait a l'amour | Persephone: The wandering breeze has caressed / the flowers. / I listen to you with all my heart / song of the world’s first morning. Nymphs: Morning drunkenness / nascent ray, petals / glistening with liqueur / Succumb without further ado / to the most tender advice / and let the future / softly invade you. Persephone: And now becomes so furtive / the tender caress of the day/ that even the most timid soul / will abandon itself to love |!”

This chanson from 1910 held deep personal significance for Gide. In 1935, he used the poem again as the opening for Les Nouvelles Nourritures, a supplement to his earlier Les Nourritures terrestres—the key work that in

his youth had coincided with his passion for Persephone. The feelings expressed in Les Nouvelles Nourritures go back to 1916-18, however, when

Gide fell in love with Marc Allégret and first planned to write a series of “meditations” in the presence of God. During those years, he had conducted a profound and moving correspondence with Allégret; publicly he and Allégret modeled the affirmative possibility of same-sex love for the 172. This is Dorothy Bussy’s English translation, with some changes, from The Fruits of the Earth, 186.

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u u isi sexual scene.'” |

nderground Parisian homosexual scene.'’* In Les Nouvelles Nourritures Gide prefaces the 1910 chanson with a call to future readers to learn to enjoy life, “drink with his thirst,’ and allow his desire to inform their own. “I admire how imprecise desire becomes when it becomes love,’ he com-

ments in brackets, expressing intense admiration for a feeling that envelops another body “diffusely and all at once.”!”*

Given this history, the otherwise not noteworthy poem that Gide steals for the opening of Perséphone takes on new meaning. In it Gide

expresses powerful feelings and articulates homoerotic desire as he pantheistically experiences it. Moreover, by evoking the affective language of Walt Whitman, he had reached into the past as a means of challenging received opinion about pédérastie. He disrupts narrative time in the poem by evoking a Whitmanesque sensuous merging with nature and an erotic realm of nontemporal pleasure. Whitman's lyric expression of the joyous and infinite communion of homosexual love provided a foundational model for Gide.'”* In citing this poem in Perséphone, Gide proclaims his individuality and acknowledges his per-

sonal ethics against the familiar backdrop of the Homeric Hymn. Same-sex desire and homoerotic sensuality shaped his identity, created the spiritual core of his personal religion, and motivated the call to arms in Les Nouvelles Nourritures to “dare become who you are!” (Ose

devenir qui tu es!). He pursues his pédéraste rewrite of the Homeric Hymn here by listing the “wrong” flowers to describe the meadows in the nymphs’ chorus “Ivresse matinale.” Whereas in the Homeric Hymn Persephone picks roses, crocuses, violets, irises, and hyacinths, Gide's

Persephone plucks “verbena, columbine, hyacinths, and Adonis or 173. See André Gide and Marc Allégret, Correspondance 1917-1949, ed. Jean Claude and Pierre Masson

(Paris: Gallimard, 2005). Daniel Guérin remarked that Gide and Allégret were known as a homosexual couple. He listed Mauriac, Proust, the surrealist René Crevel, and Maurice Ravel as other “known homosexuals” and remarked that “we found encouragementin the fact thatso many famous people were homosexuals.” Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou, Paris Gay 1925 (Paris: Presses de la renaissance, 1981), 51.

174. Lucey comments upon the homoerotic undertones and temporal confusion of Gide'’s introduction to this poem in Les Nouvelles Nourritures. Gide strains here, he writes, “to figure a nontemporal, truly united erotic utopia’; Lucey, Gides Bent, 192-93. Emily Apter compares expressions of love in Les Nourritures terrestres to Barthes’s Fragments d'un discours amoureux. She describes Gide's style as litotic hyperbole that uses neologisms and archaisms; Apter, André Gide and the Codes of Homotexuality, 81-83, 86-87. 175. Heather Love opens Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2007) with an epitaph that echoes the tradition of homosexual subjectification in early twentieth-century Europe: “The homosexual dream of perfect metaphysical union is not so much a reflected heterosexual ideal as it is the compensation for having wept in the darkness.” She quotes here from Thomas Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text. Gide translated Whiteman’s Leaves of Grass in 1909. John Addington Symonds, who also influenced Gide, celebrated Whitman as a direct descendent of ancient Greek homoerotic culture; see Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist, 270-78.

Gide’s Anxiousness m 115

rose-a-rubies’—flowers that grow not in Elysium but rather in the luscious field Oscar Wilde created for Persephone in “The Garden of Eros.’

Gide continued his deconstruction of Homer when he wrote Eumolpuss opening lines at the end of March. Gide referred to the lines as an “introit’—it is impossible to guess whether in using this term he was amused, angry, or ironic—which hints at the possibility that he and his collaborators had decided in Paris that Eumolpus should not only narrate the story of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as an ancient Greek literary source but also perform it in his own person on stage by acting as the priest of a modern-day theatrical ritual. Gide spaced the lines in the middle of the page, which, according to his tripartite scheme, suggests that they should be spoken (although he had decided at this point that they would be sung). The lines give the impression of an invocation, or the opening of a religious ritual. Yet Gide quickly disrupts that effect by

referring to the Homeric Hymn in the last line of the passage. Gide claims to have derived Demeter’s action of entrusting Persephone to the nymphs from Homer, but there is no mention of it in the Hymn. Given his emphasis of that gesture in the stage indications and nymphs’ chorus of his first typescript, Gide’s repetition of it here might simply have

been laziness: he does not want to take the time to invent something new. He ends Eumolpus’s introit with the line “This is what we will represent here,’ which he then crosses out, perhaps aware that it would bla-

tantly create distance to the audience and reveal Gide’s ironic attitude toward Stravinsky's ritualistic theatrical vision of Perséphone as an ancient mystery: Introit d’Eumolpe, avant le lever du rideau « Déesse aux mille noms, puissante Déméter | sic], > « Qui couvres de moissons la terre, » « Toi, dispensatrice du blé » « (Nous) célébrons ici tes mystéres » « Devant tout ce peuple assemble. » « C’est aux Nymphes que tu confies » « Perséphone, ta fille chérie » « Qui fait le printemps sur la terre » « (Et se plait aux fleurs des prairies.) » « Comment elle te fut ravie, » « Cest ce que nous raconte Homére. »

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[In Gide’s hand: ] {Quetrousattonsteprésenter>} Note. Les passages entre parenthéses sont ad libitum.’ [Eumolpus’s introit before the curtain rises / Goddess of a thousand names, O great Demeter / Who covers the earth with her harvest, / “Thou dispenser of wheat; / (We) celebrate here your mysteries / Before the people assembled

here. / Unto the nymphs you entrusted / Persephone, your cherished daughter / Who makes the spring on earth / (and enjoys picking flowers in the fields) / How she was ravished and taken from you / This is what Homer

tells us / In Gide’s hand: hat-we-wiltttepresent / Note. The passages in quotations can be repeated ad libitum. |

With Eumolpus’s lines written, the bricolage of Perséphone’s opening was complete. This strange new work is riven by aesthetic contradictions. Gide was still motivated by Symbolist mysticism and the powerful, unspoken musical emotions of his youth. He had borrowed for Persephone a poem, rare in his oeuvre, that was associated with his love for Marc Allégret. Yet perfect alexandrines and the resolute presence of Eumolpus hold these associations in check. Gide’s pagan, Sicilian Proserpina continues to resist the Homeric frame, question the laws of the narrative that binds her, and rebel against the faith of her mother. Yet she also bows to the authority of that mother and, as the first tableau progresses, shows herself to be grown and compassionate and closer than ever to the parable of the grain of the gospel from which she was born. Gide’s new melodrama is even more deconstructively postmodern than its predecessor had been, more than forty years of literary contemplation now collapsed into a patchwork narrative haunted by memories. In creating a bricolage of historical and stylistic voices Gide discovered the perfect form to reflect his heterophonic spiritual, sexual, and political core. Now it was Stravinsky's turn to take the story and shape it in the spirit of his faith.

176. Gide, draft 1c; microfilm 226.1, p. 959, PSS; this page is not reproduced in SCC.

2 Stravinsky's Dogma

SSS

Stravinsky had a lukewarm reaction to the drafts of the first two tableaux

that Gide sent him on 28 February and 5 March 1933.' He wrote Gide and thanked him for his “beautiful verses.” But he appeared disappointed and seems to have taken offense at the few suggestions for music that Gide had left in his libretto. “We need a little tranquility in which to examine the libretto together from the theatrical perspective,’ he cautioned Gide. “I must make you understand my conceptions and ideas about the role of music in theater in general, and in your piece in particular.’ “I love your work deeply, seriously, and I am seduced by your magnificent text, celebrating the mystery of the ancient Persephone,’ he added. Yet this praise seems disingenuous, given the annoyed tone of what followed, a warning that he would not compromise on the autonomy of his music: I will devote all of my energies to erecting a monument in sound to stand next to yours in words. Like yours, this monument will be a tribute to the mystery, but a monument that will also be an independent musical organism, serving neither to embellish the text (beautiful in itself), nor to color it, nor to guide

the public (Leitmusik-Wagner) in the development of the plot. It hardly matters when this concept of the music differs from I-R’s [Ida Rubinstein’s| and surprises her. In the final analysis, I am certain she will realize that I have not done her a disservice, and that the value of success with the subscription audience at the Opéra—who like to leave the theatre whistling the tunes that

they have heard (and to provide them with these is felt to be one of the composer's responsibilities )—is not indisputable, but, on the contrary, worth very little.’

Gide had at the same time sent drafts of the first two tableaux to Ida Rubinstein, who had arranged to meet with him and Stravinsky at her home in Paris to discuss the production during Stravinsky's planned visit

1. Stravinsky did not receive the typescript of the first tableau that Gide sent on 24 February 1933; Rubinstein and Gide had to resend it a few days later. See Gide to Stravinsky, 24 and 27 February 1933; and Stravinsky to Gide, 28 February and 5 March 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 27-31;

and SSC, vol. 3, 188-89. The letter of 24 February is not included in the English translation. Gavriil Paichadze wrote Stravinsky on 27 February 1933 that Rubinstein’s secretary, Pauline Regnié, had brought a “packet, in which A. Gide sends you some sketches of the first act of the new thing,’ in SPRK, vol. 3, 509. 2. Stravinsky to Gide, 5 March 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 30-31; and SSC, vol. 3, 189. 117

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to the city on 16 March.’ Gide was annoyed at having to leave Lavandou to attend this meeting.’ During their first dinner together, he found himself repelled by what he perceived to be Rubinstein’s dated theatrical allegiance to the decadent Symbolist aesthetics of Gabriele D‘Annunzio, with

whom Rubinstein had collaborated in 1911 on her most famous spectacle, the sensationalist Le Martyre de saint Sébastien. Gide told Maria van Rysselberghe that when Rubinstein defended D'Annunzios “sincerity” he cynically commented to himself under his breath, “precisely, and that’s

exactly what’s so horrible about him.” He confessed to Maria that he wanted to abandon Perséphone after this meeting, that he would “do whatever [Stravinsky and Rubinstein] said,” that “he didn’t care,” and that the

work “didn't interest him.’ He and Stravinsky largely stopped corresponding after this point and made few further attempts to meet in person

to discuss the libretto, although as late as 28 February Stravinsky had warmly invited Gide to his home in Voreppe in southeastern France near Grenoble.® After Stravinsky began composing on § May 1933, he did not consult with Gide regularly for weeks.’ Gide’s tiny aside to himself about D‘Annunzio on the night of 16 March

1933 points toward a potentially disastrous disagreement over faith between him and Stravinsky. In fact, neither of them seemed fully aware of the other's ideas on religion. A few weeks before the March meeting Stravinsky had told Gide, as Gide reported to Maria, that “I get along very well with you, but I could never work with Valéry; he’s an atheist!!!" Maria thought this a clear sign that Stravinsky really didn’t know about or understand Gide’s rejection of the Church, and that their collaboration would not work.®

3. See Gavriil Paichadze to Stravinsky, 14 February 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 509. Rubinstein thanked Gide for the tableaux in telegrams from 1 and 8 March 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 29. In the first, she wrote that she was “filled with joy by the precious package.’ Gide also told Copeau he was planning to meet Rubinstein in a letter of 1 March 1933, in CGC, vol. 2, 404-S. 4. Gide tried to persuade Rubinstein to meet him in the south of France but was unsuccessful. See Gide to Dorothy Bussy, 10 March 1933, in Correspondance André Gide-Dorothy Bussy, Cahiers André

Gide 10, ed. Jean Lambert with notes by Richard Tedeschi (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), vol. 2, 458-59. Bussy replied on 12 March 1933 that it was unfortunate that Ida had her “claws into him,’ ibid., 460. 5. Entry for 17 March 1933 in CPD, vol. 2, 290. Maria notes that Gide met with Stravinsky until past midnight. 6. Stravinsky to Gide, 28 February 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 29; and SSC, vol. 3, 189.

7. Gide met with Stravinsky in early April, May, July, and September 1933. See Correspondance André Gide-Dorothy Bussy, vol. 2, 461, 477-78, 488-89, 497; Paichadze to Stravinsky, 19 May 1933, and Stravinsky to Paichadze, 20 May 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 513-14; and CGC, vol. 2, 413-24. 8. Entry for 23 February 1933 in CPD, vol. 2, 285. Maria did not realize that Stravinsky had hoped that Paul Valéry, not Gide, would be the librettist for Perséphone.

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Stravinsky approached the project of Perséphone with a certain amount of religious zeal. In 1926, after he had interpreted the sudden healing of an

abscess on his finger before a performance in Venice as a miraculous answer to his prayers to an icon in a Paduan church, he had “reconverted” to Russian Orthodoxy, the religion of his youth.’ His decision to reconvert appeared at least in part motivated by feelings of guilt over his affair with Vera de Bosset Sudeikina.’® On 6 April 1926, Stravinsky had written Sergei

Diaghilev a dramatic confession that he had not “observed the fast for twenty years’ and that it was “out of extreme mental and spiritual need” that he was doing so now. “Ina few days I shall go to confession and before confession I shall ask forgiveness of everyone I can,’ he wrote. “I ask you too, dear Seryozha, with whom I have worked so much during these past years without repentance before God, to forgive me my transgressions as sincerely and cordially as I ask it of you.”"’

Stravinsky began to speak publicly about his Orthodox faith starting around 1928. In interviews he represented himself as an obedient Christian servant who showed gratitude to God for the gift of musical talent by devoting his life to composition. He emphasized the importance of divine order and spoke of adhering closely to Church dogma." Because Stravinsky's reconversion coincided with the conversion to Catholicism of intellectuals inspired by Jacques Maritain and the Renouveau catholique, contemporary French commentators frequently blurred the difference between Stravinsky's Orthodox faith and Catholicism. Biographers—among them Stephen Walsh—continue to exaggerate the resemblances between Stravinsky's reconversion in the spring of 1926

9. D&D, 26; reprinted in abbreviated form in Mec, 164. 10. See SPD, 211; and Ute Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis: Igor Stravinskijs Asthetik zwischen 1920 und 1939 (Hofheim: Wolke, 2007), 66. Henseler gives important background on Stravinsky’s faith in 65-84. 11. Stravinsky to Diaghilev, 6 April 1926, in SPRK, vol. 3, 184; translated into English by Stephen Walsh in Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia and France 1882-1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 431. See also Stravinsky to Diaghilev, 21 April 1927, in SPRK, vol. 3, 233-34. 12. The number of interviews in which Stravinsky discussed his faith peaked in 1936 and then tapered off dramatically. See Josep Farran | Mayoral, “Conversamt amb Strawinsky,” Le Veu de Catalunya,

25 March 1928 (excerpt in English translation by Malcolm MacDonald in IVP, 17); Paul Werrie, “Igor Strawinsky compositeur chrétien: Conversation avec le grand ‘responsable’ de la musique modern,’ Le Vingtiéme Siécle (Brussels), 27 May 1930; Vittorio Tranquilli, “Avvenimenti della vita teatrale cittadina: Strawinsky in prosa,’ Il Piccolo di Trieste, 23 April 1931 (excerpt in English translation by Robert Craft and Kristin Crawford in IVP, 21); Philippe Diolé, “Leurs raisons de vivre: Igor Strawinsky,’ Beaux-arts, 28 February 1936; and “Igor Strawinsky nos habla de las orientaciones futuras de la musica y de su arte,” La Nacién (Buenos Aires), 25 April 1936. Stravinsky later claimed that his religious beliefs had never influenced his music. See, for example, Santiago del Campo, “En declaraciones a ‘Pro Arte’: Strawinsky enjuicia el momento musical de hoy,” Pro Arte (Santiago de Chile), 2 June 1949.

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and Jean Cocteau’s “symptomatic” return to Catholicism the previous summer.'> Robert Craft later remarked that people regularly mistook Stravinsky for one of Maritain’s Jewish converts because it was clear that the philosopher had influenced him.'* Yet, although Stravinsky was attracted to Maritain’s neo-Thomism and Spanish Catholic mysticism, he did not consider converting to Catholicism in the 1930s.”

Whether because of his reconversion, association with Maritain, composition of Symphonie de psaumes, public comments, or a combination of these factors, Stravinsky's faith had by the 1930s become central to his compositional process and, as a result, also to the reception of his music.

During this time Pyotr Suvchinsky, Nadia Boulanger, Jacques Maritain, Louis Laloy, the Italian critic Domenico de Paoli, Charles-Albert Cingria,

and the Germans Herbert Fleischer and Paul Bekker all spoke about Stravinsky’s music in terms of faith.’ Stravinsky corroborated their view when in an interview with Domenico de Paoli reported by Raymond Hall in the New York Times in October 1933 he described his mission in Perséphone as “divine. “I do not take pride in my artistic talents,” Stravinsky told de Paoli, because “these are qualities I received from God, and there is no reason to boast about a gift one has received.’ He promised de Paoli

13. Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 426-41. 14. Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, rev. exp. ed. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 15.

15. Stravinsky discussed his friendship with Maritain and Jean Cocteau and expressed his admiration for Saint John of the Cross, Saint Jerome, the Spanish mystic Ramon Llull, and especially Saint Teresa of Avila in Josep Farran I Mayoral, “Conversant amb Strawinsky.” Stravinsky did consider converting to Catholicism later. “I grew up with a profound admiration for Catholicism, to which I was drawn both by my spiritual education and in my nature (I am as much a Westerner as an Oriental),” he told an Italian reporter in the early 1950s. “My Orthodox religion is relatively close to Catholicism. And I wouldn't be surprised if one day I became a Catholic”; quoted in Roman Vlad, “Le Musiche religiose di Strawinsky,” in Robert Craft, Le Musiche religiose di Igor Strawinsky, con il catalogo analitico completo di tutte le sue opere (Venice: Lombroso, 1957), 19; see also Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem

Bekenntnis, 21; 67-68. Stravinsky comments amusingly on his lifelong desire to become a Roman Catholic in Paul Horgan, Encounters with Stravinsky: A Personal Record, rev. ed. (Middeltown, CT: Wesleyan,

1972/1989), 147. 16. Numerous critics noticed Stravinsky's religious turn after 1927. See, for example, Michel Georges-Michel, “Une nouvelle oeuvre d'un grand musician d’aujourd’hui: Apollon Musagéte d'Igor Stravinsky et les concepts inédits du compositeur,” Excelsior, 27 October 1927, and Daniel Lazarus, “La Musique: La Symphonie de psaumes de Strawinsky,” Europe 97 (15 June 1931): 119-23. Stravinsky's friends sometimes also expressed doubts about his religious sincerity. André Schaeffner apologized pro-

fusely to Stravinsky about a planned screening of the latest film by Jean Cocteau at a soirée at the Vicomte de Noailles in July 1931, for example, which had to be delayed so that Cocteau could cut out the “improper passages” that would have “hurt” Stravinsky's “religion’—a word Schaefiner himself put in quotation marks in his letter, as if he weren't sure about it. See Schaefimer to Stravinsky, 8 July 1931; microfilm 102.1, pp. 2657-58, PSS. Robert Craft translates this passage differently, leaving off the quotation marks around the word religion in SPD, 272.

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that he would “use and defend” his artistic talents in Perséphone as best he could, “precisely because they are gifts of God.” Hall was struck in this interview by “the religious conception of art expressed by the supposed ‘objectivist’ | Stravinsky], who sustained what to many seems paradoxical in him: the divine nature of inspiration.”"’

Stravinsky's Orthodox attitude toward composition is incompatible with the image of modernism that has become established among music critics and scholars in the twentieth century."* It also fits uncomfortably within the history of religious music in France between the wars. As Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau have beautifully documented, the revival of religious music in France—or what they call the “néo”—was inextricably linked with Pope Pius X’s proclamation of the motu proprio

“Tra le sollecitudini” in 1903, which established Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony as respectable models for contemporary Christian composers and led to the founding of the Institut d’art sacré de Paris in 1919. The separation of Church and state in France in 1905 had like-

wise provoked a vivid response from French composers, Caron and Duchesneau claim, and inspired the return to religious themes in opera."” The painter Maurice Denis, Vincent d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum, and the

composers André Caplet, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Charles Tournemire, and Olivier Messiaen all rose to prominence as central figures of this new religious culture between the wars.” Yet this specifically French and largely Catholic history relates only obliquely to the émigré

17. Stravinsky, quoted in French in Raymond Hall, “Stravinsky's Perséphone,’ New York Times, 1 October 1933. Hall reports on a recent interview with Stravinsky by an Italian critic, who I suspect is Domenico de Paoli. See de Paoli’s “Neue Werke von Malipiero und Strawinsky,’ Schweizerische Musikzei-

tung und Séingerblatt 20 (15 October 1933): 649-52; and Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 20-21.

18. Numerous scholars have offered explanations for the scholarly neglect of Stravinsky's faith. See Heinrich Lindlar, Igor Strawinskys sakraler Gesang: Geist und Form der Christ-kultischen Kompositionen (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1957), 11-12; and Vlad, “Le Musiche religiose di Strawinsky,” 12-13. Notable research on the subject includes Robert Copeland's “The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky,’ Musical Quarterly 68, no. 4 (October 1982): 363-79; Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religiésem Bekenntnis; Roman Vlad, Strawinsky (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1958); Simone Zacchini, Stravinsky: Caos, nulla, disincanto (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero Padova, 2002); and Alberta Zama, Strawinsky e il sacro

(Florence: Firenze Libri/Atheneum, 1997). 19. Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau, “La Musique et la foi entre les deux guerres: vers un nouvel humanisme,” in Musique, art et religion dans lentre-deux-guerres, ed. Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau (Paris: Symétrie, 2009), 3-5. For historical background, see also Michel Steinmetz’s and Mario Coutu’ articles in ibid., 97-122 and 123-38, respectively.

20. Messiaen’s faith has received tremendous attention in recent years. Sander van Maas’s work provides a particularly interesting foundation for a comparison between Messiaen and Stravinsky. See van Maas, The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough toward the Beyond (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

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Russian Orthodox context of a composer like Stravinsky, who worked outside the French system (although often in France) and independently of the Gregorian revival. Stravinsky's Orthodox faith led him to differ with Gide on several issues particularly pertinent to Perséphone that came to the fore during various stages of Stravinsky's creative process. ‘The first, and most divisive, issue was whether art should be considered a form of divine revelation.

This related for both of them to the question of immanence, which Stravinsky believed in but Gide did not. “Immanence,’ as it was understood in theological and aesthetic debates of the 1930s, refers to a belief

in the transcendent or metaphysical content of all worldly things, including the materials of art.”' It differs from pantheism in that God is not omnipresent but rather revealed in the material of each and every physical object, whether syllables, notes, musical instruments, or bodily gestures. Artists who believed in immanence thought they could intuit the divine spark in material objects and thus experience in the creative act a form of divine revelation. These artists rejected the literalness and empiricist bent of realist, naturalist, or engaged art, which they believed mirrors a mundane and profane world not worthy of the glory of God.

The “modernist crisis” in the Catholic Church and the turn back to Thomism after World War | led intellectuals to return to theories of immanence. They revolted against Descartes’s view of matter as existing only

in and of itself and rejected Cartesian dualism and Newtons scientific revolution—the cornerstones of enlightened modernity. Instead, Christian integrationists argued for the presence of the divine or transcendent in the material itself. With this, they believed not only to have solved the mind/body problem but also responded to the dilemma of making modern, autonomous art more relevant in a rapidly changing world. They did this by erasing the body’s individuality and specificity, however. In their

belief, all bodies become universally transcendent signifiers, like the spirits that moved them. Immanence became a strange bedfellow to modernism in 1930s France.” The disagreement between Stravinsky and Gide over the issue of immanence led them to adopt contradictory approaches to writing for the theater. Around the time of Perséphone, Gide frequently voiced doubt 21. See John Wright Buckham, “Immanence-Transcendence,” Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 8 (9 April 1931): 204-11; and Chin-Tai Kim, “Transcendence and Immanence,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion $5, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 537-49.

22. Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 54-56.

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about the theater, at times (though not consistently) suggesting that he thought of it solely as a representational forum for literary texts.” Stravinsky, by contrast, intended his music for Perséphone to be inherently theat-

rical and was eager to participate in the work's staging. His belief in universal values led him to reject theatrical realism and mimesis in favor of rituals in which mythical characters acted out their faith or performed universal beliefs through archetypal gestures. To disrupt these gestures, deny their archetypal power, or minimize their spiritual potential—as, judging by his commentaries on the typescripts for Perséphone, he thought Gide did—represented a breach of faith he found intolerable. He therefore rejected Gide’s autobiographical and subjective Persephone in favor of an interpretation based more directly on the mythical characters and

situations described in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. He further opposed Gide’s reading of the story by adding the narrator Eumolpus and emphasizing Demeter’s opening symbolic gesture of entrusting Persephone to the nymphs. Stravinsky also differed with Gide over the subject of dogma. Whereas Gide questioned the universal laws of the Church, Stravinsky accepted them a priori. Stravinsky’s belief in dogma influenced the way he composed and, after having passed the initial stage of creating musical ideas through divine intuition, handled compositional rules. Finally, Stravinsky’s faith also led him to an understanding of history that diverged from Gide’s. Whereas Gide had a strong historicist bent as a writer and situated his writing in a European literary tradition extending back to the Middle Ages, Stravinsky joined his Catholic friends in embracing a mythical consciousness of music. Although he situated himself historically within the traditions of Russian and Western music, he treated these traditions with considerable liberty and picked capriciously among them, guided solely by his belief that a divine power assured that whatever

he produced would attain the mythical status of universal and divine musics that preceded his. This same mythical consciousness led him to distrust daily life as a measure of human purpose. Stravinsky’s belief in immanence (that is, art as divine revelation), theater as an immanent art, dogma, and mythical consciousness are revealed through and bear on his process in composing the opening of Perséphone. In his sketchbooks, he collected versification patterns, syllables, and gestures that reveal the importance he ascribed to divine revelation through objects in the material world. His attitude toward Christian dogma determined 23. Jean Claude, André Gide et le thédtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

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how he thereupon negotiated rules in the act of composition. His mythical

(rather than historical) consciousness caused him to shape this nascent music in a kind of vital communion with music of the past that should not be confused with mere stylistic imitation. Finally, in a separate stage of his compositional process, which is not revealed in the sketchbooks, he sought the perfect sound to embody the divine.

Although I believe that these compositional stages all related to Stravinsky’s faith, l agree with Sylvain Caron, who argues that it is risky to attempt to establish the genealogy of a compositional process and assign

to it an ideological, religious, or aesthetic origin. If I have nevertheless made this attempt, I have done so fully aware that this chapter is, in consequence, more speculative than the others.** I focus here, even when

speaking about Stravinsky's Russian influences, exclusively on the French-Catholic and Swiss context for his compositional choices. This emphasis receives its counterbalance when | explore Stravinsky's Russian and Eurasian influences in chapter 5. My goal in separating these cultures

is to demonstrate that the pluralistic context of Renouveau catholique and Eurasianism, French and Swiss Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, was characteristic of Stravinsky's émigré artistic existence in the 1930s and left unmistakable traces in his creative activity.

M™ STRAVINSKY’S CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY:

CINGRIA, MARITAIN, AND SUVCHINSKY In a brilliant study, Valérie Dufour has argued convincingly for the tremendous impact of Stravinsky's social networks on how he conceived of his musical universe, formulated his music philosophy and conducted and envisioned himself as a composer between the wars.” In the early 1930s Stravinsky engaged most intensely with a group of Christian thinkers involved in different aspects of France’s musical, literary, and intellectual life—like-minded believers who dwelt intellectually in the spiritual space in which he felt at home. This group included Nadia Boulanger, CharlesAlbert Cingria, Domenico de Paoli, Arthur Lourié (with whom, however, he broke contact in 1932), Jacques Maritain, and Pyotr Suvchinsky, who together created what Alessandro Piovesan has called—in a different 24. Sylvan Caron, “André Caplet et Jacques Maritain: Une résonance du paradigme médiéval entre la musique et les idées,” in Musique, art et religion dans lentre-deux-guerres, 43, 45.

25. Valérie Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes (1910-1940) (Brussels: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 2006).

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context—a “secular form of spiritual community typical of the modern age.” Stravinsky’s compositional process in Perséphone and the reception

history of the work became inseparable from his dialogue with these Christian friends.

Maritain, Cingria, and Suvchinsky formed a curious intellectual trivium, given their national, aesthetic, social, religious, and political differences. They played completely different roles in French culture: one was an eclectic Swiss writer known for his flights of fancy, another a Russian émigré intellectual deeply involved in the Eurasianist movement, and the third a renowned and prestigious French Catholic philosopher. They thus frequently approached their subject matter from diametrically

opposed philosophical perspectives. Whereas Maritain embraced the Renouveau catholique, neo-Thomism, French literary modernism, and an earnest and self-sacrificing devotion to his faith, Suvchinsky lived the

aristocratic life of an independent intellectual, combining a profound knowledge of Russian philosophical and theological tradition with a deep engagement with European modernism. The Swiss Cingria, by contrast, reveled in a bohemian existence of incessant travel, concerts, literary escapades, eclectic musicological debates, and Nietzscheaninflected polemics. Stravinsky's relationships with these individuals were uneven; this was no four-way conversation, for Suvchinsky, Maritain, and Cingria probably

met in person only occasionally in this period, in spite of the mutual admiration for one another that they sometimes expressed in their writings.*’ Stravinsky composed Perséphone during a period of particularly close exchange with Cingria.* In December 1932, Cingria had sent him

his Pétrarque—an unusual extended essay on the musical origins of 26. Alessandro Piovesan, “Premessa,” in Le Musiche religiose di Igor Strawinsky, 7. Piovesan was Stravinsky's friend. I did not include Nadia Boulanger in this chapter because, although she may have introduced Stravinsky to new repertoire during the year in which he composed Perséphone, and also served him well in editing his work, she did not in her own work shape or reflect Stravinsky's philosophy in close communion with him in that year in the same way as Cingria, Maritain, and Suvchinsky did. 27. Suvchinsky’s correspondence with Cingria between 1938 and 1952 is kept in VM BOB-21983, Département de musique, Bibliothéque nationale de France (hereafter DM-BNF). Suvchinsky mentions having lunch with Cingria, who was so poor he could not even buy stamps, in a letter to Stravinsky, 4 August 1939, in SPRK, vol. 3, 66S. Cingria reviewed Maritain’s work during the period when Stravinsky was composing Perséphone; see Cingra, “De la philosophie chrétienne: Religion et culture par Jacques

Maritain (Desclée de Brouwer),” NRF 22, no. 242 (1 November 1933): 778-82. 28. See Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska, 2002), 192-200; Carr, “Igor Stravinsky et Charles-Albert Cingria,’ in Erudition et liberté: L'Univers de Charles-Albert Cingria, ed. Doris Jakubec and Maryke de Courten, Actes du colloque de l'Université de Lausanne, 16-17 octobre 1997 (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 259-80; Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes, 177-96; and Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 208-25.

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Petrarch’s poetry that inspired Stravinsky both creatively and compositionally. Stravinsky had read it immediately, modeled his Duo concertant on

its aesthetic theory, and praised the book both privately to Cingria and publicly during a concert of the Symphonie de psaumes in Paris on 20 March

1933, just days after meeting with Gide and Rubinstein.” He read Cingrias next book, L'Eau de la dixiéme milliaire, while sketching the first bars

of Perséphone that May.’ And he leaned on Cingria when his battle with Gide heated up that summer, soliciting his collaboration on the aesthetic statement about Perséphone that he published in Excelsior and in the critical debate that took place after the premiere of Perséphone in April 1934.°! A few years later, in Chroniques de ma vie, Stravinsky (or his ghostwriter

Walter Nouvel) commended Cingria’s “rare wisdom” and “remarkable originality” and fondly remembered the clear affinity between Cingria’s “views, leanings, and ideas” and his own.”

Cingria and Suvchinsky were intimate friends, but Stravinsky knew Maritain only from a distance; rather than fraternizing with Maritain, Stravinsky revered him as an intellectual with a tremendous impact on

French culture.*? Ernest Ansermet had first drawn the connection

29. Stravinsky to Cingria, 28 December 1932, in Charles-Albert Cingria, Correspondance avec Igor Strawinsky, ed. Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Lausanne: LAge d’ Homme, 2001), 28; and Cingria to HenryLouis Mermod, 20 March 1933, quoted in ibid., 29; and SSC, vol. 3, 113. 30. Charles-Albert Cingria, L'Eau de la dixiéme milliaire (pages sur Rome) (Lausanne: Henry-Louis Mermod, 1932); reprinted in Oeuvres complétes (Lausanne: LAge d’ Homme, 1981), vol. 4, 9-62. Stravinsky writes to Cingria about this book on 23 May 1933, in Cingria, Correspondance avec Igor Strawinsky, 31-32. 31. Stravinsky to Cingria, 6 August 1933, and Cingria to Stravinsky, 30 April 1934, in Cingria, Cor-

respondance avec Igor Strawinsky, 30-31, 37. In the letter of 30 April 1934 Cingria wrote: “But I had somebody buy Excelsior and I saw the use they made of the little text we established between us”; this letter is translated into English in SSC, vol. 3, 117. 32. Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie | 1935] (Paris: Denoél, 1962), 183; Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiog-

raphy [1936] (New York: Norton, 1962), 170. Stravinsky signed his name next to Cingria’s at the bottom of a typescript of an interview the two of them prepared together for the radio in 1936 with the words “and Igor Stravinsky who loves him” (et Igor Stravinsky qui laime). (See “Ma Causerie avec Ch. Albert Cingria au RADIO-PARIS le 23 mars 1936,” microfilm 118.1, pp. 141-47, PSS.) When asked to write a statement on Cingrias death in 1954, Stravinsky commented that he would need time to formulate his thoughts on “this infinitely dear friend.” If he were a poet he would find the words, he wrote, but since he was not he quotes Dylan Thomas's words on the death of his father: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” See Stravinsky, typescript dated 24 September 1954; microfilm 116.1, p. 412, PSS; reprinted in “Hommage,” NRE 3, no. 27 (1 March 1955): 428. Stravinsky wept when he heard of Cingria’s death; MerC, 135n15S. 33. On the relationship between Stravinsky and Maritain, see Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger, “Poétique musicale,” in The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 81-96; Viviana Cadari, “Il Tempo musicale in Stravinsky: Tratti della

teoria di Maritain come sistema organizzativo dell'attitudine estetica del grande musicista,’ Nuova Rivista musicale italiana 25, no. 2 (April-June 1991): 246-61; Robert Fallon, “Composing Subjectivity: Maritain’s Poetic Knowledge in Stravinsky and Messiaen,” in Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, ed. Douglas A. Ollivant (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 284— 302; and Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure’ und religidsem Bekenntnis, 131—S0.

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between Maritain’s neo-Thomist aesthetics and Stravinsky’s music in a 1921 article.** Yet although Stravinsky may have become acquainted with Maritain’s Art et scholastique at that time, he first met the philosopher only in 1926.°° Stravinsky had witnessed Maritain’s influence on his friends Jean Cocteau and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, his confidant Arthur Lourié, and his colleague Alexis Roland-Manuel. Lourié, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, wrote Stravinsky regularly in the late 1920s about his positive experiences of Maritain, with whom he lived for a period in 1934. In a letter of 24

November 1926, Lourié admitted that he loved Maritain and that he and Maritain were impatiently awaiting Stravinsky’s return to Paris.*° Stravinsky shared with Lourié and Maritain a fondness for the writings of Léon Bloy, whose Lettres a ses filleuls Maritain sent him in 1929.°’ And yet

Stravinsky spent less time with Maritain in these years than with the Orthodox priest Father Nikolai Podosenov, who may have lived with him

and his family in Nice from 1924 to 1929.°° In fact, Stravinsky’s son

34. Ernest Ansermet, “L’Oeuvre d'Igor Stravinsky,’ La Revue musicale 2, no. 9 (1 July 1921): 1-27. 35. See Maritain to Stravinsky, 11 June 1926; microfilm 98.1, pp. 1282-85, PSS. Maritain writes, “How emotional it was for me to meet you. I don’t admire you any more than I did before (that would be impossible), but I feel profoundly attached to you, and, quite simply, I love you.” See also Valérie Dufour, “Néo-gothique et néo-classique: Arthur Lourié et Jacques Maritain: aux origines idéologiques du conflit Stravinski-Schoenberg,” in Musique, art et religion dans lentre-deux-guerres, 41; Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 131-36; and Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 432. Stravinsky later told Craft that he became friends with Maritain in 1929; see EeD, 64. 36. Lourié to Stravinsky, 24 November 1926, in SPRK, vol. 3, 209-10. Lourié served as Stravin-

sky's editor and proofreader, and perhaps as his secretary, before 1930, although the last-named job

remains undocumented. Pyotr Suvchinsky told Heidi Tagliavini in 1978-79 that Lourié acted as Stravinsky's “music assistant, something like the master’s philosophical éminence grise, in the 1920s and 30s.” See Heidi Tagliavini's comments in her translations of Stravinsky’s letters to Suvchinsky; microfilm 277.1, p. 1425, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. Stravinsky trusted Lourié's analytical skills and scholarship and tried to have him hired to write prefaces or give preconcert lectures for his music in the late 1920s. See, for example, Stravinsky to the Wiener Philharmonischer Verlag and Columbia Gramaphone Company, 30 August 1929, and 12 December 1929, respectively; microfilm 98.1, pp. 95-109, PSS. See also Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes, 87-105; Detlev Gojowy, Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus (Laaber: Laaber, 1993), 173-75; Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 185-207;

Katerina Levidou, “The Encounter of Neoclassicism with Eurasianism in Interwar Paris: Stravinsky, Suvchinsky, and Lourié,’ Ph.D. diss., St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, 2008; and Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1996), vol. 2, 1587-91. The friendship between Lourié and Stravinsky collapsed for unknown reasons around 1932. Lourié had no involvement in Perséphone and is therefore not included in this chapter. 37. Maritain to Stravinsky, 8 December 1929; microfilm 98.1, p. 1286, PSS; quoted in Dufour, “Néo-gothique et néo-classique,’ 40, and translated by Craft into English in SPD, 293. See also Lourié to Stravinsky, 21 December 1926 and 8 March 1930, in SPRK, vol. 3, 215, 383. Stravinsky praised Bloy in Werrie, “Igor Strawinsky compositeur chrétien.” 38. See Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 499. There are fourteen letters and one telegram from

Nikolai Podosenov, as well as a draft of a letter from Stravinsky to Podosenov in microfilm 98.1, pp. 2024-73, PSS. In the first of these letters, Podosenov speaks rhapsodically about the beauty of nature

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Soulima saw Maritain as a bit of a charlatan and outsider to the family who drew Stravinsky into his orbit by playing on his vulnerability in relation to new philosophical fashions and intellectuals with social prestige but never unsettled the core of his Orthodox faith.* In the 1930s, Stravinsky developed an extremely close friendship with Pyotr Suvchinsky, a compatriot who shared his background, religion, and deepest cultural beliefs.*° Stravinsky and Suvchinsky came from the same intellectual milieu in Russia and enjoyed the same music and literature. Stravinsky had met Suvchinsky through his brother Guriy in Russia before the revolution and had reconnected with him again in Berlin in 1922 and then again in Paris after Suvchinsky moved there in 1925.%' On 18 July 1932, Stravinsky thanked Suvchinsky “very very much” for remembering

his birthday—the repetition of the intensifying adverb hinting at how

in Bras-d'Asse, southeastern France, where he is staying, and expresses his sorrow that this natural beauty is not in Russia, which he longs for nostalgically. “How long will we wait,’ he asks Stravinsky, before assuring him that they will put their trust in God. On the envelope to this letter, Stravinsky or

somebody else has sketched doodles of an Orthodox priest, probably Podosenov himself. (See Podosenov to Stravinsky, 26 August 1926; microfilm 98.1, pp. 2025-28.) Ina series of letters from 1931 (pp. 2029-43), Podosenov discusses formally with Stravinsky a collection of valuable items Stravinsky

has lent to the Orthodox Church of Nice, and that has not been registered properly. (See “Religious Objects belonging to me: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky” app. a, SSC, vol. 1, 386-88.) Finally in a series of letters from June 1938 to July 1939 (pp. 2051-73), Podosenov expresses his condolences over Stravinsky's loss of his mother and daughter, and tries to help him cope with his grief. I am grateful to Natalia Braginskaya for summarizing the content of these letters for me. Robert Craft noted that the correspondence with Hieromonk Gerasim (Mount Athos), Father Sergei Zradlovsky and his assistant, the Superior Igumen Kozlovsky, and Archbishop Seraphim would be important for exploring Stravinsky's religion; see Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 67.

39. Interview with Soulima Stravinsky, MGZMT 5-563, DC-NYPL. Stravinsky expressed cynicism about Maritain in his letters to Victoria Ocampo. On 10 July 1936 he wrote her that he was going to try and see Maritain “(although his entourage makes me slightly nauseous)” (quoique son entourage me donne des légers nausées). On S November 1936, he wrote Ocampo that he wasn’t surprised that she liked Maritain, whom he had recommended to her. He described Maritain, however, as a man “with superior intelligence but without nature.” “There is still that nihilist side of his youth that I feel in many of his books,” Stravinsky wrote, “in spite of the tremendous value of his work as a Christian philosopher and Thomist (and of his Christian activity too).”’ See Stravinsky to Victoria Ocampo, 10 July 1936 and 5 November 1936; microfilm 98.1, pp. 689 and 702, respectively, PSS; and SPD, 632nS2. 40. See Irina Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky (1892-1985): Etude de l’émergence d'une personnalité, son époque, ses travaux et sa pensée a la lumiére de sa correspondance et de ses écrits,’ PhD diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), 2007-8, 78-88; Elena Pol'dyaeva, ed., V muzykal’nom krugu russkogo zarubezhya: Pis'ma k Petru Suvchinskomu [In the musical circle of Russia abroad: Letters to Pyotr Suvchinsky] (Berlin: Gesellschaft fiir Osteuropa-Férderung, 2005); Alla Bretanitskaya, ed., Pyotr Suvchinsky i ego vremya [Pyotr Suvchinsky and his time] (Moscow: Izdatel’skoe Obyedinenie “Kompozitor,” 1999); and the correspondence between Suvchinsky and Stravinsky in SPRK, vols. 2 and 3. 41. Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 16, 18, 124. Suvchinsky told Heidi Tagliavini that he was close friends with Guriy Stravinsky—‘Stravinsky’s younger and deeply loved | innig geliebten] brother’—and that he often visited the Stravinsky home in St. Petersburg for that reason. He claimed that his first real meeting with Igor Stravinsky was in 1922, however. See Heidi Tagliavini’s notes; microfilm 277.1, p. 1414, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS.

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grateful he was for support he otherwise felt was lacking in his life.” Years later, Suvchinsky remembered that he had “spoken with | Stravinsky] face

to face for hours, days, years, but that “remembrances of him would be completely incongruous with everything that has been and will be written about him, and most important, with what he has said about himself”* Suvchinsky was a scholar of Znamennyi chant, a Eurasianist activist, and an amateur singer. Before the revolution, he had published articles on

plainchant and the leading composer of Russian Church music, Alexander Kastal’sky, in the Russian journal Melos; later he offered his expertise on this repertoire as a contribution to the Eurasianist movement.” In the early 1930s, Suvchinsky studied voice in Paris with Alberti and also

participated in the classes of the dramatic soprano Félia Litvinne.* He wrote several significant articles on Stravinsky, including one in Contrepoints in 1946 that greatly pleased Stravinsky.” In the late 1960s, Stravinsky asked his trusted old friend Suvchinsky to organize his archive

and edit his correspondence, but these plans came to nothing—in Suvchinsky’s opinion because of Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft.”

42. Stravinsky to Suvchinsky, 18 June 1932, in SPRK, vol. 3, 474. In a letter to Stravinsky of 1 December 1938 Suvchinsky likewise wrote: “I am thinking of you all the time and do not leave you in my thoughts. Because you and all yours are the most dear thing to me”; SPRK, vol. 3, 657. 43. Suvchinsky to Gregory Schneerson, 24 July 1970; quoted in Pol'dyaeva, V muzykal’nom krugu russkogo zarubezhya, 446, and in French in Konrad Walterskirchen, “Pétr Suvcinskij (1 892-1985),” in Pierre Souvtchinski, cahiers d‘étude, ed. Eric Humbertclaude (Paris: L- Harmatton, 2005), 109.

44. Svetlana Zvereva, “.. . Iskusstva opredelyayutsya otnosheniem k religii . . .: P. P. Suvchinsky i A.D. Kastal’sky” [. . . Art is defined by its attitude toward religion . . .: P. P. Suvchinsky and A. D. Kastal’sky], in Pyotr Suvchinsky i ego vremya, 169-77; and Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 37-38.

45. See Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 5. Konrad Walterskirchen writes that “having taken up singing lessons again, Suvchinsky occasionally performed in recitals in Paris, calling himself P. Zgheliga, for example, on 5 June 1930 in a concert given by Félia Litvinne’s school of voice, in which he sent an aria from Tosca’; see Walterskirchen, “Pétr Suvcinskij,” 106. 46. See Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Igor Strawinsky,” Contrepoints 2 (February 1946): 19-31; integrated into Un siécle de musique russe (1830-1930) { 1943-47], ed. Frank Langlois (Paris: Actes Sud, 2004), 195-208. André Schaefiner told Suvchinsky in 1946 that Stravinsky had asked him to “tell Suvchinsky that I thoroughly enjoyed his brilliant article in Contrepoints and that Iam absolutely disappointed that I never received the letters you told me about. But I did write him and sent him my good wishes about a

year ago (through the French Embassy in London, as they told me to do), and I never received a response.” Stravinsky, quoted in a letter from Schaeffner to Suvchinsky, 18 September [unclear month] 1946, RES VM DOS-91(70), DM-BNF. 47, Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,” 104-8. In 1967, Stravinsky wrote Suvchinsky and asked him to come to Hollywood to sort out “my old files and papers, and to discover whatever is to be discovered in them.” Stravinsky felt he could entrust the evaluation of these materials “to [Suvchinsky] alone, not only as my intimate friend in whom I can trust and confide, but also as a qualified scholar and authority, possessing the necessary languages and reference knowledge.’ He asked Suvchinsky to organize a volume of letters from French and Russian friends for publication, and offered him 3000 pounds sterling to complete the task in a period of five years starting on 1 November 1968. See Stravinsky to Suvchinsky,

12 and 9 October 1967; microfilm 277.1, pp. 1406 and 1410, respectively (microfilmed in reverse

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Suvchinsky’s ghost lingers over Perséphone. Stravinsky composed the role of Eumolpus for him, and his philosophy and personality shaped the outcome of Stravinsky’s contribution to the work. Suvchinsky was one of the few people, along with Nadia Boulanger and Domenico de Paoli, who had access to Stravinsky's manuscript score, and thus knowledge of the music of Perséphone, before the premiere on 30 April 1934." Suvchinsky’s influence on Perséphone began almost the very moment Stravinsky started composing the work. Suvchinsky sang an excerpt from Perséphone for Rubinstein and Gide in late May 1933, and Stravinsky was pleased with his performance.” Suvchinsky expressed his gratitude in a letter of 23 July 1933, in which he asked Stravinsky cautiously whether

Rubinstein liked his singing, which he thought might have been distasteful to her. “I wouldn't want her to invite me against her will, or that

order), Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. In 1976, Suvchinsky and Francois Lesure formulated their ideas for the establishment of a “Centre d'Etudes Igor Strawinsky.’ The goal of the center would be to gather all musical and literary manuscripts, conduct comparative analyses of them, and to inspire research, conferences and doctoral theses. They tentatively wanted to present the idea to Pierre Boulez and Paul Sacher. (See Pyotr Suvchinsky, “Pour un Centre d’Etudes Igor Strawinsky,” microfilm 277.1, p. 156-57, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS.) Suvchinsky discusses Craft’s and Vera’s role in the collapse of these projects in

a letter to Lawrence Morton, 11 November 1982, RES VM DOS-91(53), DM-BNF. Troubling questions remain, however, as to whether Stravinsky intended to involve Suvchinsky in the establishment and publication of his archive or not. See Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and Amer-

ica, 1934-1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 530-63. 48. Boulanger was helping Soulima Stravinsky to complete the piano-vocal reduction, teaching the piece in her classes at the Ecole Normale de Musique, and preparing a performance of the third tableau to take place in the salon of the Princesse de Polignac on 17 May 1934 and at the Union interalliée on 22 May 1934. She also corrected the proofs for the piano-vocal score when they were ready. Two copies of Boulanger'’s set of proofs of the piano-vocal score are kept in RES VMA 316, DM-BNF. The first includes

Boulanger’s exhaustive corrections. The second includes Boulanger’s minor corrections and additions by Stravinsky, who also added the date 27 April 1934. (See Kimberly Francis, “Mediating Modern Music: Nadia Boulanger Constructs Igor Stravinsky,’ Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010.) De Paoli visited Stravinsky in Voreppe in August 1933 to interview him for the second edition of his monograph on the composer. In the winter of 1934, he corrected the orchestral material and proofs of the “piano part” of the piano-vocal score for Perséphone. (See de Paoli to Stravinsky, 17 and 30 August 1933, and 22 February 1934; microfilm 98.1, pp. 1357-59, 1360-62, and 1373-74 respectively, PSS.) De Paoli wrote several substantial reviews of Perséphone. including “Perséphone,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 28 April 1934; “‘Persefone’ di Strawinsky all’Opéra di Parigi,” L’'Ambrosiana (Milan), 1 May 1934; and “Un importante avvenimento artistico: Perséphone di Strawinsky e i balletti Rubenstein all’ ‘Opéra’ di Parigi,” I! Lavoro, 4 May 1934. After hearing Perséphone on the radio in the fall of 1934, de

Paoli wrote Stravinsky to thank him for having given him the “joy—the greatest joy of my life—of having experienced for several months the intimacy of Perséphone and its author.” See de Paoli to Stravinsky, undated letter [fall 1934]; microfilm 98.1, p. 1383, PSS. On de Paoli’s relationship to Stravinsky, see Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes, 204—S.

49. See Ekaterina to Igor Stravinsky, 6 June 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 516. Ekaterina wrote, “I am glad

that everybody liked what you composed and that it comes out wonderfully in Suvchinsky’s voice, which | imagined would be the case. I can imagine how pleased you were when you told him that he will sing the part. Let's hope that Alberti will let him perform by the time Perséphone is on.’

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there be any masked tensions or dissatisfaction around Perséphone,’ he wrote, adding that he would be grateful if Svetik would send at least two more arias to his summer residence in Switzerland.°° A week later, he wrote to thank him for the “arias,’ which he had received when he visited Svetik. “I sang [the music] all day today,” he wrote. “It’s written wonderfully for the voice. One sings it as if it were | Verdi’s] La Forza del destino. Wonderful!”** In September, Stravinsky wrote Suvchinsky that there was

a mistake in his copy of Eumolpus’s opening aria, and that the B on the syllable “son” of the word “moisson” (R1:2) should be a D. “For God’s sake,” he wrote. “Change it quickly so that you don't learn it incorrectly.’>*

Suvchinsky thanked him for the correction, asked for more music, and then added “I have thoroughly familiarized myself with these arias. They are wonderful.” Stravinsky's intensely satisfying collaboration with Suvchinsky while preparing the role of Eumolpus on Perséphone came to an abrupt end, however, after the social gathering at Ida Rubinstein’s house on 20 October 1933, which I described in the introduction. Suvchinsky concluded

after this performance that he might not be up to the role. He wrote Stravinsky a sad, thoughtful note on 11 November: After returning home yesterday and also this morning—lI thought deeply about our conversation, and have now come to the conclusion that I must refuse Perséphone. I am terribly afraid of causing you damage with the imperfection of my performance. At the same time, I cannot be responsible for perfection in these conditions. Aside from that, I hate to think, and find it unacceptable, that extraneous persons would get involved (in this case I. L. Rubinstein) in my material situation. With great difficulty—and therefore very slowly—I dragged out my vocal training, and I will drag it to the end somehow, without recourse to the aid that, as you yourself said, looks very mutch like blackmail. Finally, 1am convinced that Ida Lvovna doesn't trust me and is not disposed to favor my participation. I understand her very well: why should she take a risk, burden herself with my lessons, when she can invite an experienced singer with a name? To see a “double” for me makes no sense, because whoever sings the role of Eumolpus has to have a trained voice and a vocal pedigree, and not one major artist will want to be my understudy. I do

50. Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 23 July 1933, ibid., 520. 51. Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 31 July 1933, ibid., 521. §2. Stravinsky to Suvchinsky, 3 September 1933, ibid., 522. 53. Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 5 September 1933, ibid., 522.

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not want to be a “double” myself because the expenses to prepare for the role

with Alberti will remain the same, and the number of performances will either diminish, or disappear entirely, and even Alberti will consider this to be unacceptable. You know how it upsets me to have to reject the role, but if I do it now I won't be letting you down. If 1 am ever meant to sing Perséphone, then

it will happen regardless of whether or not I participated in its creation. Maybe you will convey my refusal to Ida L’vovna, as she, even at this point, has not had any negotiations or even any conversations with me personally. In sincere devotion, Yours, P. Suvchinsky.**

Stravinsky responded with a heartfelt letter sprinkled with French expressions, linguistic mixing having become habitual to the correspondence of these Russian émigrés: Dear Pyotr Petrovich, I was very upset by your decision, despite the fact that I was more and more coming to realize the impossibility of resolving the question, though it increasingly involved me, on my own. More than anyone else, I blame myself for treating my ardent and sincere desire to see you sing the role of Eumolpus as a fact that had already happened and for not foreseeing a row of ridiculous obstacles standing in the way. Tant pis pour moi! Mais ce qui est remis nest pas perdu [Too bad for me! But what is delayed is not lost] and you must sing Eumolpus, even if not in the shows of this season, then definitely next season. I wish it. I read your letter to Ida Lvovna and she will write you. You are deeply mistaken when you say that Ida Lvovna “is not disposed to favor your participation” in Perséphone.*>

Chosen by Stravinsky to sing Eumolpus’s part, engaged in the intimate act of rehearsing his part from the earliest manuscript copies of the piece, and linked in heartfelt friendship to the composer, Suvchinsky was well posi-

tioned to clarify for posterity how Stravinsky’s poetics related to his Christian faith in Perséphone. He did so only indirectly, however, in scat-

tered comments made over the years and in the article “La Notion du temps et la musique,’ written in 1939 for La Revue Musicale and used as a

54. Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 11 November 1933, ibid., 524-25.

5S. Stravinsky to Suvchinsky, 12 November 1933, ibid., 525-26. Stravinsky's plans to have Suvchinsky sing the part in London that fall fell through. See Stravinsky, draft of a letter to his London agent, mentioned in SSC vol. 3, 481n6; and in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 54. Suvchinsky sang an excerpt from Perséphone for Prokofiev in 1937; see Prokofiev to Vladimir Mayakovsky, 17 September 1937, quoted in Walterskirchen, “Pétr Suvcinskij,” 106.

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blueprint for chapter 2 of Stravinsky’s Poétique musicale.*° This article rep-

resented the culmination of more than two decades of Suvchinsky’s thoughts on music and time and established him as a respected music critic in France.*’

By associating with Maritain, Cingria, and Suvchinsky and assimilating some of their ideas into his own, Stravinsky had by time of the early 1930s “religious wars’ in France situated himself tentatively in the camp of the

Renouveau catholique and thus against Gide. Stravinsky did not, however, explicitly take sides, and he later remembered his conversations with

Gide on Russian literature and religion with some fondness. “I had returned to the Orthodox Church in 1925 | sic] and was not a likely quarry for proselytizing Protestantism,’ he recalled, “but I have more respect for

|Gide] and his views than for some of the Catholic Pharisees who ridiculed him.”** Nevertheless, Stravinsky socialized with some of Gide’s most

vocal opponents, including Maritain and Cingria, and adopted a musical poetics fundamentally at odds with Gide’s aesthetic beliefs. Maritain had publicly attacked Gide throughout the 1920s and 1930s, condemning him for his sexuality and cult of imagination. Gide had embraced communism out of a naive sense of pity for the oppressed, Maritain argued. As a consequence, Gide had replaced an intimate connection to God and the world in his writing with what Maritain called the “social,” which he judged to be a negative attribute of art.’ Cingria knew Gide primarily through his involvement with La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, to which he contributed about 100 articles over a period of twenty years.’ Connected

56. See Pierre Souvtchinsky, “La Notion du temps et la musique (Réflexions sur la typologie de la création musicale),”’ La Revue musicale 20, no. 191, special edition on Igor Stravinsky (May-June 1939): 70-80 (bound 310-20); reprinted in Souvtchinsky, Un siécle de musique russe, 239-52; and published in Spanish by Victoria Ocampo as “Reflexiones sobre la tipologia de la creaci6n musical: La nocién del tiempo y la musica,’ Sur 9 (April 1939): 88-98. Dufour disputes the legitimacy of the original French publication based on Russian sources in the PSS in Stravinski et ses exégétes, 64-65. Akimova contests Dufour's judgment in “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 124. Given that Suvchinsky sent the original French version to Stravinsky when they were writing Poétique musicale, and that he had it republished in Spanish in Sur in 1940, it appears that he considered it a viable version; see Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, June 1939, in SPRK, vol. 3, 686. 57. Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 124.

58. Stravinsky, quoted in MeC, 177. 59. Jacques Maritain, “La Clef des chants { 1935],’ in Frontiéres de la poésie et autres essais; reprinted in JMOC, vol. 5, 780-82. See also Maritain’s comments in “André Gide et notre temps: Débat [Union de la vérité, 26 January 1935],” in André Gide, Littérature engagée, ed. Yvonne Davet (Paris: Gallimard,

1950), 63-76. 60. Jean Paulhan, rather than Gide, supported Cingria’s participation in this journal. See Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes, 190; Peter Schnyder, “Charles-Albert Cingria entre Paulhan et Gide,” in Erudition et liberté, 299-334; and Cingria to Stravinsky, 6 August 1933, in Cingria, Correspondance avec Igor Strawinsky, 31 (Craft does not include this letter in SSC, vol. 3).

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to Swiss expressions of the Renouveau catholique through his brother Alexandre (a painter involved in the sacred art revival), Cingria had embraced a Christian existentialist perspective on Nietzsche that proved fundamentally at odds with Gide’s pluralistic literary faith.°’ His religious and political differences with Gide led to their becoming embittered ad-

versaries around the time of Perséphone. With Cingria, Maritain, and Suvchinsky whispering in his ear, Stravinsky entered the Perséphone project already subtly biased against Gide and unlikely to be sympathetic to

beliefs that countered his own. By imbuing his compositional process with his friends’ aesthetics, Stravinsky transplanted the religious debate surrounding the Renouveau catholique, or at least the issues motivating that debate, into musical modernism, with conflicting and divisive results.

™ COMPOSING THE OPENING TO PERSEPHONE: EUMOLPUS’S INTROIT AND THE NYMPHS’ CHORUS Stravinsky’s sketchbook for Perséphone and his commentary on Gide’s

typescripts of the libretto reveal much about both his compositional process and how his faith shaped that process.®* Stravinsky began work on

Perséphone by going carefully through Gide’s undated third typescript (draft 1c), crossing out lines and adding others, critiquing (and often rejecting) many of Gide’s indications for music and stage action, and sketching preliminary musical ideas. By the time he started actually composing the music, he had parsed Gide’s text into three distinct types of music: Eumolpus’s solo, the nymphs’ choruses, and Persephones brief moment of melodrama. He began with preliminary sketches for Eumolpus's solo and the nymphs’ choruses:

1. Eumolpus’s narration (opening to R7), sketchbook pages 4-9, $ May 1933.

2. Nymphs’ first chorus (“Reste avec nous,” begins R7), sketchbook page 10, 9 May 1933.

3. Nymphs’ second chorus (“Ivresse matinale,’ begins R23), sketchbook pages 18-19 and 22, undated.°° 61. See Pierre-Marie Joris, “Le Gai Savoir de Charles-Albert Cingria: Une poétique de la joie,” in Erudition et liberté, 95-124. 62. Stravinsky's sketchbook is in private possession in Switzerland. Portions of it are reproduced in facsimile in Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks. 63. See ibid., 172-80.

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Stravinsky seems to have been unaware of the 1910 chanson that Gide used as the foundation for Persephone’s monologue and the nymphs’ sec-

ond chorus (R15:3-16:2; R22:5-32); in any case he had no qualms about parsing the lines of this portion of the text differently from the way Gide had laid them out. He gave particular attention to the supplements

Gide had sent him subsequent to submitting the original typescripts, which included Eumolpus’s introit and two additional verses (attached as

paste-ons) for the nymphs’ first chorus. Stravinsky composed Eumolpus’s part and the choruses separately, as if he considered them to be autonomous units, thereby fulfilling his promise to Gide to erect next to his text for Perséphone an “independent musical organism” constructed according to his own implicit rules and laws. Gide had sent Stravinsky the lines for Eumolpus’s introit on an extra piece of paper as an “addition” to his libretto in late March (as we saw in chapter 1).°° When Stravinsky started composition of Perséphone by setting those lines first, he was starting with the portion of the text that Gide

had thought of last. Stravinsky copied out Gide'’s text for the introit on pages 4 and 5 of his sketchbook, spreading the words widely across the page and ignoring Gide’s invitation to repeat bracketed lines ad libitum. He copied out all three instances of Eumolpus’s invoking Homer, which occur at the opening to each tableau (R1:1, R70:3, and R197:3). He appears to have been trying to grasp their collective meaning (although there is no evidence that Gide had necessarily thought of them as a collective statement) and create a melody suitable to all three; initially he did not, however, set the words of the second and third invocations that he had copied out here. His approach not only demonstrates his allegiance to the aesthetic of the strophic lied and his belief that music should

develop its internal logic independently of words but also hints at his already having a large-scale formal and harmonic vision for the work.

Stravinsky's idiosyncratic musical scansions of Gide’s text in both

draft 1c and in his sketchbook reflect his overriding interest in the rhythmic and aural qualities of words, even if that meant undermining the meaning or expressive content of those words. From the start, his

64. Although Craft published most of Gide's draft 1c in SSC, vol. 3, he neglected to reproduce these loose pages, which are kept in microfilm 226.1, pp. 959 (Eumolpus'’s introit), 960 (paste-on no. 1), and 961 (paste-on no. 2), PSS. 6S. See Gide to Stravinsky, 28 March 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 31-32; and SSC, vol.

‘ ae For a facsimile of this page of the sketchbook, see Carr, Multiple Masks, 172.

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interest in syllables led him to disregard rules of French versification and pronunciation. In his sketchbook he gives each cut-up syllable of Gide’s text an individual pitch and duration and creates melodies to match individual lines of verse; for some lines he indicates cadential chords.®’ He took pains to give a note to each syllable, indicating that the sound or declamation of each elicited a distinct, immediate musical response from him. I was struck when I saw how precisely Stravinsky attached pitches and rhythms to the words written out on the page—a practice that gives his notation a resemblance to the neumes of liturgical calligraphy. Ignoring the requirements of the French octosyllable, Stravinsky even gave the word ‘terre’ in the eighth line its own five-note ornament or neume, thereby forcing the declamation of the silent e. As set by Stravinsky, Gide’s French words take on an alienated and archaic

appearance, somewhat akin to the Latin that Stravinsky preferred for his sacred works. He must have liked what he had created, for his preliminary sketches correspond closely to the published edition of the score.” Once Stravinsky had established his rudimentary rhythms and melodies, he let his musical imagination take flight. He shaped the pitches into coherent melodic lines with clear phrasing and direction, and in the first line he set (Qui couvres de moissons la terre, RO:4—-R1:3) he organized

the individual pitches harmonically to emphasize the tonic E and its dominant B. He added an A-sharp and C-sharp in Eumolpus’s third line of text ( Toi dispensatrice du blé, R1:4-2:1) to give it motion toward D, but then

countered that with a C-natural in the next line. He also jotted down a rudimentary triad on F with an added fourth at the end of the fifth line of text (Devant tout ce peuple assemblé, R2:4—R3:1), indicating that already at

this early stage he had begun to envision a harmonic direction and pitch content for this section of the piece. He retains this chord in the final score at R3:1.° Elaborations of the melodic material on pages 6 and 7 of his sketchbook demonstrate that he almost instantly began compositionally developing his first ideas.” The final score shows further elaboration of the initial compositional skeleton, including the introduction of a horn chorus (R1:1-R2:3).

67. As Carr has noted, these cadences are not always identical with the final cadences and harmony of the published score; see ibid., 171. 68. Ibid., 170-77; see also ibid., 205-11, musical examples 4.7, 1-9; 4.8; 4.9. 69. See ibid., 206, example 4.7(3). 70. See Carr’s remarks in ibid., 173.

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In his sketches, Stravinsky’s rhythmic notations for Eumolpus’s introit

and the nymphs’ choruses appear at odds with the texts’ poetic meter and accent and hint at his attempt to overlap rhythms reflecting indepen-

dent stage action onto sung melodies. He later remembered that the music “was composed and aimed to a fixed plan of stage action, though he could not remember what that was. It is easy to imagine why he might have chosen to forget: as he could not have drawn inspiration from the stage action designed by the choreographer, Kurt Jooss (who had not yet arrived on the scene), he must have written the music to reflect actions described in Gide’s libretto. Despite his resistance to the content and wording of Gide’s stage directions, the actions laid out in the libretto were so important to Stravinsky's conceiving the music for the work that he later remembered Perséphone not as a melodrama but as a “masque” or “dance-pantomime.””’ But Stravinsky and Gide disagreed about how music should be used to convey stage action. Gide had provided stage directions that indicate that

he wanted stage action to take place in between vocal numbers, in set pieces, but Stravinsky was determined that the singing and stage action should occur together but remain distinct. Stravinsky had articulated this vision of the mise-en-scéne during his first meeting with Gide in Wies-

baden, when he had encouraged Gide to imagine a chorus dancing or trained dancers singing. Gide had informed him that Rubinstein said it was “impossible to have choristers dance or dancers sing, but Stravinsky remained attached to the theatrical vision of the two activities occurring simultaneously.” Years later, he still imagined the simultaneity of movement and song or speech. He thought that for the part of Persephone, for example, “the mime should not speak, the speaker should not mime, and the part should be shared by two performers. I say this not only because few mimes, or dancers, are trained speakers as well... but also, and principally, because the division of labor allows greater freedom for mimetic

movement.” This became the greatest point of contention between Stravinsky and Gide, as the composer's extensive commentary on the stage directions in Gide's third draft typescript of Perséphone reveals. One of the first things Stravinsky did when he started to compose was establish a key opening gesture—the theatrical act that was to ground his

71. D&D, 36; reprinted in Me&C, 177. 72. Gide to Stravinsky, 8 February 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 26; and SSC, vol. 3,

i 73. D&D, 36-37; reprinted in MeC, 178.

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music and give it dramatic meaning. There is no doubt that Demeter was the character that interested him most in the opening of Perséphone; she ruled over agriculture and the Eleusinian mysteries, and she set the drama in motion by putting Persephone in danger’s way. He honed in on Gide's stage indication that “Demeter, warned by Mercury who guides her, says good-bye to Persephone and entrusts her to the nymphs.’”* He gave no indication that he cared that this gesture does not appear in the original Homeric text. The authenticity of Gide's borrowings from Homer mattered far less to him than the dramatic effectiveness of a gesture he himself may well have urged Gide to emphasize: Demeter’s gesture gives a reason

and cause for her later grief (she had tried to protect her daughter and failed). It also establishes her authority in the Eleusinian rite. At one point

in the collaboration, Stravinsky even suggested that Demeter should receive a dancing part at the opening of the piece—a privilege otherwise reserved in his theatrical vision only for Persephone and (possibly) Mer-

cury.” At the premiere, Raymond Schwab noticed immediately that Stravinsky's music favored Demeter and that she functioned like a mater dolorosa figure.”” More than thirty years later—though by then he had forgotten both Gide’s mention and Nathalie Krassovska’ss performance of it and spoke about it as his own idea— Stravinsky still remembered how important Demeter’s presence was at this moment was to the dramatic unfolding of Perséphone.’’ Yet Demeter’s presence on stage was so brief and limited—she received neither a speaking nor a singing part—that it remained invisible to listeners who heard Perséphone in concert or came to know it from studying the score. Stravinsky responded compositionally to Gide’s stage directions only when these were present in direct utterances of singing characters in the text. Whenever Gide gave a character spoken lines that referred to a gesture made by Demeter, Stravinsky made that gesture present to the audience and immanent to the drama in a way that he did not do with Gide’s

74. Gide had first added this stage direction to his libretto in version la; microfilm 226.1, p. 937, PSS. Lindicated his original formulation of this stage direction in chapter 1. 75. Stravinsky to Copeau, 6 October 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 39. 76. Raymond Schwab, “Opéra: Perséphone par André Gide et Stravinsky,” =1934=, 9 May 1934. 77. Stravinsky, D&D, 37; reprinted (but modified) in MerC, 178. “Pluto and Mercury did not appear in the original production, but they should appear, I think, and Tryptolemus [sic] and Demeter as well, because any embodiment will help to dramatize Gide’s undramatic narrative,” Stravinsky tells Craft in D&D. In MeéC Craft changed “Gide’s undramatic narrative” to “the static narrative.” Gide had not only introduced all these characters in his stage directions but also insisted on their theatrical presence on stage.

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straightforward stage directions. Stravinsky appreciated the difference between lines emanating from characters he could identify with and orders from the suspect writer/outsider, and it is clear that he favored the material reality of dialogue in the libretto over extrinsic commentary. He completely ignored Gide's carefully worded stage direction but responded

creatively to the moment when Eumolpus in his introit describes in the third person how Demeter had entrusted Persephone to the nymphs: “It is to the nymphs that you entrusted her” (C est aux Nymphes que tu confies, R3:2-4). In front of this line on page 4 of his sketchbook Stravinsky added

a striking three-two tempo marking, followed by an eighth-note rest, which adds syncopation to what had up to that point been a succession of solemn neumes. It is as if the mention of Demeter’s action had activated his motoric musical imagination and incited his compositional response

in the form of rudimentary rhythm and meter. The faint rhythmic jolt Stravinsky gives to this passage is evidence of his visceral response to Eumolpus’s mention of Demeter’s handing Persephone over to the nymphs and of his desire to integrate this gesture directly into Eumolpus's musical line rather than separating it out into an independent instrumental transition as Gide had suggested. He aims to superimpose the rhythm of Demeter’s action directly onto Eumolpus’s musically distinct melodic line, thereby creating a clash between the active rhythmic drive associated with Demeter and Eumolpus’s solemn melodic mood.

On pages 8 and 9 of his sketchbook Stravinsky elaborated a more dynamic musical response to the same line of verse by composing fast descending scales in thirds and triplet eighth notes against a dramatic rising bass line.” He tested this rhythmic pattern out on the line “And was enjoying the flowers in the fields when she was ravished and taken from you’ (Et se plait aux fleurs des prairies / Comment elle te fut ravie, RS:1—-R6:1)

before applying it to “It is to the nymphs that you entrusted her” (C est aux Nymphes que tu confies, R3:2-4), thereby implying that the act of entrusting Persephone to the nymphs and her ravishment were related and insep-

arable. The two events together motivated a “movement” or “social relation’ that Stravinsky realized in full in the musical gestures he gives the nymphs in their first chorus, “Stay with us” (Reste avec nous, R7). The two events also constituted a particularly clear case of social gesture: a mother hands over her daughter to somebody who will not protect her properly— cause enough for agitated music. In Stravinsky's setting Eumolpus’s words

78. A facsimile of this page is reproduced in Carr, Multiple Masks, 175.

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are allowed to recede behind the more important sonic reenactment of Demeter’s gesture of entrusting Persephone to the nymphs.

Stravinsky's practice of using independent versification patterns in combination with rhythmic gestures inspired by stage action is unmistakable in his sketches for the nymphs’ first chorus, “Stay with us” (Reste avec nous, R7:1-R15:3 and R16:3-R22:6, interrupted by Persephone's melodrama). Following the practice established for Eumolpus’s introit, Stravinsky carefully wrote out Gide’s text for this chorus across pages 10

and 11 of his sketchbook, leaving enough room between lines to respond musically to the material.”” As noted, Gide had not included this complete text in draft 1c but sent it to Stravinsky separately as two béquets, or “paste-on’ corrections. His original typescript had included a more rudimentary nymphs’ chorus and Persephone’s melodramatic part, which he had borrowed from a chanson he had written in 1910, as we saw in chapter 1. Before he wrote the new lines for the nymphs’ chorus, Gide had envisioned them singing a relatively free, repetitive text. To this end, he had given Stravinsky the option of repeating the first line of their first verse two or three times or ad libitum, and the first line of their second verse twice, three times, or ad libitum. Clearly he thought

that Stravinsky would construct his music on formal principles that might require him to repeat text at will. He could not know that Stravinsky would indeed in part follow his advice here (R7:1-R9:3) but also subsequently hone in on versification patterns and rhythmic gestures, and that he would repeat these regardless of Gide’s French text. This is what the original text of the nymphs’ chorus looked like: Le CHOEUR DES NYMPHES: (chanté) “Reste avec nous, Princesse Perséphone;” (bis ou ter.) (ad libitum) “Ta mére Deméter [sic], reine du bel été,” “T’a confiée a nous” (quelques vers seront ajoutés, dont ce dernier: “Chant du premier

matin du monde”) (voir bequet no. 1) [Gide adds this comment by hand] Perséphone, encore assise sans doute, et comme a demi-endormie:

79. A facsimile of these pages is reproduced in Carr, Multiple Masks, 176.

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PERSEPHONE: (parlé) “La brise vagabonde” “a caressé les fleurs”

Le choeur des Nymphes s empresse autour de Perséphone que se léve lentement. LE CHOEUR DES NYMPHES: (chanté) “Viens! Joue avec nous, Perséphone ...” (bis ou ter, ad libitum, sera Voir bequet | Gide adds this comment by hand] [The NYMPHS’ CHORUS: / (sung) / Stay with us, Princess Persephone (two or three times) (ad libitum) / Your mother, Demeter, queen of beautiful summer / Entrusted you to us / (A few lines will be added, including this last one “Song of the world’s first morning” (See paste-on no. 1) / Persephone, no doubt still seated, and as if half asleep / PERSEPHONE: / (spoken) / The wandering breeze / has caressed the flowers / The nymphs’ chorus gathers around Persephone who slowly rises / THE NYMPHS’ CHORUS /(sung) / “Come! Play with us, Persephone/ (twice, three times, or ad libitum, withmaybebeangmented) / See paste-on. |*°

Toward the end of March, Gide had sent Stravinsky separate sheets with the paste-ons for this passage; these two verses were in more formal alexandrines and octosyllables: Paste-on 1 [integrated into the final libretto matching the score at R10: 4A—-R15:3 |

“; parmi les oiseaux et les fleurs,’ “Les baisirs des ruisseaux, les caresses de lair; ” “Vois le soleil qui rit sur onde!” “Reste avec nous dans la félicité”

“C’est le premier matin du monde’. | Among the birds and the flowers / ‘The rivers’ kisses, the air’s caresses / See the sun laughing on the wave / Stay with us in happiness / It is the world’s first morning. |

80. See microfilm 226.1, p. 952, PSS (published as example 1, SSC, vol. 3, 490).

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Paste-on 2 [integrated into the final libretto matching the score at R17:

3-R22:6] “La brise a caressé les fleurs,” “C’est le premier matin du monde;”

“Tout est joyeux comme nos coeurs;” “Tout rit sur la terre et sur onde.’ “Viens! Joue avec nous, Perséphone;” “La brise a caressé les fleurs.’

|The breeze has caressed the flowers / It is the world’s first morning / Everything is as happy as our hearts / Everything laughs on land and water / Come! Play with us Persephone / The breeze has caressed the flowers. |*'

When Stravinsky began composing this section of Gide’s text on 9 May 1933, he copied out Gide’s original lines from draft 1c on pages 10 and 11 of his sketchbook, and added the two paste-ons exactly where Gide said he should. As he had done with Eumolpus'’s introit, he copied out the two

verses of the chorus together (which Gide had written out on two separate paste-ons), ignoring Persephone’s spoken disruption; presumably he did this to get a sense of the nymphs’ choral whole. By composing the nymphs’ chorus as a coherent musical entity, he gave it more importance than Gide had, and, even more significantly, he diminished the centrality of Persephone’s melodramatic solo. Gide had added a stage action here— the nymphs are now to be seen “gathering around Persephone, who slowly rises’ —and Stravinsky seems to have recognized that this called for a conclusive and holistic gesture. Stravinsky had an instant compositional reaction to the nymphs’ mention of Demeter's act of entrusting Persephone to them in the second line

of their chorus: “Your mother Demeter, queen of beautiful summer / Entrusted you to us” (Ta mére Déméter, reine du bel été / Ta confiée a nous,”

R9:3-R10:4). He jotted a rhythmic and melodic response to “Ta mére” right onto the first page of Gide’s typescript and then on page 10 in his sketchbook animated the words with a syncopated, repetitive rhythm that disregarded the rules of French versification. The rudimentary vocal harmonies for this line conflict sharply with the G-G-sharp—A of the bass (R10:2—4), giving the passage a slightly “off,” contrary, and jolting character. The resemblance between this line and “It is to the nymphs that you

81. These paste-on additions to the libretto are kept in microfilm 226.1, pp. 960-61, PSS.

Stravinsky's Dogma m 143 Musical Example 2.1: (1) Stravinsky’s rhythmic outline for this line on draft 1c of Gide’s libretto [sic]; (2) the rhythm in three-quarter time in the final score (R9:3-11); and (3) the correct French versification. Gianfranco Vinay, “Abbozzi della discordia: Gide, Stravinsky e Perséphone,’ in Musica se extendit ad omnia: Studi in onore di Alberto Basso in occasione del suo 750 compleanno, ed. Rosy Moffa, Sabrina Saccomani, and

Alberto Basso (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 2007), 851-52.

didd dd I d HAD SD 1) ta mé-re Dé-mé-ter, rei - me du bel & - té

J dbhdbddds J DADS. 2) Ta mé-re Dé-mé-ter, rei - ne du bel é€ - ¢té

Baaméee reaDéNae errei-ineSeal oeté mé-ter/ du bel éentrusted” (C est aux Nymphes que tu confies) from Eumolpus’s introit (on p. 4 of the sketchbook) must have been intentional, for he syncopated the

beginning of both lines with an eighth-note rest. As Gianfranco Vinay’s careful analysis shows, Stravinsky did not compose a random rhythm for the melodic line here; rather, he imposed on Gide’s poetic line a versification pattern that he subsequently used in multiple variations, creating a gestic rhythm that contradicted the solemn pastoral beauty of the scene (see musical example 2.1).** This tiny moment in the music alone gives evidence of a second level of Stravinsky's gestural process: he not only reacted intuitively to the mention of stage actions while composing characteristic rhythms for his melodic lines but also envisioned objective versification patterns to give his music overall gestic shape or groove. At the bottom of page 10 of his sketchbook Stravinsky jotted what look like random ideas for both the nymphs’ chorus and Persephone'’s solo, which he had temporarily held off transcribing. ‘hese sketches relate only obliquely to the solemn neumatic setting of the nymphs’ complete chorus above, but one sketch stands out, an ostinato on the syncopated pitches B-D against a three-quarter meter with shifting accents. This ostinato would subsequently rhythmically define the nymphs’ chorus and Persephone's first solo. Stravinsky scribbled only a rudiment of the idea here but bracketed it with a bold “repeat” (bis), as if to remind himself that it

would need to be repeated. In the published score, this fundamental 82. See also Gianfranco Vinay, “La Tetralogia greca,’ in Stravinsky neoclassico: L’Invenzione della memoria nel ‘900 musicale (Venice: Marsilio, 1987), 115-20.

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rhythmic gesture appears in the first violins and harps (at R7:1), where it

embodies the stage action of the nymphs moving toward Persephone while their melody conveys the impression of plainchant. The counterintuitive yet attractive textual rhythm in the vocal line here creates a jazzy

counterpoint to the syncopated, chorus-girl rhythms in the violins and harps—a combination of gesture, sound, and syllables resembling a musical Merzbau.

Stravinsky's decision to superimpose choreographic movement on closed vocal numbers resulted in a compositional approach that in many respects resembled the gestic music of Kurt Weill, whose recent success with Das kleine Mahagonny in Paris had caught the attention of everybody in Stravinsky’s circle.*’ Weill, after hearing a radio broadcast of Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann in 1926, had subsequently developed the idea of musical gestus in collaboration, and dispute, with Brecht.** Gestus in part represents his response to the question of how to stage musical theater on the airwaves. Weill thought that music could provide a sonic equivalent

for missing stage action by realizing the “idea” of it through emphatic rhythmic gestures. Music “fix[ed] a basic gestus that [could] be represented scenically, yet ha|d] to be shaped convincingly enough purely as music (without the aid of the stage) in order for the listener to gain a good

impression of the person speaking to him,” he theorized.* In Brecht’s terms, music exteriorized the social relation or attitude expressed through the text or through actors’ movements on stage.

83. Das kleine Mahagonny was performed at the Salle Gaveau on 11 December 1932. Suvchinsky wrote but did not publish a review of the piece, in which he offered a rare Marxist analysis of Weill’s music in general (with no specific examples). His typed essay does not seem to be in his voice. He argues that popular dances and jazz “exteriorize” human affect, and that Weill should be complimented for having succeeded in “transposing” into music through popular genres entirely new psychological states that mirror the times, including eroticism, indignation, and pathos-filled anxiety. He compares Weill’s use of popular music to Stravinsky’s in Mavra, and concludes that whereas Stravinsky integrated the popular into his own style, Weill loses himself within it. See “Notes sur une fin de saison 1. Kurt Weill |1932],” unpublished typescript; microfilm 103.1, pp. 2154-58. PSS. André Schaeffner wrote a very positive review of Weill in “La Musique: Kurt Weill,” Beaux-arts 3 (30 December 1932), copy in micro-

film 102.1, p. 2672, PSS. Margaret Severn recalls that Weill served as the rehearsal pianist during rehearsals for Perséphone in “Dancing with Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein,’ 356-57. She is probably confusing him with Jooss's Jewish-German composer accompanist, Fritz Cohen. 84. Kurt Weill, “Brechts Mann ist Mann als Sendespiel,” Der deutsche Rundfunk S, nos. 11 and 13 (13 and 27 March 1927): 736, 879-80; reprinted in Kurt Weill, Musik und musikalisches Theater: Gesammelte Schriften mit einer Auswahl von Gesprdchen und Interviews, ed. Jiirgen Schebera and Stephen Hinton with Elmar Juchem (Mainz: Schott, 2000), 348-50. 85. Kurt Weill, “Notiz zum Berliner Requiem,’ Der deutsche Rundfunk 7, no. 20 (17 May 1929): 613; reprinted in Weill, Musik und musikalisches Theater, 409.

Stravinsky's Dogma m 145

Stravinsky's gestic music resembles Weill’s in its rejection of “musical

realism” or programmatic attempts to imitate or create an analogy in music for the action on stage. As he explained years later to RolandManuel, when asked about his music based on stage action: Music does not express an action, but rather needs to give it a bit of garlic, as one says that a widow sheds her black dress for blondes [or new colors and

suitors]. There is no convention in that: a situation unwinds in this music instead of in another music that works less well. The music is not worth more

if this type of analogy works. It has to be precious in and of itself. We don't listen to the analogy, we listen to the music. I really do want these relations to exist but I also want to disentangle myself within them. We don't measure the gold prize by what it’s used for, but rather by its content. Output, utilitarian relationships. One has to profit from the thing.*°

Rather than underscore stage action with appropriate effects and an expressive soundtrack, Stravinsky let the action “unwind” in the music itself. Such a theatrically oriented compositional approach flew flagrantly in the face of Gide's notion of musical expression.

™ SPLENDOR FORMAE, OR THE DIVINE REVELATION OF SYLLABLES In his sketches for Eumolpus’s introit and the nymphs’ first chorus, Stravinsky conveyed Demeter’s archetypal gestural movement of entrusting Persephone to the nymphs through pointed rhythmic counterpoint. This musical setting distorted Gide’s text and rendered his carefully chosen words stilted, occasionally comical, and at times even incomprehensible. In his introit, Eamolpus sometimes sounded as if he were speaking

a foreign language he had not mastered; at other times he delivers his plainchant in a jazzy rhythm that contradicts its melodic earnestness— curious effects for Stravinsky to want a solemn priest to convey. When

86. See “{ Alexis] Roland-Manuels Notizbuch (Ms. von Roland-Manuel, 1938-1939),” MF 257.1, “Dossier Roland-Manuel,’ pp. 190-95, PSS; published in facsimile in app. 1 in Igor Stravinsky, Poétique musicale sous forme de six lecons, ed. Myriam Soumagnac (Paris: Harmonique/Flammarion, 2000), n.p. Stravinsky had started to tell journalists that the music in his ballets was valuable in itself independent of the stage action in 1921, when Le Sacre was performed in concert and also with Leonid Massine’s new choreography. See “Interview with Stravinsky: His Aims and Methods. Music and its ‘Subjects’: “The Rite’ and Its Two Ballets (From a Special Correspondent),” Observer, 3 July 1921, and Guy Davenel, “Un grand musician a Anvers: Ce que nous dit Igor Stravinsky,’ Le Matin (Anvers), 10 January 1924.

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Suvchinsky first began practicing this music, he wrote his friend, “I must say that the music completely kills the word. It is that much higher and more concrete. No need, of course, to say anything to André Gide.’*’ Blindness toward the subject of faith has led to a distorted academic

reception of the compositional decisions in evidence here. Stravinsky himself led his listeners down the wrong path in the commentary on Per-

séphone that he cowrote with Cingria for the journal Excelsior, which appeared on 29 April 1934 (the eve of Perséphone’s premiere) and again in a corrected version on 1 May. In this article, which Stravinsky may have written to preempt what he expected would be negative criticisms of his work, Stravinsky (or Cingria) stated that he had deliberately set syllables

instead of words in Perséphone as a means of evading the “discursive” aspect of Gide’s text. It is important to note that Stravinsky singles out not only syllables but also what he calls “action’—the social action he recognized in Gide’s text and realized in gestic music: Since they have asked me to write about my music for Perséphone, I must draw the public’s attention to a word that embodies an entire program: syllable. This has been my primary preoccupation. In music, in which time and pitch are regulated, in contrast to the confused

sound in nature, there is always the rhythm of the syllable. Between the syllable and the utterly general meaning—the atmosphere that bathes the work—there is the word which channels scattered thought and enables discursive meaning. But the word, rather than helping the musician, is a cumbersome intermediary. [ wanted for Perséphone only syllables, beautiful, strong syllables, and then an action.

Given this wish, I congratulate myself on having met Gide, whose text, which is highly poetic yet free of outbursts, should have furnished me with an excellent syllabic structure.**

Stravinsky (or Craft) contributed further to the misinterpretation of Stravinsky's compositional practice in later discussions of the piece. “The musical accentuation of the text |of Perséphone| surprised and displeased | Gide],” Stravinsky apparently told Craft in 1960, “though he had been

87. Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 5 September 1933, in SPRK, 522.

88. “Ce que les 4 compositeurs des ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein disent de leurs propres oeuvres”; reprinted in French (in the form of variants to the article of 1 May) in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 580.

Stravinsky's Dogma m 147

warned in advance that I would stretch and stress and otherwise ‘treat’ French as I had Russian and though he understood my ideal texts to be syllable poems, the haiku of Bash6 and Buson, for example, in which the words do not impose strong tonic accentuation of their own.’*” Scholars have tended to follow Stravinsky's and Craft's words and dwell on the conflict that ensued between Gide and Stravinsky over Stravinsky's

errors in French pronunciation and versification. In doing so, scholars have oriented listeners to understand Perséphone in terms of the aesthetic question of text setting. Pulled out of context in an appendix to Eric White's masterful study of Stravinsky's works in 1966, the commentary on Perséphone from Excelsior served for decades as evidence of Stravinsky’s linguistic priorities and antiexpressive aesthetic creed, both of which mask his metaphysical priorities and underlying religious purpose. Richard Taruskin later persuasively argued that Stravinsky’s practice of setting syllables derived from Russian folk music and became a trademark of his

style during the war, when he set numerous Russian songs, including Pribautki, Quatre chants russes, and Tri pesenki.” This led Taruskin, like his predecessors, to trust that Perséphone was all about syllables and to use the Excelsior manifesto to prove Stravinsky's abstract attachment to language. “To fail to take this aspect of his art | Stravinsky’s approach to text setting | seriously is to fail at a very basic level to understand it,’ Taruskin warned.”* “In brief, the issue was syllables,’ Michael Steinberg concluded about Perséphone in 2005.”

Stravinsky's compositional process appears in a new light if we consider it from the perspective of Maritain’s Art et scholastique (1927), Cingria’s Pétrarque (1932), and Suvchinsky’s article “La Notion du temps et la musique” (1939). My speculative analysis of the relationship between these writings and Stravinsky’s compositional process builds on Taruskin’s

work and is premised, like his, on an acknowledgment of the Russian roots of Stravinsky's long-term investment in setting texts against the grain. It was Stravinsky's attraction to Russian Orthodox Church music, after all, that made him empathetic to Maritain and his aesthetics. That

89. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries | 1960] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 150. This section of the 1960/1982 Memories and Commentaries is not reprinted in MeC, which consists of an amalgamation of several previous books of interviews edited by Robert Craft. It think it is unlikely that Stravinsky knew any haiku poetry in 1934. 90. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 2, 1198-236.

91. Ibid, 1235. 92. Michael Steinberg, Choral Masterworks (New York: Oxford, 2005), 262.

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said, I believe that Stravinsky's approach to text-setting is more tied to religious belief than has hitherto been recognized. Maritain’s poetics departed from the Aristotelian premise that art is not of the imagination or based on the subjective expression of emotions but belongs rather to the “practical order” of intelligence that uses knowledge in the service of a work or action. Maritain further divided the practical order into two domains: “acting” and “making,” the former having as its goal the good of human life, or morality, and the latter being a “productive action,’ considered not in relation to how freedom is used in the undertaking of an action but rather purely “in regard to the thing produced’ — that is, the work is considered in and of itself.”’ The creative process begins when artists intuit beauty in the physical world. This fills their souls with joy and opens them up to the “Other,’ allowing “creative ideas” to arise

spontaneously in their spirit and giving them insight into the rules and techniques they need to form art. The work of art exists only when the artist realizes in the physical world the unspoken ideas, or verbus cordis (to

speak with Augustine), that have entered his soul during the process of creation. From the moment of inception to final production, art thus

retains its intimate connection to material reality and, through it, to humanity.

Maritain based his aesthetics on the principle of “sensible intuition” (intuition sensible), which refers to the capacity of the intellect to capture physical beauty through the senses alone—‘the sensible object intuitively grasped.””* This means that for Maritain, practical making of art was intrinsically linked to the intuitive perception of beauty in the material

world, which he equated with the highest intelligibility, the divine. Although influenced by Henri Bergson in his formulation of this concept, Maritain countered his former teacher by arguing that intuition is not sep-

arate from the intellect but rather rooted in it; with this philosophical move, Maritain blurred sensual and cognitive, or body/mind, experience in a way that remained ambiguous and that he insufficiently theorized.”

93. Jacques Maritain, Art et scolastique [1920], in JMOC, 623-25; translated by Joseph W. Evans as Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), 7-9. 94. The French word sensible implies “through the senses.” Joseph W. Evans translates it as “sensible,” based on the standard translation of Kant’s “sensible intuition” (Anschauung). Although the adjective sensible has connotations in English that make it less than adequate in communicating the idea of “intuition through the senses,’ | adopt it, nevertheless, because of its widespread use in Anglo-American philosophy. 95. See Bergson, “Introduction a la métaphysique [1903],” in Oeuvres, ed. André Robinet, introduction by Henri Gouhier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959/2001), 1392-432.

Stravinsky's Dogma m 149

Maritain’s theory of sensible intuition also contradicted Kant’s classical aesthetics, in which beauty is apprehended by judgment. Maritain’s critique of Bergson and diatribe against Kant are reminiscent of Paul Claudel's repudiation of Kant and hint at an anti-Enlightenment, “irrational” core to his aesthetics.”° Maritain argued that artists intuitively perceive intelligible objects sensuously, as if in a divination that causes spontaneous knowledge to well up in their spirit. This is different from perceiving objects emotionally or through “empathy” (Einfiihlung) as Theodor Lipps and Johannes Volkelt had argued—theories Maritain rejected as negative philosophical consequences of Kant’s subjectivism.”’ Maritain theorized that the sensual perception of the material world leads the artist not to understanding but rather to “delight,” “stirring up desire and producing love,

which, if it escape[s] the weakness of the flesh, in turn produce|[s| ecstasy. Maritain thus drew a direct correlation between artistic intuition and mystic experience.”®

Beauty reveals itself to the artist through form, or what Maritain also called “a flashing of intelligence on a matter intelligibly arranged.” Such

beauty is essentially “perfect” according to the three conditions that Thomas Aquinas derived from the trinity: integrity, proportion, and “splendor of form” (splendor formac). The latter term, sometimes associated by Maritain with a “bursting forth of form” (éclat de la forme), sheds particular light on Stravinsky’s compositional process. It refers not to conceptual clarity but rather to the ontological splendor of intuited objects in and of themselves. Maritain experienced this as “the sensible radiance or bursting forth [[éclat sensible] of color or tone; there is the intelligible clarity of an arabesque, of a rhythm or an harmonious balance, of an activity or a movement; there is the reflection upon things of a human or divine thought; there is, above all, the deep-seated splendor one glimpses of the soul, of the soul principle of life and animal energy, or principle of

96. See Gilles Routhier, “Restaurer ‘ordre du monde: L Horizon médiéval de la pensée des années 1920 et 1930,” in Musique, art et religion dans lentre-deux-guerres, 8S. 97. Maritain, Art et scolastique, in JMOC, vol. 1, 742-43nS6); Art and Scholasticism, 167nS6. Maritain gains his understanding of Theodor Lipps’s and Johannes Volkelt’s notions of Einfithlung (empathy) from Maurice de Wulf, L‘Oeuvre dart et la beauté: Conférences faites a la Faculté des Lettres de Poitiers

(Louvian: Institut de philosophie/ Paris: Félix Alcan, 1920). 98. Maritain, Art et scolastique, in JMOC, vol. 1, 644-45; Art and Scholasticism 26-27. In an article of 1910 that captured Stravinsky's attention, Cingria foreshadowed Maritain’s ideas when he argued from a neo-Thomist perspective that music appealed to a “special contemplative faculty that escaped comprehension and that could imperfectly be called a “sense of superior delight.” Cingria, “Essai de définition d'une musique libérée des moyens de la raison discursive [1910],” in Oeuvres completes, vol. 1, 195-96.

1SO m FAITH

spiritual life, of pain and passion. And there is a still more exalted splendor, the splendor of grace, which the Greeks did not know.’ This “radiant intelligibility” derives from the “first intelligibility of divine ideas” and can neither reveal itself directly through things nor be reduced to “representative signs drawn from things.” Rather, it “precedes things and creates them,’ relating to them only through analogy. Maritain concluded—and this is the core of his immanent aesthetics—that beauty is at once transcendent and immanent and that it is experienced as divine “in the sensible and through the sensible.” By basing his aesthetics on the principle of immanence, or hylomorphism (the indivisibility of matter/body and form/soul), Maritain proved

the intimate connection between art, the divine, and material life. Art does not have as its goal the good of human life, he wrote, in the sense that it is not political, realistic, or engaged with the social. And yet it remains profoundly “human” because intimately linked with the physical world in the moment of creative inspiration. Alarmed, as Gide was but for different reasons, by Stéphane Mallarmé’s and Henri Bremond’s attempts to achieve spiritual fulfillment through poetry alone, in the form of poésie pure and an

esprit poétique pur, Maritain urged artists to remember the human and material foundation of spiritual experience and artistic creation.’ Art necessarily struggles with “conditions of existence,’ he insisted, whether these are material circumstances, general human conditions, or aspects of the societies in which the artists live. He went on to describe this profoundly human yet divine art as “ontological” or “existential” in Kierkegaard’s sense, “ born in the unique roots of being, as close as possible to that

joint of soul and spirit mentioned by Saint Paul.” Art is ontology, of, in, and for man, Maritain wrote in Frontiéres de la poésie."°' With this theory, Maritain elevated the human to a universal idea, erasing individuality, historical and social specificity, and unique corporeal experience and forcing consensus on how to be properly alive in a Christian sense. Maritain suggested that if composers follow the creative process he outlined, the divine would become audible in their works and lend them a quality of “magic” or “grace” in Plotinus’s sense. As every work of art is

99. Maritain, Art et scolastique, in JMOC, vol. 1, 642-43, 646-47, and 738-39n56; Art and Scholasticism, 24-25, 28-29, and 163-64nS6. The emphasis is in the original. 100. For Maritain’s comments on Henri Bremond, see his supplement “Note sur la poésie moderne (Réponse a une enquéte de la Gazzetta del popolo),’ in Frontiéres de la poésie et autres essais (Paris: Plon, 1927), 71. This supplement is not included in the JMOC edition. 101. Maritain, Frontiéres de la poésie, in JMOC, vol. 5, 693-94; “Frontiers of Poetry,’ in Art and Scholasticism, 122-23.

Stravinsky's Dogma om 151

made up of body (language), soul (the idea), and spirit (poetry), the work becomes magical only when the spirit has transcended the soul, annihilating both it and the body and making them its instruments.'°* Maritain

heard such magic in the music of Schubert, Chopin, Musorgsky, and, most notably, Arthur Lourié.'*’ He reserved the term “sacred magic,” or “that which is totally pure and originates in the inexpressible desires of the Holy Spirit,” for Gregorian chant.’** Maritain worried about the modernist tendency to ignore such divine grace and replace humane and spiritual artisanship with a misguided, mechanical obsession with mere form. In such instances, he judged, rules were being imposed from without as conventional imperatives, resulting in “sensual slush.’"™ I believe that Stravinsky resonated to Maritain’ beliefs and that syllables functioned for him as physical objects whose ontological splendor he believed he could intuit. Whereas words, which imply concepts, appealed to his cognitive faculties, syllables functioned as the raw material itself— physical objects pulsating with divine energy. Syllables assured his connection to the physical world and promised that his art would not become

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UNE REUNION CHEZ Mme IDA RUBINSTEIN De gauche a droite: M. Barsac, M. Jacques Copeau et Mme Ida Rubinstein s‘ccupent de la mise en scéne, (Phot. .) Figure 3.1 “A Meeting at Madame Ida Rubinstein’s. From Left to Right: Mr. [André] Barsacq, Mr. Jacques Copeau and Mme Ida Rubinstein busy with the staging,’ unknown photographer, reproduced in Ida Rubinstein, “Ma prochaine saison de spectacles de danses,” Excelsior, 10 December 1933. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France.

with all stage action in Perséphone. “The essential element of the Eleusinian mysteries is the contrast between night and brilliant light,” he remarked." The melodrama would begin in relative darkness, he noted, with light pro-

jected on Eumolpus, and later Persephone, both of whose movements were to be followed by a spotlight throughout. The underworld in the 118. Copeau'’s note; folder 730, subfolder 2, p. 13, F]C-BNF.

Performing Devotion m 215

second tableau would be “nighttime blue,’ with red light for the shadows. And Persephone would emerge from her tomb in the third tableau illuminated by a brilliant white light, just as classical authors had described that moment in the Eleusinian mysteries. Although most critics later judged that Copeau's lighting scheme was too dark and, on the whole, ineffectual, Gide’s friend Maria van Rysselberghe commented that Copeau and Barsacq had created “an incredible variety of lights and atmosphere to

underline the music.” Barsacq executed some of the costumes strictly according to the vision reflected in Copeau’s notes.'*? Persephone’s costume for the first tableau represented Spring (see figure 3.2 in insert); her costume for

the second and third tableaux symbolized her descent into the underworld(see figure 3.3 in insert). Both dresses suggested ancient models, but her headgear—a crown of leaves (for spring) and poppies (for the underworld) —were meant to evoke a Christian image of Christ. Demeter'’s costume, in contrast, was stylistically eclectic, influenced by both abstract design patterns and the latest Parisian fashions (see figure 3.4 in insert). A small sample of lush blue fabric in “Moroccan wool” that Barsacq attached to his design for Demeter’s cloak of grief attests how important color and texture were to his staging of the piece (see figure

3.5 in insert). Barsacq drew three different costumes for the chorus members, one for each tableau, accompanied by careful descriptions of the different flowers they were to carry.'*' Copeau’s notes indicate how important these aspects of the production were to him. Barsacqs drawings indicate that he also shared Copeau's ideas about how death should be represented in the production. The Génie de la mort (Spirit

of death) appears as a daunting medieval woodcarving (see figure 3.6 in insert), and Lethe, who is not present in Gide’s typescript but mentioned in Copeau's notes, appears draped in a dark cloak, looking like a destitute figure from one of Ernst Barlach’s or Kathe Kollwitz’s Depression-era drawings

119. Maria van Rysselberghe, entry for 3 May to 8 July 1934, in CPD, vol. 2, 377. Count Sergei Volkonsky, too, highly praised the “bewitching effect” of Copeau’s lighting. See his “Ballety Ida Rubinstein” | The ballets of Ida Rubinstein], Poslednie novosti, 10 May 1934. 120. Barsacq’s collection of designs for Perséphone includes one pencil drawing (MAQ 10125; slide

13974), one costume sketch (MAQ 11070; slide 12360), and twenty-two slides (12348-59 and 12361-70); originals are in the private possession of Jean-Louis Barsacq, copies in the DAS-BNF. Iam profoundly grateful to Jean-Louis Barsacq for inviting me to see the original drawings and discussing them with me, as well as allowing me to study other work Barsacq completed in these years. This was a deeply moving experience for me. 121. Slides 12353, 12359, and 12361; copies in the DAS-BNF. Slide 12353 shows Barsacq's measurements for chorus members’ flowers.

216 m@ FAITH

and clasping a curiously oversized cup of memory (see figure 3.7 in insert). Barsacq provided a separate drawing of the door to the crypt that symbolized the underworld and death in the third tableau. Copeau had described the door to his collaborators on the night of Rubinstein’s party, and here, too, Barsacq followed his mentor’s vision (see figure 3.8 in insert).!”

At other times, however, Barsacq mixed stylistic elements with a modernist daring not evident in Copeau’s notes. Certain drawings indicate that he sometimes worked independently and according to an aesthetic that differed from Copeau’s. Seemingly free of the artistic dilemmas and religious anxiety that plagued his elders, Barsacq toyed in these sketches with contrasting styles and ideas, creating a hybrid archaic-modern style that combined ancient, medieval, and modern elements. He played with the relationship between the hierophant of the Eleusinian mysteries and Symbolist poets by giving Eumolpus a scarf with hieroglyphics, which indicates that he appreciated the difference between symbol and allegory and understood the importance

of the latter to Perséphone (see figure 3.9 in insert). On the other hand, Barsacq’s designs for Triptolemus and the “adolescents” (who also danced as Pluto’s servants) must have appeared terribly out of character for an ancient mystery; the short tunics he gave them were more suitable for displaying the dancers’ legs in modern ballet than for conveying religious purpose (see figures 3.10 and 3.11 in insert).'*°

Barsacq designed even more stylistically eclectic costumes for the women in the corps de ballet, who alternatively danced the roles of the nymphs, charities, Shadows, Danaides, and Hours. He gave the Shadows stylishly striped yet archaic long robes that the audience may well have associated with bathers on a beach in southern France (see figure 3.12 in insert), and in early sketches he envisioned the charities wrapped curiously in cloth with tiny hats perched on their tilted heads, and the Hours as matriarchs of ancient Rome, with anachronistic brown stripes on their tunics (see figure 3.13 in insert).'”* His designs for the nymphs, by contrast, convey the elegance of Isadora Duncan’s dancers (see figure 3.14 in insert).’”

122. Slides 12363 (Lethe), 12349 (door to the crypt), and 12368 (Spirit of Death); copies in the DAS-BNF.

123. Slides 12362 (adolescents), 12366 (Triptolemus), and 12356 (Eumolpus); copies in the DASan Slides 12352. and 12369 (Shadows), 12354 (charities), and 12367 (Hours); copies in the DAS-BNF. 125. Slides 12355 (nymphs) and 12364 (charities, second version); copies in the DAS-BNF.

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Performing Devotion m 217

The most striking of Barsacq’s drawings, however, were those for the stage set, which seemed to depart most dramatically from Copeau's vision. Barsacq created a cathedral-like structure with an inserted temple that condenses the ancient, Christian, and modern interpretation of the Persephone myth into a single emblematic image that was meant to reveal the sacred and secular history of the action on stage through allegorical

collage (see figure 0.1 in the introduction to part I). Barsacq follows Copeau’s idea of recreating the monumental effect of La Rappresentazione di Santa Uliva by transforming the stage of the Paris Opéra into a historically informed, inspired place of worship on a grand scale. The cathedral reflected Copeau’s vision in conflating Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance stylistic elements in what appears to be an attempt to evoke a histor-

icized Catholic past. And yet the Greek temple is anything but Greek: Barsacq went against Copeau's intentions for the scene by creating a round temple that resembled a modern advertising pillar rather than a Hellenic “niche” (see figure 0.3 in part 1).'°° This modernist, urban temple is “bursting” with flowers and birds, as if Barsacq had wanted to show the exoticism at the root of modernist neoclassicism. Copeau further added a melancholic element to the scene with a somber “tree of dreams” (see

figure 0.2 in part1). The amalgamation of disparate elements he put on display reveals that Barsacq's theatrical aesthetic was neither theological like Copeau’s nor naturalistic like Gide’s but allegorical. Instead of creating a symbolic context or sensual atmosphere appropriate to the experience of mystic effects, he juxtaposed fragments—or what might be called “ruins’—of various cultures that he had come to know through museum visits and modern media; in their heterogeneous presentation these fragments must have conveyed an impression of the failure of myth in Perséphone (figure 3.15). As soon as Barsacq had finished this fantasti-

cally modern set, in mid-February, Copeau sent the drawings off to the painter Georges Mouveau.'*’ When Barsacq's design became reality, few critics and none of the Perséphone collaborators but Copeau particularly liked it.

Barsacqss striking fresh, modernist tone found a complement in the work of Kurt Jooss, who arrived on the scene in January 1934. Just weeks

126. Copeau doodled a classic Greek temple on his notes for the staging of Perséphone. I believe he intended to evoke Greek models, in opposition to the eclectic modernism evident in Barsacqss set. Next to his doodle Copeau wrote: “The temple can serve precisely to frame Demeter, like a niche”; folder 730, subfolder 2, p. 1, FJC-BNF. 127. Copeau to Gide, 19 February 1934; in CGC, vol. 2, 433-34.

218 m@ FAITH

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— During one practice session he asked the chorus why they

sang the opening chorus (“Reste avec nous”) sentimentally. When they responded that the music “seemed expressive, he replied “Why do you want to make what already is?”'”® He was intent on achieving in

their performance the same detachment that he had exercised in com-

posing the music—the restraint that he believed enabled spiritual

171. Copeau to Gide, 18 April 1934, in CGC, vol. 2, 440. 172. Jean Claude includes this information in ibid., 442-43. 173. Copeau, quoted in Bex, “Le Réle de Jacques Copeau.” 174. Stravinsky to Copeau, 8 February 1938; see Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ $1. 17S. Gavriil Paichadze wrote Stravinsky in April 1933 that Rubinstein was hesitant to confirm in

Stravinsky's contract that he would conduct the premiere “and maybe the following Parisian performances” because the dates had not yet been set; see Paichadze to Stravinsky, 26 April 1933, in SPRK, vol. 3, 512.

176. This story is related by Maurice Perrin, a student in Nadia Boulanger’s class at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. Stravinsky taught there from 17 September 1935 and told this story in class; see SSC, vol. 1, 244.

Performing Devotion m= 231

insight. Only through self-effacement could the composer and performer properly serve the music and expose its religious fervor truth-

fully. Spiritual expression required this emotional detachment, Stravinsky later commented in reference to St. Paul.'”’ In the words of Saint John Climacus of the Russian Orthodox Church, later translated by Théodore Stravinsky for publication, “be fervent, but in your soul, never letting it show in external relationships, neither in your appearance, nor by a word, whatever it may be, nor through an enigmatic gesture. And don’t succumb to zeal, even if it’s hidden, unless you have already stopped humiliating your neighbor.”’”* Stravinsky’s performance practice added the final layer to the complex religious collage of Perséphone. By the time of the premiere, Copeauss faith in his collaborators’ capacity to create theatrical community, or even work

together, was completely shattered. He told Gide that he felt nothing but “deception, something Gide told a friend Copeau should blame on his own miserable stage sets. Gide refrained from telling Copeau this to his face, however, merely responding ironically with a postcard of a man burdened with a huge baptismal font on his back and a copy of Perséphone with the single word “Ouf!”'” The sight of Copeau’s religious ritual in the first tableau of Perséphone struck at the very heart of what many people in 1930s France held dear: national culture, Western musical traditions, ideologies of history and memory, the French language, and Catholic faith. It reminded some of the sacred experiences they most cherished, and others of the Russian foreigners they loathed. But the mystery of Perséphone had only just begun.

177. Stravinsky to Gavriil Paichadze, 11 April 1946; quoted in SSC, vol. 1, 18. 178. “Saint Jean Climaque: Pensées (trad. par Théodore Strawinsky),” in Essais sur Kierkegaard, Pétrarque, Goethe: Religion et philosophie, musique et poésie, dessins (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934), 131; quoted by Copeau in an entry for 31 October 1931 in Journal: Deuxiéme partie, 1916-1948, 328.

Stravinsky spoke frequently to the press in these years about his theory of conducting. He believed conductors should not interpret the music but rather reproduce it accurately. He compared conductors to bell-ringers who pull the cords that allow the music itself to sound. See “Gesprach mit Strawinsky,” Blatter der Staatsoper und der Stédtischen Oper 8, no. 19, special issue on Oedipus Rex (February

1928): 20-23, and Herbert Seilmann, “Igor Strawinsky iiber sich selbst,’ Ostpreussische Zeitung, 4 November 1932. At other times Stravinsky compared conductors to army commanders who know how to follow rules. See Karl Laux, “Gespraich mit Strawinsky,” Neue Badische Landes-Zeitung (Mannheim), 8 December 1930, and “Sachlichkeit in der Musik: Eine Stunde mit Igor Stravinsky,’ Prager Presse, 23 February 1930. 179, Gide to Copeau, postcard from 21 April 1933, in CGC, vol. 2, 444. See also Jean Claude's note on p. 442 (concerning Copeau’s comment); and Correspondance André Gide Roger Martin du Gard, with an introduction by Jean Delay (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), vol. 2, 612.

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As the first tableau came to an end, Ida Rubinstein moved to the front of the stage and began speaking in stilted verse. She was about to pluck the narcissus, which, according to the Homeric story, should have led to her ravishment by Pluto and descent into hell. But something was going terribly wrong with the narrative: Persephone appeared to be beginning to experience a mystic revelation, taking the melodrama in a direction that nobody in the audience was expecting. Reminded throughout the first tableau that the unity of their culture was disintegrating, the audience was about to be confronted with an even more divisive theme: sexual morality.

[| PART TWO Love Experiencing Perséphone in 1934 Part II: End of “Perséphone ravie” (Persephone Ravished), and “Perséphone aux Enfers” (Persephone in the Underworld), in which Persephone plucks the narcissus and chooses to descend into the underworld, where she refuses Pluto’s gifts, bites the pomegranate given to her by Mercury, and gazes into the narcissus, in which she sees her mother raising Demophon to become Triptolemus, whom she recognizes as her future husband. She resolves to return to the earth to unite with him.

When the nymphs end their chorus to the first dawn (R31 in the score). Ida Rubinstein is standing in her long Grecian robe at the front of Barsacqs voluminous and empty stage. She is surrounded by her faithful nymphs, who kneel on the ground with their arms lifted in a gesture of supplication. The chorus stands to the wall at her right, watching her patiently. The two-dimensional tree of life dominates the scene behind her, as does the pedestal on which Eumolpus is perched. On the bare ground in front of her lies a large and obvious stage prop that looks vaguely like a flower, perhaps a narcissus. Its beauty transfixes Persephone. Her eyes are vacant and lost, her head thrown back, her body quivering, her voice trembling. She approaches the flower in spite of Eumolpus’s stern warnings (R34:2-R40:3). She gazes into it and sees a people who are “sad, anxious,

colorless” (R40:4-R42:4). The music turns abruptly to B-flat (after Eumolpus’s pronounced E-D seventh), with a notable change in rhythm. After a few more warnings and an attempt at seduction on the part of the nymphs (R44:3-R45:2), Rubinstein plucks the narcissus (R45:3-RS8:4). She begins to shake as desire takes possession of her, the wavering folds of her luscious floor-length gown rustling uncontrollably. André Schaeffner suspects she is in a state of mystic rapture (see figure 6.1).' The lights lower

1. André Schaeffner, “Perséphone,” Beaux-arts, 27 April 1934.

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almost imperceptibly as she dances.” Her gestures are not spontaneous but remain poised, “precious, and stiff. The plucking of the narcissus causes a scene change, which corresponds

with the opening of Stravinsky’s second tableau (RS8:6-R62:2). Light emerges from the door to the crypt of the church, an allegory for the gates of hell. The light is yellowish and traversed by smoke rising from the cassolettes carried by the Shadows. The dancer Karnakovsky, as the Génie de la mort (Spirit of death), enters carrying a torch and approaches Persephone (see figure 3.6 in the insert in chapter 3). He looks like a medieval angel from a carved wooden church altar, acts like Amor in Gluck’s Orpheus und Eurydice, and reminds the audience of Speranza in Monteverdi's Orfeo in his role as a messenger who crosses the boundary between life and death. Karnakovsky executes an extended pas de deux with Rubinstein. Critics are mortified to see her dance. “We've never seen worse or more clumsy on the stage of the Paris Opéra,’ Dominique Sordet laments.’ Karnakovsky takes Rubinstein’s hand, and they exit by descending a set of stairs, the lights intensifying toward a clear “night blue” as they approach the eerie

door to the crypt (see figure 3.8 in the insert in chapter 3).4 When the light has overwhelmed the stage, the stagehands and dancers begin taking care of the complex scene change. First, six dancers dressed as Shadows take the palm leaves offstage. Then two nymphs remove the little tree at the back of the stage. Then six more Shadows enter to remove the dream tree. While this is going on, the dancers enter and take their places on stage for the beginning of the second tableau. There has been no intermission; this movement occurs as Stravinsky's music proudly initiates the second tableau.*

The lights dim as the Shadows begin their dance. Louis Laloy points out that the contrast in illumination is the only thing that distinguishes this tableau from the first. He describes the effect as a “gloomy half light.”® Auguste Mangeot agrees that the stage set looks identical to the first tableau, except for a few new accessories that have been placed in front of the

Greek temple.’ Numerous critics join Pierre Michaut in complaining about the dim lighting; it is impossible to see anything. “The grey and 2. Copeau’s note; folder 733 subfolder 6, p. 1, FJC-BNF. 3. Dominique Sordet, “Les Ballets Rubinstein,” Action francaise, S May 1934.

4. Copeau’s note; folder 733, subfolder 6, p. 1, FJC-BNF. The stairs are mentioned in Intérim, “Les Spectacles de Mme Ida Rubinstein,” LAube, 1 May 1934; and in an untitled and unsigned article in La Victoire, 8 May 1934.

5. Copeau’s note; folder 730, subfolder 1, pp. 1-3, FJC-BNF. 6. Louis Laloy, “Revue musicale,” La Revue des deux mondes 104 (1 June 1934): 696. 7. Auguste Mangeot, “Théatres: Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,” Le Monde musicale, 31 May 1934.

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light of Hades is a nice idea,’ Michaut writes, “but more literary than suitable for the theater.”* As the sopranos begin to sing Persephone’s lullaby “Sur ce lit” (R74), the contours of Kurt Jooss's plaintive Shadows and of the Danaides emerge from the darkness. Jooss’s choreography strikes observers as particularly

beautiful at this moment. Robert Dézarnaux notes that the Shadows, a mixed group of male and female dancers, are wearing gray veils.’ They are “on their knees,’ Michaut writes. They “approach and move apart from Persephone. The whole ensemble oscillates, their faces held toward Persephone, their arms glued to their bodies, wearing gray or pale green veils. This is a people without hope, sad, anxious, colorless.”'® Jooss has created a space in which the “joyless shadows of Pluto’s kingdom seem to float,

wander around, suspended in a painful atmosphere,’ Darius Milhaud writes.'' Marie de Heredia (writing under the name Gérard d’Houville) relishes the “turbulent and muted moments of certain subterranean impressions’ that communicate for her, “a nonreligious person!” “the restlessness of the mystery of the future germination.” She finds the movements beautiful and moving but “a bit worm-like.”'” Pierre-Octave Ferroud feels his evening has been sacrificed to the “morbid fantasy of Mr. Kurt Jooss.” Such immobility of movement “rattles all the notions we have of theater,’ he remarks impatiently.’ Laloy describes more specifically how

the “deceased shadows surround the unexpected apparition [of Persephone] with their supplications, but they scare her a bit by lifting with their arms the wings of their grayish coats, which make them resemble bats, as Homer said they did. The funeral hoplites in blue-shaded corselets

also scare her, and that’s why she will refuse the crown and the cup of oblivion that are the marriage gifts with the God of the dead.”* André George is impressed by how the choreography has been reduced “to the[se] gestures of supplication of infernal despair.’'* Mangeot’s attention

8. Pierre Michaut, untitled notice in L‘Opinion, 1 June 1934. 9. Robert Dézarnaux, “A Opéra,” Liberté, 2 May 34. The names of the dancers who performed as Shadows in this scene are given in the program, Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein: Programme Perséphone Diane de Poitiers.

10. Michaut, untitled notice in L’Opinion, 1 June 1934. 11. Darius Milhaud, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Le Jour, 2 May 1934. 12. Gérard d’Houville (pseudonym for Marie de Heredia), “Spectacles: Deux ballets nouveaux de Madame Ida Rubinstein,” La Revue des deux mondes 104 (15 May 1934): 432-35. 13. Pierre-Octave Ferroud, “Le Premier Spectacle de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Paris-Soir, 2 May 1934. 14. Laloy, “Revue musicale,’ 696. 15. André George, “Le Premier Spectacle de Mme Rubinstein,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 5 May 1934.

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is drawn at the same time to the Danaides, who are “pouring water from the river Lethe tirelessly in their bottomless urns. They boast to one another about the earth’s and spring’s charms.”"®

After a lulling dialogue between the Shadows and the awakening Persephone (R93:2-R102), and her first account for them of her life on

earth (R102-R110), Persephone hears Pluto calling her (R116:2R117:4), and Eumolpus warns her of her destiny (R118:1—-R124:1). The servants of Pluto arrive to offer the gifts of a crown, a scepter, and the cup of Lethe that would allow her to forget her life on earth (124:2-136:3).'” The critics can hardly grasp these events but sit up for the balletic display

when Pluto’s servants, eleven male dancers, arrive on stage.'* Michaut notices that “the spirits who bring Persephone the crown offered to her by Pluto and the cup of oblivion create a ‘dancing theory’ | theorie dansant |, the movement of which is more rich and animated | than what has been seen before |: it is sort of a pyrrhic | war dance invented by Pyrrhus, son of Achilles], disrupted by leaps and moments of squatting.’ Raoul Brunel notices “really strange instrumental exploration” just after the “march” (R130:2-R133:4), where “the monotonous chant of the oboe is punctuated by the dry grunts of the tuba” (R135-—136:3).”° This is “newspaper reporting in tones, Gebrauchsmusik, fake music,” the German correspondent Otto Ludwig Fugmann writes.*' Persephone abruptly refuses

the gifts, upon which the mixed chorus summons Mercury, the dancer Anatole Vilzak, whose winged cap Louis Laloy singles out.** Just before and during Eumolpusss narration, he arrives on stage with the Hours—a part danced by the same ten female dancers who previously represented

the nymphs (R136:4-R139:3 and R139:4-R150:4).% The audience have their eyes on the soloist, Anatole Vilzak, however. The critic for Candide judges Vilzak to be an “unfortunate dancer” who does “a few clumsily executed and coordinated pirouettes.’** Marie de Heredia finds 16. Mangeot, “Théatres: Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein’ 17. Malherbe, “La Musique,’ Feulleton du Temps 9 May 1934; quoted in English by Craft in SSC, vol. 3, 482. These actions are also described in Mangeot, “Théatres: Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,” and in the program. 18. The dancers who appeared as Pluto's servants are also listed in the program. 19. Michaut, untitled notice in L Opinion. 20. Raoul Brunel, “Premiére representation a l’Opéra (Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein): Sémiramis, L'Oeuvre, 13 May 1934. 21. Otto Ludwig Fugmann, “Perséphone: Diane de Poitiers,’ Neue Pariser Zeitung, 19 May 1934.

22. Laloy, “Revue musicale,” 696. The critic Robert Dézarnaux comments upon Persephone's refusal of the gifts in his article in Liberté.

23. The official program indicates that the nymphs and Hours were danced by the same dancers. 24. Le Vieil Abonné, untitled article in Candide, 10 May 1934.

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that Mercury's dance with the Hours have a typically operatic effect but look “bizarre, almost ridiculous, [next to the Shadows’ ] contortions ala Cranach.”* Michaut attributes the odd effect of his dance to the context: Vilzak’s “short classical movement, while presenting the “liber-

ating pomegranate, appears “isolated in a choreography that was otherwise of a completely different style, and gives the impression of a borrowed piece.””®

After this vivid moment of dance, the audience sits back for a long

stretch of static stage movement and incomprehensible recitation from Rubinstein (R151:2-R184:2). During this onerous melodramatic stretch, Persephone gazes into the narcissus and remembers the

earth. She learns that her mother has raised Demophon to become Triptolemus, who will teach agriculture to mankind and become her husband. The critics can hardly understand what is going on. Henry Bénazet is dismayed at the lack of choreography. “On the other hand,’ he writes, “there is an extensive Gidean poem, that distills boredom.

The mystery takes over the ballet. This is surely more suitable for thinkers, but do we go to the Opéra to think?”*’ “It is embarrassing to

watch the burlesque scenic parody to which Mme Rubinstein condemns this work,’ an anonymous critic writes in Cyrano. “She is just as

ridiculous when she sings as when she dances. Or better said, when she believes she’s singing, and imagines she’s dancing.’** “Why have they given such a dominant place to this old woman in the middle of all these perfect dancers,’ the critic Pecker asks, “who declaims a beautiful poem by André Gide with all the declamatory mistakes possible, and who feigns artificial charm while everybody else dances so beauti-

fully around her?”*’ “Even if Madame Ida Rubinstein might have a charming voice in an intimate setting, she appears ridiculous from the fifth seat,” an anonymous reviewer writes in Ecoutez-moi. “From the sixth row in the orchestra we can even hear her foreign accent, and from the seventh row on we can't hear anything at all. I thus advise that one rent out seats starting in the eighth row when she is performing.”

“Madame Rubinstein knows well that she has an accent that nothing will erase, not even the lessons and advice she received in the past

25. D’Houville (Marie de Heredia), “Spectacles: Deux ballets nouveaux de Madame Ida Rubinstein.” 26. Michaut, untitled notice in L'‘Opinion. 27. Henry Bénazet, “Premiéres représentations,’ Le Petit Parisien, 2 May 1934. 28. “LOpéra Rubinstein,” Cyrano, 4 May 1934. 29. A. Pecker, untitled notice in La Concorde, 15 May 1934.

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from Madame Bartet, who lost her patience trying to correct her,’ another anonymous critic complains in LArtagnan. “She knows well that she has neither the means nor the ‘format’ to become a tragédienne, and yet her craziness consists precisely in trying to give the passing illusion of being that.”°? When the second tableau is over, numerous people leave.

30. “Les Ballets Rubinstein a Opéra,’ Ecoutez-moi, 5 May 1934; and “Quand parlent les statues,” D/Artagnan, S May 1934.

aT

4 André’s Masked Pleasures

The subject of sexual desire received an enormous amount of attention in 1930s France. Not only were Freud's writings reaching a broader public and exerting their controversial influence in all areas of intellectual life but also the prohibitions of the Catholic Church had led the topic to become irresistible to Christian intellectuals. Literary critics, popular novelists, doctors, and psychiatrists studied sexual desire to gain insight into the multifarious sexual practices of their time and differentiate between the hundreds of newly categorized and labeled sexual types. And yet the term desire was rarely clearly defined or consistently used. Most authors favored the historically grounded term instinct and the recently popularized Freudian term sex drive (Geschlechtstrieb); others invented a creative variety of verbs to describe what they perceived as different kinds of sentimental and physical attraction. Critics frequently distinguished between desires and how people acted on them, or between “practicing” and “nonpracticing” sexual types, and in many instances encouraged the latter, that is, chastity.’ It was common for French writers in this period to define a persons sexuality based on the gender they assumed in sexual relationships, the acts they participated in, whether they claimed to be born with their sexuality or “acquired” it, and the objects of their attraction. In the 1920s, French literary debates on sexuality were dominated by

the idea that sexual desire, or instinct, was heterosexual; anyone who desired somebody of his or her own sex had to be possessed by the opposite gender. This led to the widespread popularity of the notion ofa “third sex” (drittes Geschlecht, or troisiéme sexe )—a term the German lawyer Karl

Heinrich Ulrichs first used in 1864 to describe a gender transfer, what he described, for a man who desired a man, a “woman's spirit | anima] in a man’s body,’ and, for a woman who desired another woman, a “man’s spirit in a woman's body.” Ulrichs’s hypothesis broke down the heteronormative model of sexuality yet suggested a model that reified essentialist notions of female and male and kept intact the notion of desire as

fundamentally heterosexual. Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis in 1. Michael Lucey, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 35. 2. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Forschungen iiber das Rathsel der mannmdnnlichen Liebe | 1864-79], ed. Hubert Kennedy, 4 vols. (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1994).

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England and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany picked up and elaborated on the notion of a third sex, which thereupon entered French discourse through police and medical records, as well as in literature, pulp fiction, and journalism.’ Today critics interpret Ulrichs’s work in terms of transgenderism and differentiate it from homosexuality, but during the 1920s and 1930s the two concepts were often equated in France.’ The third sex became synonymous in many French circles with the popular term invert, which was first used by Havelock Ellis but associated by some French writers with the German psychiatrist Karl Westphal, who in 1869 had described congenital “contrary sexual behavior” in women,

or, again, what today might be called transgenderism.° French literary critics particularly favored this term, applying it to both men and women, and they associated it with the “man-woman’ or gender-deviant effeminate man made famous by the character of Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu.° This figure confirmed the popular presumption that male inverts are women in men’s bodies who inverted gender binaries without toppling or erasing them. Many critics condemned male inverts for taking on and mimicking the lesser role of women. Misogyny and outrage over gender deviance led to deep and vicious prejudice against the male invert across broad segments of the French population. “Easily,” Ramon Fernandez wrote in 1931, “the invert

is becoming the scapegoat of universal debauchery, a sort of abscess of fixation from which the pus of the social body is secreted.” In literary circles, writers sometimes referred to inverts as uranists— a term that carried a stronger inflection of a literary or artistic tradition.® This word was derived from Plato’s description of male same-sex love in the Symposium in relation to the goddess Aphrodite Ourania, 3. See Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (London: Allen and Unwin, 1908); Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (London: University Press, 1897); and Charles Godfrey Leland, The Alternate Sex: or, The Female Intellect in Man, and the Masculine in Woman (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904). See also Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Cultural History (New York: Zone Books, 1993); and Laure Murat, La Loi du genre: Une Histoire culturelle du “troisiéme sexe” (Paris: Fayard, 2006). 4. See Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender, 213-39.

5. Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal, “Die kontrare Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes,” Archiv fiir Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 2 (1869): 73-108; and Armand Dubarry, Les Invertis, ou le vice allemand (Paris: Chamuel, 1896).

6. My use the term “gender deviant” reflects my reception of the work of David Halperin, who distinguishes between gender and sexual deviance in “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,’ Representations 63 (Summer 1998): 106-7. 7. Ramon Fernandez, André Gide (Paris: Corréa, 1931), 174. 8. Lucey argues that the patrician term uranist was never widely used outside of a small literary elite and quickly fell out of favor; Lucey, Never Say I, 267n21.

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the motherless daughter of Urania, and the word entered modern discussions through Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s notion of “Urnings.’ The Catholic writer Marc-André Raffalovich popularized the term in France. He rejected the notion of a third sex, however, and argued instead that

uranist men were not possessed by the souls of women but simply attracted to their own sex—a phenomenon he labeled “unisexuality.”” “Others think that similarity is a passion comparable to that aroused by sexual dissimilarity,” he wrote in 1895.'° But Raffalovich’s theories did

not catch on; in the 1930s many critics still loosely assumed that uranists were the same as inverts and that their desire depended on the gender they assumed: they were the feminine partners in male samesex relationships.'' Gide liked to use the term uranist, especially when speaking in private with men (for example, with Proust). He preferred

uranist to homosexual—a label he disliked in reference to his own person yet also used on occasion in public to group together other men engaged in male same-sex relations.'” These examples corroborate the assumption that during the initial decades of sexual categorization and self-definition in France, many writers and literary critics thought of same-sex relations within the frame of the dominant discourse on heterosexuality. The third sex, inverts, and uranists often remained heterosexualized figures in popular prose—and in the popular imagination as well. Leo Bersani has critiqued this essentialized and heterosexualized discourse on homosexuality, which he sees as fundamental to Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Although he is intrigued by the “dance of essences” this discourse enables and the “trouble” it causes (in the sense of characters having to cross incessantly from one sex to the other), he worries about its political repercussions.’

Teresa de Lauretis has expressed similar concern that the emphasis on heterosexual “sameness” within same-sex relationships necessarily implies “indifference” to creating categorically different kinds of sexual relations that recognize the feminine. She adopts Lucie Irigary’s term hommosexuality to describe same-sex relations that are conceptualized in heterosexual 9, Marc-André Raffalovich, Uranisme et unisexualité: Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct

sexuel (Paris: Masson, 1896), 26, 41-42. 10. Marc-André Raffalovich, “L'Uranisme, inversion sexuelle congenitale: Observations et conseils,” Archives danthropologie criminelle 10 (1895): 101. 11. See, for example, Willy, The Third Sex [1927], trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 2007), 32-33. 12. On Gide'’s use of the term uranisme, see Lucey, Never Say I, 31-55; and Gide, entries from 13, 15, and 16 May 1921, in J-I, 1124-27. 13. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 134-42.

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terms. She speaks not of men but only of women and, more specifically, of female same-sex relations that mimic heterosexuality by specularizing the phallus.'* Only a few writers in interwar France imagined categorically different kinds of sexual relations for men or women in the way de Lauretis has suggested. Among those who did was Gide. Gide revolutionized the expression of male same-sex desire in the writing strategies he developed for the narcissus-plucking moment in Perséphone —a process I began to explore in chapter 1 and expand on here. In his classic text Corydon, he countered the dominant belief that desire was heterosexual by suggesting the possibility of a male same-sex desire directed toward pleasure rather than reproduction. Throughout the 1920s he explored multiple

strategies for articulating his pédéraste subjectivity in his writing. Gide established his point of view in the late 1920s against the unrelenting criticism and insults of many contemporaries—a framework that played a part in determining how he positioned himself as a writer. His embattled situation may have led him to couple Persephone’s expression of same-sex desire in the narcissus-plucking scene with her simultaneous need to fulfill her social obligation and to frame her actions within the context of the exclusionary French sexual politics of his day. Gide’s eagerness to see nonconformist desire coexist with judicial conformity and acceptance of societal laws leads him, as I described in chapter 1, to a “bricolage” of literary form.

M ANDRE’S PLEASURE In the 1920s Gide challenged the dominant heterosexualized theories of same-sex sexuality in three distinct literary genres: the “treatise” Corydon (1924), the autobiographical Si le grain ne meurt (1924), and the novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925). In these works he explored multiple possibilities of expressing through writing his subjectivity as a pédéraste, or lover of adolescent boys in the Greek tradition—a form

of male erotic relationship that recognized the masculine (in the manner de Lauretis suggests for women) and imagined desire beyond the normative frame of heterosexuality. He also identified publically as a pédéraste.'* This was a bold step. Gide did not have access to a 14. Teresa de Lauretis, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,’ Theatre Journal 40, no. 2

(May 1988): 156-57. 15. In 1918 Gide wrote, “The pédérastes, of whom I am one (why can I not say this quite simply, without your immediately claiming to see a brag in my confession?), are much rarer, the sodomites much more numerous, than I first thought”; Gide, Feuillets [1918], in J-I, 1092. See also Lucey, Never Say

I, 29-56.

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community whose members might have openly affirmed their identities with him and shared in his minority plight; rather, apart from a small circle of devoted friends, he found himself alone in asserting his subjectivity. That he did so in such explosively disruptive ways is part of what makes his story so compelling. At a time when France, unlike Germany and England, had neither an actively organized homosexual movement

nor official publications that such a movement could support, Gide became a cause célébre or, as he preferred to see it, a “martyr” for the cause of pédérastie. Elusive, perplexing in its articulation, and resistant to epistemological certitude, Gide’s representation of homoerotic pleasure has continued to elicit outrage, incomprehension, and passionate criticism for almost a century.'® Gide spoke most explicitly of pédéraste desire in Corydon, which, despite its muted initial reception after Gallimard published it in 5,000 copies in 1924, had a lasting influence on French discourse about sexuality. Corydon consists of conversations between the pédéraste doctor Corydon (who seems to speak for Gide himself) and an old friend who has not seen him for years yet has sought him out to ask his opinion about “uranism, which is making headlines in connection with an unnamed but sensational lawsuit. This friend is an ardent natalist and French nationalist

who voices the common prejudices against uranism of Gide’s time.” Corydon and his friend address the issue of uranism in a series of four classic Socratic dialogues. In the first two Corydon defends “normal pédérastie” against what he calls “sick pédérastie,’ which he equates with inversion. He seeks evidence of “normal pédérastie” in the natural world, but he does so in a manner that makes a mockery of scientific discourse

on sexuality of that time. In the last two dialogues, which Gide wrote years later, Corydon speculates on the cultural context and positive social

implications of pédérastie. In all four dialogues Gide adopts an ironic tone. He deconstructs abiding beliefs about sexuality in a tongue-incheek fashion and with an irony that was lost on many readers, who found

16. Florence Tamagne argues that France did not have a “gay movement” between the wars and that this led to a lack of public forums, especially journals, for discussing nonconformist ideas. See Tamagne, Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe: Berlin, Londres, Paris 1919-1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 156-S9. The first French homosexual journal, Inversion, appeared in 1924 but was soon forbidden in the

wake of antipornography laws established in 1882. See Mirande Lucien, ed., Inversions 1924-25, L’Amitié, 1925: Deux revues homosexuelles francaises (Lille: Cahiers Gay-Kitsch-Camp, 2006); and Gilles

Barbedette and Michel Carassou, Paris Gay 1925 (Paris: Presses de la renaissance, 1981), 139-304. 17. Martha Hanna, “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeftrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 204.

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it dificult not to take Corydon seriously, especially later in the century during the struggle for gay rights."* One of Gide’s main aims in Corydon was to clarify the public misconception that male same-sex love necessarily required one partner's adopt-

ing a female role. He also challenged the common presumption that the many diverse forms of same-sex love could be subsumed under generic labels like homosexual or uranist."” Gide felt an urgent need not only to assert the distinctiveness of his pédéraste sexuality and differentiate it from other nonconformist sexual types but also to define his masculinity

in a more nuanced way than that of the binary distinction between a wholly heterosexual man, on the one hand and an invert, or woman inside a mans body, on the other. In pursuing this agenda, he adopted a fiercely misogynist tone, ruthlessly rejecting the third sex, uranists, and inverts, all groups he associated with women and whom he condemned for adopting the feminine (passive) role in sexual intercourse.”° He also indirectly critiqued Proust’s fictional figure Charlus, who he felt had hurt the cause of

pédérastie by representing a negative stereotype that blinded people to the plurality of male same-sex experience.”’ He felt in competition with

18. Gide noted in 1912 that he understood Corydon as being a conversation with his father, Paul Gide, who had publicly criticized Greek pédérastie in his Etude sur la condition privée de la femme dans le droit ancien et moderne et en particulier sur le sénatus-consulte Velléien (Paris: Durand et Pédone-Lauriel,

1867), 69-71. Gide also noted that he did not want Corydon to be serious throughout, because he thought the subject of pédérastie was not as serious as people thought it was. See Gide, note from 1912, included among the materials for Corydon, in folder 885, AG-BLJD; published in Alain Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,’ BAAG 35, no. 155 (July 2007): 419-39, at 392-94. Later Gide wrote, “L was probably ill advised to treat ironically such serious questions, which were usually joked about or treated with reprobation”; Gide, entry for 19 October 1942, in J-H, 842. 19. Gide later wrote: “The great number of confidences I have been in a position to receive has convinced me that the variety of cases of homosexuality is much greater than that of cases of heterosexuality. And, furthermore, that the irrepressible loathing a homosexual may feel for another whose appe-

tites are not the same as his is something of which the heterosexual has no idea; he lumps them all together so as to be able to throw them all overboard at one and the same time, and this is obviously much more expedient. I tried insofar as I could to make the distinction between pédérastes in the Greek sense of the word (lovers of boys) and inverts, but no one deigned to see anything in this but a rather groundless discrimination, and I had to give it up.” Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits, in Souvenirs et voy-

ages, ed. Pierre Masson, with Daniel Durosay and Martine Sagaert (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 2001), 1071.

20. Bersani criticizes Gide's rejection of inverts and sodomy as excluding what many understand to

be homosexual desire itself; see Bersani, Homos, 121. Lucey, too, expresses discomfort with Gide's blindness toward and rejection of the role of mimicry in constituting social and sexual behaviors; Michael Lucey, Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics and Writing (New York: Oxford, 1995), 75-81.

21. This was clearly an important topic of conversation between Gide and Proust. On his deathbed Proust told Gide that he had applied everything “gracious, tender, and charming” about his homosexual experience to young women to strengthen the heterosexual aspect of A la recherche, and left everything “grotesque and abject” for “sodomy. He had not wanted to stigmatize homosexuality, however, but

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Proust and had, ever since the publication of A la recherche, striven to counter Proust’s models and narrative strategies with his articulation of an alternate pédéraste subjectivity. Gide identified his pédérastie with a male virility based on the models of Plutarch’s Thebian army, the French

literary tradition associated with Georges Eekhoud and the journal Akademos at the turn of the century, and, more remotely, Adolf Brand's militaristic Kameradenschaften.”* The age of the object of male same-sex desire also played a role: pédérastes fall in love with “adolescent boys,” Gide told Paul Bourget in 1918, whereas “sodomites” fall in love with “mature men.” Gide quite consistently used the verb séprend de (fall in love) rather than the word desire when describing an older man’s relation-

ship to a younger one. He noted that according to the seventeenthcentury French moralist Jean de la Bruyére, boys between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four were “more desirable and desired than desiring’— that is, passive rather than active in the game of seduction.” Gide turned the sexual politics of his time upside down in Corydon by replacing the idea of heterosexual instinct as a motive for pédéraste relations with that of depsychologized pleasure.* His character Corydon denies

rather to express his affection for its abject qualities; see Gide, entry for 24 May 1921, in J-I, 1126. Gide commented on Proust and on Max Hirschfield's theory of the “man-woman’ in a footnote to his preface

to the 1922 edition of Corydon (just months after his heart-to-heart conversation with Proust). He regretted that he had not given more consideration to inversion and the “effeminization of sodomy” in his original publication of the book; see Corydon (Paris: Gallimard, 1925), 8, 142-43 (letter to Francois Porché). See also Murat, La Loi du genre, 313-19; and Sidonie Rivalin-Padiou, “Marcel Proust et André Gide: Autour de Sodome,’ BAAG 31, no. 137 (January 2003): 43-52. 22. See Patrick Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1991), 246-48; 454; Adolf Brand was known for the journal Der Eigene and for publishing Georg Philipp Pfeiffer's Mannerheldentum und Kameradenliebe im Krieg: Eine Studie und Materialien-Sammlung (Berlin-Wilhelmshagen: Adolf Brand, 1924). 23. In the diary entry from Feuillets cited in note 15 above, Gide describes a pédéraste as “the man

who, as the word indicates, falls in love with young boys. I call a sodomite—One says sodomite, monsieur, Verlaine responded to the judge who asked him if it was true that he was a sodomist—the man whose desire is addressed to mature men. I call an invert the man who, in the comedy of love, assumes the role of awoman and desires to be possessed. These three types of homosexuals are not always clearly

distinct; there are possible transferences from one to another; but most often the difference among them is such that they experience a profound disgust for one another, a disgust accompanied by a reprobation that in no way yields to that which you (heterosexuals) fiercely show toward all three.” Gide, J-I, 1092; translated into English by Lucey in Never Say I, 39. Paul Bourget’s influence may have rivaled Freud’s among French writers for a certain time. His most influential book in this regard is his Physiologie de l'amour moderne (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1890). 24. Gide, Corydon, 137.

25. Martha Hanna has described how Gide switches the role of Virgil's Corydon and his lover Alexis in the first dialogue of Corydon to give a textual clue that throughout his essay he will turn every

convention and argument against homosexuality on its head; Hanna, “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon,’ 205.

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outright that there is such a thing as a natural sexual instinct that draws men to women, and he rejects scientists who posit such an instinct to condemn sex between men.” In fact, Corydon argues, females have to invent artificial, superficial means of attracting males—female dogs have to go into heat and women have to wear jewelry—because otherwise men would explore pleasure in infinite ways that have nothing to do with the opposite sex or the survival of the species. Men are capable of exalted pleasure in all conceivable situations, including with women they do not desire. Such pleasure can even lead to the conception of a child, he concedes, though not necessarily so.’’ After observing the widespread evidence of sex between males in the animal world, Corydon concludes that the notion of a heterosexual instinct aimed at reproduction is a myth and that it is time to embrace the reality of autonomous, liberated, ecstatic, and joyous male pleasure.” By liberating male sexual pleasure from the laws of attraction as bound by instinct, intention, and object choice, Gide freed desire to move in multiple directions. Sexual orientation, Martha Hanna notes, became secondary in importance in his work to sexual appetite.” In his notes for Corydon Gide remarked that “the question [of love] is so complicated. It is worthy to note that Plato, when he wanted to speak about love, was no longer satisfied with a dialogue, but rather appealed to eight interlocutors for diversity of points of view.” Ina diary entry from 24 October 1932 Gide observed that “imperious and irrepressible desires, both homo- and heterosexual, are quite rare,

and with a large number of people desire remains mobile, ad libitum, floating, without conviction or vocation ready to yield to any opportunity, 26. Gide's depsychologizing move away from instinct and toward pleasure led him to feel attachment to, yet also recurring ambivalence about, Freud's theories of sexuality. See Gide, J-I, 1170-71, 1244, 1250; Alain Goulet and Claude Maillard, “Gide et Freud, et aprés .. .: Gide dans l’'Almanach der Psychoanalyse 1930,” BAAG 36, no. 157 (January 2008): 33-48; Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Mor-

alist, 105-8; David Steel, “Gide et Freud,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 77, no. 6 (JanuaryFebruary 1977): 48-74, and “Gide lecteur de Freud,” Littératures contemporaines 7 (1999): 15-36. Gide’s rejection of Freud is remarkably prescient in light of later skepticism toward the psychologization of homosexual identity within the gay and lesbian movement. See Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 101-2; David Halperin, “Homosexuality’s Closet,’ Michigan Quarterly Review 41, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 16-18; and Didier Eribon, Echapper a la psychanalyse, Variations II (Paris: Editions Léo Scheer,

2005). 27. Gide, Corydon, 24.

28. Ibid., 50-79. Gide's attempt to naturalize homosexuality has been contested by many critics. See David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990): 41-53; Monique Witting, “Paradigm,’ in Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/ Critical Texts,

ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 114-21; and Guy Hocquenghem, Le Désir homosexuel (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1972). 29. Hanna, “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon,’ 2.13.

30. Gide, note kept among the materials for Corydon, in folder 885, AG-BLJD; published in Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,’ 400.

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or to fashion or convention, vaguely seeking pleasure, which is the only certain thing.”*' Corydon similarly argues that adolescent boys’ sexual appe-

tites have no precise direction: in this state of what Pliny called molliter juvenis, “|the adolescent’s] desire is floating and at the mercy of examples, indications and provocations from the outside. He loves adventure and, until he is about eighteen years old, invites love rather than knowing how to love himself”*” Earlier, Corydon comments that “it is rare for desire to make itself specific of its own accord and without the support of experience. It is

rare for the particulars of one’s first experiences to be dictated solely by desire, even if they are the ones that desire would have chosen.’ Adolescents caught in this play of free desire could be “taught” sexual orientation, Gide implies, depending on whom they encounter in life.

Gide’s notion of unbound male pleasure moved the argument about pédérastie beyond the normative frame of the sexual theories of his time. Pédérastie is not “abnormal,” Corydon argues, but rather occurs naturally because a surplus of men has resulted in an excess of sexual energy that needs to be used in ways that have nothing to do with reproduction.” The fact of this surplus opens the way to male spiritual and sexual pleasure (joie and volupté, respectively) by freeing it from biological and capitalist constraints. Such pleasure thus occurs outside the bourgeois economy of sex as a supplement—a male “overabundance, “prodigality, “wastage, or what Edmond Perrier called a “luxurious but unproductive expenditure.”

All these terms recall Georges Bataille’s theory of the accursed share.”

31. Gide, J-II, 384. Gide discusses this topic within the context of a conversation with Roger Martin Du Gard about men engaged in homosexual prostitution who are not homosexuals. See also Naomi Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 210-52. 32. Gide, Corydon, 137. Pliny was famous for having used this term to describe the hint of youth and manhood in the ancient Greek statue of the youthful Diadumenus, which he compared to the older Doryphorus. Patrick Pollard argues that Gide culled this information from Léon-Maxime Collignon’s Historie de la sculpture grecque, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1892-97); see Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist, 407-8. Gide’s reference to Pliny hints at the affinities between his theory of pédérastie in Corydon and Winckelmann’s aesthetics. 33. Gide, Corydon, 112.

34. [bid., 53-59. 35. Gide quotes Edmond Perrier yet leaves out the parts I indicate here in square brackets: “The female sex is therefore in some sense the sex of physiological foresight [of economy, of richness]; the male

sex, that of sumptuous but unproductive expenditure [of living day to day, and too often, misery]”; Corydon, 8-59. The original quote is from Edmond Perrier’s 1905 address to the Museum d histoire naturelle, published as “La Parure,” Feuilleton du Temps, 26 October 1905, kept in folder 885, AG-BLJD. Gide kept two further articles by Perrier in this folder, which are reprinted in Goulet, “Le Dossier préparatoire de Corydon,” 434-39. See also Georges Bataille, La Part maudite [1949] in Oeuvres completes, ed. Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 7; and John d’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michéle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 467-76; and Pollard, “Perrier,” in André Gide: Homosexual Moralist, 112-15.

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“Pleasure is not to such a degree related to its end that it couldn't come apart from it and easily emancipate itself,” Gide boldly declared.*° In his journals and novels Gide frequently described ideal male pleasure as being free of possession, penetration, and phallic energy. It is oceanic, without boundaries, selfless, void of difference, and based on utopic mutuality (qualities his critics frequently described as narcissistic). In Si

le grain ne meurt, for example, Gide famously described a situation in Algeria in which he watched his friend Eugéne Rouart violently possess a former lover of his own, Mohammed. Gide could see only Eugéne's massive coat, which dominated Mohammed's tiny body; he wanted to scream in horror. “For me, who only understands pleasure face to face, reciprocally and without violence, and for whom often, as with Whitman, the most furtive contact suffices, I was horrified both by Eugene's game and to see Mohammed lend himself to it so complacently.”*’ This often-cited story gives evidence of Gide’s fear of possession and his association of penetration with aggression and violence. It also points to the role of surfaces, skin, and touch in Gide's libidal economy and to his pre-

dilection for experiencing pleasure through spontaneous encounters. Gide referred to uranists as “men of surface” (des superficiels), recalling his preference for the sensuality of touch, as Naomi Segal has shown.** Gide equated pleasure with a sensual blurring of flesh in which his body and another lost their distinctiveness and merged pleasurably without a trace of violence.” The passage above from Si le grain ne meurt led to endless speculation among Gide's biographers about the nature of his sexual relationships and whether they ever went beyond the aesthetic pleasure of watching boys or

the sensual enjoyment of their caresses. In their attempts to ground Gide's radical vision of male pleasure in actual sexual practice, scholars frequently conflated Gide's fictional narrators’ voices with his own in

36. Gide, Corydon, 48. 37. Gide, Si le grain se meurt, in Souvenirs et voyages, 312.

38. Gide, quoted in Claude Courouve, Vocabulaire de l'homosexualité masculine (Paris: Payot, 1985), 203; Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 199. I could not corroborate this source. 39. On Gide’s notion of bodily pleasure, see Sidonie Rivalin-Padiou, André Gide: A corps défendu (Paris: L Harmatton, 2002).

40. Several writers draw on Roger Martin du Gard’s report of an account Gide allegedly gave him of his sexual practices. See Roger Martin du Gard, Journal, ed. Claude Sicard (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), vol. 2, 232-33. See also Pierre Billard, André Gide et Marc Allégret: Le Roman secret (Paris: Plon, 2006), 71-87; Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 41-117; and Robert Triomphe, “Descente aux enfers et retour de l'URSS ou La Mythologie d’André Gide,” BAAG 11, no. 59 (July 1983): 406.

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researching how may have realized the pleasure he described in his own life. Following upon the problematic early psychoanalytical biography by Jean Delay, Naomi Segal theorized that Gide’s sexual etiology was established while masturbating with other boys in childhood, when he came to understand the experience of pleasure as something not created but rather belonging to the embodied self and related to the presence of boys who were not yet objects of his desire. She argues that later in life Gide continued to require the presence of another person without reciprocation or intimacy and that he experienced orgasm “along side” rather than “with’ a partner. “The motivation towards pleasure, she argues, “creates some kind of magnetism located arbitrarily but compulsively in another body.’ Segal concludes that Gide distinguished his pleasure from desire, and that he never actually desired anybody but was motivated rather by “undesire.” In some of his writings Gide seems to corroborate this view, as, for example, when he wrote at the end of his life that he had “never (at least as far as I have any recollection) lusted after anyone. ... my desires unfailingly respond to some appetite in the other person, which I sense, even without any signals.’* Just as often, however, Gide was wont to say the reverse. Gide’s celebration of pédéraste pleasure was revolutionary in his time, a

bold revision of the dominant literary representations of homosexuals as martyrs, victims, and remorseful sinners doomed to an early death. Decades before Michel Foucault called for a different economy of bodies and pleasures to replace the apparatus of sexuality and desire, and before David Halperin theorized pleasure as “a form of resistance to the apparatus of sexuality,’ Gide proposed a pédéraste pleasure liberated from the sexual constraints of his time and articulated as a persistent reminder of their epistemological and erotic limits.“* He also articulated a vision of pédéraste “love” (amour )—a word he used loosely to describe sex, feeling, desire, pleasure, and aspects of

mutual experience with another man. Gide’s contemporary supporter Ramon Fernandez claimed that Gide'’s exaltation of “homosexual love” was one of the most beautiful aspects of his work, one entirely lacking in Proust.

41. Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 65, 52, 216, 342-64. Bersani speaks about Gide's practice in relation to L’Immoraliste as “homosexuality without sexuality, desire that is satisfied just by the proximity of the other, at the most by the other's touch”; Bersani, Homos, 121. 42. Gide, Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits, 1070. Gide is explaining in this passage how he only falls

for people who he knows want him, thus avoiding the suffering of unrequited lust. 43. Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 106-12. 44, See Jean Le Bitoux, “Le Gay Savoir: Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” La revue h 2 (Autumn 1996): 44-45; Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 1; Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault,’ 94-95; and Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

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“Corydon calls our attention,’ he reminded French readers, “awkwardly perhaps, but vividly, to the felicitous aspects of homosexual love’’* Yet there are deeply troublesome ethical dimensions to Gide’s defense

of pédérastie, which in part explain why it has continued to cause such outrage and divisiveness among his critics. In the 1960s Paul de Man per-

ceived that Gide's aesthetic self-absorption had led him to confuse a “human being considered as conscious, moral person and as an object for erotic gratification.’ Bersani more recently argued that Gide “plays dangerously with the terms of sexual relations” in L'Immoraliste and that he radically eliminates from sex “the necessity of any relation whatsoever. Gide established “intimacies devoid of intimacy” and sensual relationships “uncontaminated bya psychology of desire.’ His pédérastie was narcissistic—a

narcissistic expansion of skin—and created “a lawless pederasty” that “rejected personhood’; Bersani ultimately rejected it as a basis for gay community.*’ Segal has argued that Gide cared little for either his partner’s or his own happiness and that what he experienced was therefore not pleasure but rather an “evocation of excess” understood as a desire “to be

emptied, or purged, cleansed, and cleared of that internal irritation of desire which makes him uncomfortable.’** Michael Lucey comments that desire seems to come from elsewhere for Gide and that it led him to abdi-

cate responsibility for his actions and ignore the needs of his sexual objects.” Jonathan Dollimore likewise associates Gide’s “ecstatic or intoxicating drive toward the pastoral” with blindness toward others, neglect of sexual politics and power relations, and loss of history.*° Many of these criticisms reflect an insufhcient framework for discussing the ethics of cruising or casual sex. Such a framework is necessary for a study of Gide, however, for he had a predilection for the “chase,’ pursuit of young men rather than the possession of them, and he loved the idea of “prowling” (roder). “For him,” Pierre Herbart wrote, “the sexual chase has to be brief, furtive, and unfinished.”*' Bersani describes the social relations 45. Fernandez, André Gide, 208.

46. Paul de Man, “Whatever Happened to André Gide?,” New York Review of Books 4 (6 May 1965S): 1S—17; and Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 183-87, 195.

47. Bersani, Homos, 122-25, 128. 48. Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 46. 49. Lucey, Gides Bent, 75-90. $0. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Claren-

don Press, 1991), 340. 51. Pierre Herbart, A la recherche d’André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 23-24. In 1936 Herbart married Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, the mother of Gide'’s daughter, Catherine. She believed that his commentary on Gide was biased. See Catherine Gide, Entretiens 2002-2003, with Jean-Pierre Prévost, Jean-Claude Perrier, Dominique Iseli, and Jér6me Chenus (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 28-30.

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in a cruising situation as that of two people who know each other—in the sense that they recognize each other's desire and sense their membership in a community—yet, because they are strangers, do not know each other

as individuals. It is this “knowing and not knowing that facilitates the

extraordinary democratization of sex in gay cruising, Bersani has written.” John Ricco went several steps further by exploring the ethical, erotic, and political potential of anonymous sex between men, which he sees to reside in the refusal of “many codes, protocols, laws and imperatives.’ He proposes what he calls a “New Pornography” or “logic of the

lure’-—which would take into account the ethics of anonymous and fleeting physical encounters. His approach offers a potential corrective to the uncomprehending judgments of many of Gide’s early biographers.» As his Perséphone shows, Gide remained acutely aware that pleasure does not exist in a vacuum or outside the realm of social interaction. In Gide’s account of the incident involving Mohammed, for example, Segal noted the use of the word “furtive,” which she points out “connotes both the lightness of ‘fleeting’ and the more sneaky meaning of ‘furtive,’ thus suggesting something beyond self-absorbed pleasure. “The touch can be less caressive than coercive,’ she concludes.** Lucey similarly discussed the complex politics of Gide’s relationship to African boys, who may have felt more resistance to Gide than he perceived and whose acquiescence to him was necessarily inflected by the economic, political, and social power differential between them.» In other words, Gide’s pleasure involved negotiations of power in which his partners consented to take part and that most often began with the initial ethical gesture of another man reaching out to him by engaging sensually with his body. These encounters could be transitory, fleeting, and disrupted yet nevertheless remained for Gide an intersubjective social experience that led him to pleasure as a way of understanding his self in relationship to others. Gide believed that pédérastes could integrate themselves socially by pledging service to their community, state, and country—an attitude brilliantly identified by Didier Eribon.°° The narrator in Corydon praises modern French pédérastes for assuming the historic Greek role of teaching

52. Bersani, Homos, 147-48. 53. John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xix—xxii, esp. xxii (Ricco’s description of his own experience). 54. Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 5S. 55. Lucey, Gide's Bent, 143-80. 56. Didier Eribon, “Pédérastie et pédagogie: André Gide, la Gréce, et nous,” in Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité, 148. See also Bersani, Homos, 113-81.

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morals, culture, art, and love to young men. In the tradition of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, pederasts educated young men in the art of pleasure and guided them in their decisions about the nature of their sexual desire.*’ By diverting the adolescents’ attention away from women they did society

a great service—kept women pure, hindered the spread of prostitution,

and protected the institution of marriage. The sensual instruction of boys was a noble venture: Gide understood it as a form of spiritual procreation in the tradition of Plato's Symposium; he as a pédéraste pedagogue brought forth, that is, gave birth to, virtuous men through the process of a noble education.’ Yet whereas Plato famously argued that the pédéraste’s love of a boy is only the first stage in a process that will eventually lead him to love of beauty beyond the flesh, Gide fluctuated between agreeing with

Plato and celebrating pédéraste erotic relations as beautiful in and of themselves. In his own life he realized the Greek model of the pederast as master and teacher in his relationship with Marc Allégret. He liked to think of Allégret as one of his disciples or “descendents’—the first in a line of pederastic heredity free of women and outside the frame of French laws of kinship.°' By inventing a pédéraste alternative to heterosexual rules of

heredity, Gide defended pederasts against the angry natalists who were leading the charge against pédérastie in his time.” Gide found his dream ofa life of pédéraste pleasure and noble communitarian service realized in Africa, which he visited at key moments in the 57. In linking pédérastie with ancient Greece, Gide directly opposed the Catholic writers who argued that Greek civilization culminated in the acceptance of Christianity and that its pédérastie was a mistake associated with a misguided love of nature. See, for example, a book popular among Perséphone's collaborators: G. K. Chesterton, Saint Francoise d‘Assise, trans. Isabelle Riviére (Paris: Plon, 1925). 58. Numerous critics have noted the misogynist, elitist, and homophobic nature of this social plan, which pathologized inverts and denied female pleasure or agency. Gide inadvertently equated pederasty with prostitution, implying that if men could content themselves with other men they would thus protect the honor of women. He also countered Léon Blum’s well-known argument in Du mariage (1907) for accepting female sexual activity before marriage. See, for example, Lucille Cairns, “Gide's Corydon: The Politics of Sexuality and Sexual Politics,’ Modern Language Review 91 (1996): 582-96. Didier Eribon, by contrast, praises Gide for his pedagogical goals and transforming the dominant French dis-

course on sexuality by representing pédérastie differently than in such literature of his time as, for example, the popular novels of Jean Lorrain and Rachilde; Eribon, “Pédérastie et pédagogie,’ 133-37. 59. Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 16.

60. Gide celebrates the chastity of pédéraste relationships in Corydon, 136. He writes here that “I say that this love, if it is deep, tends toward chastity, but only, it goes without saying, if it reabsorbs desire into itself—something simple friendship never achieves. Then this love can be the child's best invitation to courage, work and virtue.’ 61. See Leo Bersani, “Pedagogy and Pederasty,” Raritan S, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 17. 62. Martha Hanna argues: “In sum, Gide defended pédérastie—the only type of homosexuality he judged “normal’—as honorable by associating it with those ideals most consistently valorized in France during the Great War: martial valor, classical culture, and familial reproduction.” See Hanna, “Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon,’ 205.

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development of his sexual subjectivity. Africa vied with Greece as a place

of envisioned pédéraste community, and African boys competed with Greek sculpture as fulfilling Gide’s ideal of male beauty. In his youth Gide had felt alienated as a pédéraste in France, and that is why he sought community, pleasure, and love in Africa. He had relished the liberating effects of dépaysement, of being liberated from his own country and thus free to explore sexual subjectivities forbidden or disdained there.® In Africa he chose partners who were radically different from him in age, race, class, privilege, education, affect, and even sexuality—but not in gender. In this

way he established difference within same-sex relationships without falling into the trap of dominant heterosexual or homosexual gender binaries. Jonathan Dollimore speaks in this sense of Gide's early experience of Africa as “one of the most significant narratives of homosexual liberation.“ Africa served as a place where Gide could experiment with and negotiate the contours of his pédéraste subjectivity. There were many reasons why Africa provided such an amenable playground for Gide to realize his vision of pédéraste pleasure. The continent was sufficiently foreign to him yet also, given that he was a wealthy foreigner from the colonial motherland, “in his control”; consequently he felt that he could fashion it to meet his most fantastic expectations. For decades he exoticized Africa as the mysterious land of Les Mille et Une Nuits and participated wholeheartedly in a tradition of French colonial sex tourism, even though, as Lucey has noted, even by the 1890s North Africa was no longer the imagined place of escape from European forms of sociality.°° Gide thought of the country as “malleable,” transformable to suit his needs, and capable of lending itself to his dreams of oceanic blurring with nature. There he could explore sexual pleasure free of obligation.

In his writings, the objects of his desire often remain mute and without depth, serving as little more than beautiful sensual stimulants for the pleasure he is articulating. “I would want to forget everything, live a long time among the naked blacks | négres], among people whose language I would not understand and who would not know who I was; and Id like to fornicate savagely, silently, at night, with whomever, there, on the sand,’ Gide

63. Anne-Marie C. Hampton, “Gide, Maran, Céline et l'Afrique: Exotisme, Colonialisme et Humanisme,’ PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1995, 85. See also Phyllis Clark, “Gide's Africa,’ South Central Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 56-73; and Paulette Hacker’s somewhat unusual Gide’s Entanglements: Weaving In and Out of Africa (Paris: Editions Lanore, 2007). 64. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 12. 6S. Lucey, Gide'’s Bent, 146.

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wrote later in life.°° He dreamt of his life ending in a state of perfect, obliv-

ious union with the beautiful African boy Mala.®’ Robert Triomphe thought that Gide conceived of his relationship to all foreign countries in terms of eating a symbolically forbidden fruit and succumbing to sexual temptation. “I like a country only if multiple occasions for fornicating present themselves,’ Gide wrote provocatively in 1939, “The most beautiful monuments in the world cannot replace that; why not just admit it

frankly?” Gide had complex feelings for the peoples of Africa—a mixture of empathy and afhnity but also superiority and condescension. His colonialist view of Africans depended, even later in his life, on Levy Bruhl’s prejudicial La Mentalité primitive.” Africans “have remained in a primitive state, Gide explained to French audiences, “and one of the most difficult things for civilized European souls to accept is the extreme difficulty they have individuating and becoming separate from one another.’” He also described Africans as suffering but unaware of their state and in need of

guidance by Westerners.”' And yet at the same time he felt profound empathy for them. Gide traveled to East Africa and the Congo in 1926 with a much more developed sense of his ethical responsibility as a pédéraste. He went on this trip as an official guest of colonial administrators, and he was eager to investigate and document Africa's natural beauties as a good French 66. Gide, entry for 13 May 1937, in J-H, 556. Gide describes here how lost he feels after having sent his latest project to his publishers. In Si le grain ne meurt Gide wrote: “Africa! | repeated this mysterious word. I inflated it with terrors, appealing horrors, expectations, and my gaze plunged passionately in the hot night in search of an oppressing promise all wrapped in lightening bolts.” André Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, in Souvenirs et voyages, 273.

67. “Sweet little Mala! On my deathbed it is your amused laugh and your joy that I should most like to see again’; Gide, Ainsi soit-il ou Les Jeux sont faits, in Souvenirs et voyages, 10S0-S1.

68. André Gide, Carnets d’Egypte [1939] in Journal 1939-1949: Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1052. Gide writes this in a passage admitting that he has lost his interest in sex. See Robert Triomphe, “Descente aux enfers et retour de l'URSS ou La Mythologie d’André Gide,” 398. 69. Hampton, “Gide, Maran, Céline et Afrique,’ 74. After returning from the Congo in 1926 Gide wrote an article for the German journal Koralle in which he described the “savage, the primitive” as “a naked humanity without history, a virgin nature never yet enslaved; the spectacle of man and nature short of culture. Nothing but possibilities and promises instead of accomplishments”; Gide, quoted in Daniel Durosay, “Retrouvé a Berlin: Reise zum Kongo,’ BAAG 89, no. 21 (January 1991): 21. See also Anny Wynchank, “Fantasmes et fantomes: André Gide et Michel Leiris en Afrique,’ BAAG 22, no. 101 (1994): 87. Wynchank gathers numerous convincing quotes documenting Gide’s primitivist view of Africans. 70. André Gide, “Conférence de Bruxelles,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 23 June 1928; reprinted in BAAG 16, no. 80 (1988): 35.

71. African disease and deformity were also common topics of conversation among Gide and his friends; see Gide, entry for 22 September 1926, in Voyage au Congo, reprinted in Souvenirs et voyages, 361.

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explorer and naturalist should. Yet he experienced a change of heart after witnessing the human rights abuses committed against African workers by the concession companies that ran the rubber business in the Oubangui-

Chari region. “The tenacious pursuit of exoticism with which Gide started out [his trip to Africa in 1926] was immediately disappointed,

)Y

and was followed by the dawning of a painful political awareness which instilled in him agonizing feelings of guilt,” Phyllis Clark writes.” Frustrated by what he saw, Gide resolved to commit himself politically to the suffering workers. He fought African exploitation on a governmental level when he returned home, and as a result of the controversy he created, the managerial structure of the companies changed and the French government canceled the concessionary companies’ contracts.” Despite his political commitment, Gide neither rejected French colonialism nor wished to abolish it.“* “Now I know that our Western civilization (I was going to say: French [civilization] ) is not only simply the most beautiful; [rather] I believe, I know that it is the only one—yes better even than Greece, of which we are the sole heirs,’ he wrote in his diary during a trip to Turkey in 1914, and though he modified that point of view he never fundamentally changed it.” Walter Putnam and others have described Gide’s politics in this respect as somewhere between anti-colonialism and nationalism.” During his 1926 trip he displayed a paradoxical mix of pleasure in and service to Africa that Michael Lucey describes as a “piggyback-

ing” of a “public, political quest on a personal, psychic one.’’”’ Robert Triomphe argues similarly that Gide found two ways to satisfy his desire: 72. Clark, “Gide's Africa,” 69. 73. See the extensive documentation included in the appendices and notes to Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad in Souvenirs et voyages, 657-707, 1194-297. 74. See Clark, “Gide’s Africa,” 67-68; and Martin Guiney, “The Unrepentant Prodigal: Gide's Classical Politics and Republican Nationalism, 1897-1909,” in André Gide’s Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence, ed. Tom Conner (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 23-46. 75. Gide, entry for 12 May 1914, in J-I, 785-86. Gide engaged little with the anti-colonial literature of his time, which includes Marcel Homet’s Congo, Terre de souffrances (1934) and Victor Augagneur’s Erreurs et brutalités coloniales (1927). Yet he also rejected the nationalism of Africanist books like Paul

Morand’s De Paris 4 Tombouctou (1929), Roland Lebel’s Histoire de la littérature coloniale en France (1931), and Maurice Martin du Gard’s Courrier d’Afrique (1931). See Hans-Jiirgen Liisebrink, “Gide l’Africain: Réception franco-allemande et signification de Voyage au Congo et du Retour du Tchad dans la

littérature mondiale,” BAAG 24, no. 112 (October 1996): 365-66, 367. 76. Walter Putnam, “Writing the Wrongs of French Colonial Africa: Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad,” in André Gides Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence, 89-110. See also Lucey, Gide’ Bent, 155. Gide'’s Voyage au Congo nevertheless initiated a new European discourse on Africa and enabled a “prise

de parole” for such African writers as Bernard Nanga. See Nanga, La Trahison de Marianne (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africains, 1984); and Liisebrink, “Gide l'Africain,” 364-65. 77. Lucey, Gides Bent, 170. Naomi Segal speaks of Gide’s “touristic pederasty” in André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy, 114.

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pédérastie and the social role of a writer and activist. The consequence was that “one day the Africa of desire became an object of pity.’”* Gide discovered in East Africa and the Congo not only an alternative erotic space in which to experience pédéraste pleasure but also a forum for his ambiguous pédéraste political commitment.

M@ WRITING A PEDERASTE SUBJECTIVITY During the 1920s Gide experimented with multiple strategies for articulating his pédéraste subjectivity through his writings. Many scholars have

emphasized that his struggle for pédéraste rights took place within language and discourse; Corydon, for example, opens with Gide’s lamenting a recent French translation of Whitman’ss poetry that erased its homo-

erotic subtext and thus robbed it of its potential as a source of French homosexual identification.” He constructed his pédéraste self by noting his thoughts in extensive journals, collecting quotations and newspaper articles pertinent to pédérastie, and creating bricolage or texts based on found materials yet shaped with sincerity. Gide articulated pédéraste desire using other techniques as well. He remained flexible in how he represented it, fluctuating between precise naturalistic description, realism, self-reflexive contemplation, and direct confessions at one extreme, and elusive suggestion, fictional portrayal, pastoral fantasy, and sublimated or masked emotion in classic forms at the other.*° In Corydon Gide announced his pédérastie directly in a dry, naturalistic, but also ironic tone—a strategy that proved nothing short of revolutionary in allowing his text to resist the relishing gaze of his detractors. He told no secrets, offered no sexual details, and remained so painstakingly naturalistic in his descriptive approach that there was nothing remotely tantalizing to capture prurient interests or what Daniel Guérin has called the “unhealthy curiosity” of his hostile yet voyeuristic audiences.” In his autobiography Si le grain ne meurt and “first” (in his assessment) novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs Gide took an entirely different approach,

78. Triomphe, “Descente aux enfers et retour de l'URSS ou La Mythologie d’André Gide,” 375. 79. Gide, Corydon, 17-19. For a discussion of this passage, see Didier Eribon, “Pédérastie et péda-

gogie, 113-14, 117. 80. For two foundational essays on this topic, see Jonathan Dollimore, “Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide,” Textual Practice 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 48-67; and Wallace Fowlie, “Sexuality in Gide's Self-Portrait,’ in Homosexualities and French Literature, 243-61.

81. Daniel Guérin, quoted in Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 52. Guérin is describing the attitude of the French press in general toward homosexuality.

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however, developing literary strategies that represented pédérastie while at the same time eluding its representation, thus offering models of what John Ricco has proposed as the “disappearing aesthetics” of same-sex desire.” Although it is difficult to define Gide’s literary strategies for represent-

ing pédérastie because of their fluidity and multiplicity, four themes emerge as important to Perséphone: his construction of pédéraste subjectivity, continued use of found materials or pédéraste models, expression of pleasure, and introduction of the acte gratuit or “free act,’ with which his

main protagonists express desire and test the limits of their pédéraste selves. The first, “construction of subjectivity,’ refers to Gide’s practice of allowing the fictional characters in his novels to develop a pédéraste sub-

jectivity through their actions in a process that led in unexpected directions and to unknown outcomes. Jonathan Dollimore has noted how diametrically opposed Gide's writing strategies are in this respect to those of Oscar Wilde, who promoted the more contemporary idea of sexuality as a construction or performance based on an antiessentialist, socially disobedient, and decentered sense of self.*? Whereas Gide extolled the virtues of sincerity and depth, Wilde celebrated artifice, surface, and the theatrics of sexual performance—a difference that Gide’s friend Charles Du Bos highlighted as that between the “protean element,’ the “subject of Gide,” and the “figure of Wilde.”

If one agrees with Linda Martin Alcoff’s definition of the difference between identity and subjectivity as that between “the sense one has of oneself as seen by others and of one’s own self-perception, or between ones third person and first-person selves,’ it could be said that Gide was primarily concerned with constructing pédérastie from the inside out as a subjective experience of self, rather than as a third-person representational, political, social category or performed “identity” (though this was

82. Ricco, The Logic of the Lure, 30-66. Ricco argues that a queer aesthetics would strive to be “loyal to loss [in the gay community through AIDS] by not recuperating it through artistic practice. Art’s work then, would be an unworking of the artifactuality of the work of art—a disappeared aesthetics.” “A disappeared aesthetics is precisely that aesthetics which cannot not visualize, and which persistently and defiantly approaches its potentiality to not visualize, to forget, to be rendered blind. In this way, it materializes visuality itself, as the pure potential of visuality, that is, its potentiality to visualize and to notvisualize. It is an attenuation of the visual, and, simultaneously, a persistence of the visual in the midst of

imperceptibility” (41). 83. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 26, 78. Bersani challenges Dollimore’s notion of Gide’s pédéraste

essentialism in Homos, 118-20. Christopher Lane does a remarkable job of reviewing these issues in “Uncertain Terms of Pleasure,’ Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 807-26. 84. Charles Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide (Paris: Au sans pareil, 1929), 239-41.

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not a term used in interwar France).** Gide understood pédérastie as a

humanistically grounded sensibility, or “innate taste,” that men develop in the course of their lives through introspective study, applied learning, and experience.*° He believed that he could develop his sexual subjectivity through a daily practice of constant naturalist observation.

His character Corydon similarly describes how young homosexuals “invent themselves” by following their inner voice to develop and realize their sexuality. Even when they mimic or imitate others, Corydon claims, they do so because they “want to imitate; [because] the example flattered [their] secret taste.’*’ We can conclude from these remarks that Gide thought that a man’s sexuality is an expression of his

inner self and reflects the values and notion of selthood of Western humanist culture. Gide’s emphasis on the subjective experience of his sexuality can be seen as a reaction against the scientific categorization of sexualities in his time. From the moment he came out publicly he was confronted with critics who tried to define his character on the basis of his choice of sexual

object, from which they presumed to be able to deduce his psychology and define his character. René Schwob, for example, claimed that he could identify Gide’s “homosexuality” and the “affect” associated with it based on analysis of Gide’s facial and bodily expressions in photographs.** The sexological discovery of the homosexual, according to Jeffrey Weeks, pro-

vided “a name, an etiology, and potentially the embryos of an identity” and “marked off a special homosexual type of person, with distinctive 85. Linda Martin Alcoff, “Who's Afraid of Identity Politics,’ in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 337; quoted in Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 6.

86. Although the idea of a “homosexual subjectivity” has remained unpopular since the gay and lesbian civil rights movement of the 1960s, this was not the case in 1930s France, when writers like Gide were drawn to it as a means of countering essentialist labeling from their many detractors. In “Homo-

sexuality’s Closet” Halperin points out that one of the inadvertent consequences of the quest for gay “identity” after the 1969 Stonewall uprising was that gay affect, feeling, and sensibility became taboo subjects for contemporary scholars. He links the notion ofa gay “sensibility” to Susan Sontag’s article on Camp from 1964 and acknowledges the difficulty of talking about gayness in light of political-theoretical critiques of gay essentialism and the “forms of elitism and exclusion often bound up with them” (3-4, 12-14). Heather Love acknowledges a similar resistance to discussing gay affect and subjectivity in current scholarship, a trend she tries to counter in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 31-52.

87. Gide, Corydon, 41-42. Gide is speaking here specifically of how homosexuals recognize the

nature of their “love” when all the models they are given in theaters, books, or newspapers are heterosexual. 88. Pierre Angel, ed., Lettres inédites sur l'inquiétude moderne, with a preface by Maurice Mignon (Paris: Les Editions Universelles, 1951), 104.

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physiognomy, tastes, and potentialities.””’ To assume this identity, David

Halperin argues, object choice for homosexuals had to function as a marker of difference and be connected with “a psychology, an inner orientation of the individual, not just an aesthetics or a form of erotic connoisseurship.””? Gide resisted such identifications. He did not believe that a person's sexuality could be revealed through his or her physiology, and he

was not always sure whether he wanted to identify his pédérastie with same-sex desire or object choice. He preferred to remain “unmarked’—to borrow the term later introduced by Peggy Phelan to describe nonvisual means of articulating identity, and which in Gide’s case refers to his desire

to develop his subjectivity subtly and ambiguously in his writing and practice studied irreverence and contradictory behavior in identifying himself as a pédéraste, in spite of the bold proclamations of Corydon.”' Gide formulated his notion of humanist pédéraste subjectivity by appealing to models in art, poetry, theater, and literature with which he felt

an affinity or that reflected his experience. He constructed pédéraste subjectivity out of a vast number of clues, which he gathered with the zeal and passion of a bibliophile (see chapter 1 ). He dedicated his life to

a literary “apprenticeship and creation of self” that took place in dialogue with and in opposition to two of the most famous writers on male same-sex love in his day: Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust.” Gide found affirmative models for his pédéraste subjectivity outside of this circle of competitive creative tension, however, in Plato's Symposium, Plutarch, Goethe, Hafiz, Virgil, Montesquieu, Walt Whitman, the sculpture of ancient Greece, and Renaissance art.

89. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1988), 92-93. 90. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault,’ 118. 91. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) 1-33. Leo Bersani identifies this attitude in Gide's LImmoraliste, whose main protagonist Michael “knows and doesn't know” that he is a pédéraste, and whose discovery of his own sexuality is presented as a secret. Bersani proposes that “the profound interest of The Immoralist is Michel's homosexuality, and that if the transparent secret of his love for boys creates so much troubled confusion, it is not because his guiltridden consciousness won't allow him to accept his pederasty, but because he doesn’t know what he is in

being a pederaste.” Bersani perceptively calls this an “unmistakable but indefinable pederasty’—a phrase that matches Gide’s own perceptions of himself; see Bersani, Homos, 115-16. 92. Didier Eribon, “Pédérastie et pédagogie,” 114, 121. Many writers in the 1920s confirmed the importance of Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe in initiating a discussion of homosexuality in French literature. Francois Porché singled out Proust's creation of the representative figure of Charlus in the NRF in 1914 and in Sodome et Gomorrhe in 1921 as the “Edit de Nantes” or definitive moment for “nonconformists, who no longer had to hide away in some “hell” of the library in search of models but now saw their

culture enter the public sphere. See Porché, L'Amour qui nose dire son nom (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1927), 10. See also Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 115-19.

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The most important model of pédérastie for Gide’s Symbolist genera-

tion was that of ancient Greece, which Gide probably came to know through sources like Hippolyte Taine’s essay on “Les Jeunes Gens de Plato” (1855), the psychologist Laurent Dugas’s L’Amitié antique in its first unabridged edition from 1894, and Le Livre damour des anciens (1911).°3 In Corydon Gide suggested that because of its inherently joyous nature, love between men rarely appeared in ancient Greek tragedies or drama but found its most vivid expression in lyric poetry. Virgil's eclogues ceased to exist as a lyric form when poets stopped being in love with the shepherd, Corydon wistfully remembers, suggesting that bucolic lyric forms expressed specific forms of same-sex desire.”

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Gide’s literary project of writing his pédéraste subjectivity was the way he expressed his desire and pleasure. Rather than describe sexual acts, he alluded to either the anticipation or the memory of them—the split second before or after he or his characters realize or remember the sensation of their desire.” In the twentieth century such moments of anticipated pleasure became emblematic of a certain kind of homoerotic literary experience—captured most famously in Foucault’s description of that split second before or after temptation that he likened to saying goodbye to a lover as he climbs into a taxi.® Many of Gide’s contemporaries noticed his tendency to focus on the anticipation of desire and

associated this negatively with his ambiguity, inconsistency, tendency to change his opinions, and superficial engagement with his topics—behaviors I believe Gide engaged in knowingly to evade the

judgmental fixing of his sexuality. The editor of the complete edition of Gide’s works, Louis Martin-Chauffier, has argued that “the 93. Hippolyte Taine, “Les Jeunes Gens de Plato” [1855], in Essais de critique et d'histoire, 14th ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1923), 49-83; Laurent Dugas, L’Amitié antique d'aprés les moeurs populaires et les théories des philosophes (Paris: F. Alcan, 1894); and Le Livre damour des anciens (Paris: Bibliothéque des curieux, 1911). Gide read Taine’s essay in 1891. Although Patrick Pollard claims that Gide never dis-

cussed Dugas, I include him here because of his widespread importance for nonconformists; see Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist, 141-75, 187. Pollard also notes the influence of Moritz Hermann Eduard Meier, Histoire de lamour grec dans lantiquité, trans. L.-R. de Pogey-Castries (Paris: Stendhal et

compagnie, 1930); Ernest Renan’s “Priére sur lAcropole” (1865); and works of John Addington Symonds. 94. Gide, Corydon, 106, 121.

95. Jean Walter gives an interesting analysis of Gide'’s propensity for describing events around actions in “Action et poésie chez Maurice Barrés et M. André Gide,” Foi et vie (15 October 1930): 1070-79; this article is kept in Gide's collection of reviews of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, AG-BLJD. 96. See Love, Feeling Backward, 51 (and the section “At Night,’ 46-52). For two very different interpretations of this tradition, see Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2003); and Ricco, The Logic of the Lure.

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obsession of the moment that resisted duration was essential to understanding Gide.””’ And Francois Porché commented that Gide always left his “poor readers” stranded at the entrance to a Moorish café, or in the desert, while he disappears into the building or the distance, offering readers only “landscapes seen in the hour that precedes desire or in the hour that follows it, without the particularities of desire having been spoken, and without its hour itself having been shown.” This gave Gide’s texts, in his opinion, “a frisson, | their] colors an enraptured core.’”* Through suggestion, anticipation, and fleeting memory of desire, Gide pushes the limits of intelligibility that are possible within his understated classical prose. In pursuit of what Jean-Marie Jadin calls “something so infinitesimal as to be nothing at all,” Gide edges closer to the ephemeral

truth of his pédérastie.” Emily Apter describes this effect in terms of Gide’s attraction to “textual equivalents for marginality, difference and dispossession, which she sees as a reflection of his interest in cruising nomadic and disenfranchised populations in Algeria. “The seduction of the margin is what ultimately draws out the gap of Gide’s hyperbole, luring it from its dignified retreat into classical askesis,” she writes.'”° Jadin em-

phasizes the transformative potential of this utopic chase by dwelling on Gide’s fascination with George Sand’s short story about the Gribouille, who jumps into the water as a metaphor for desire and annihilates his self

by metamorphosing into a tree.'’' Michael Lucey similarly identified Gide’s desire with “subjectless vision, a frustratingly impossible temporality, an unspeakable pleasure, and the approach of death.’’*’ Daniel Moutote associates such epistemological uncertainty with Gide's literary technique of the mise en abyme—a term for which Gide notably chose an archaic spelling. “Mise en abyme’ refers to the practice of telling the story of a novel within the novel or, as in the most famous case of Les FauxMonnayeurs, through layers of self-reflexive stories within stories and through the journalistic reflection on the novel, in a manner that causes

97. Louis Martin-Chauffier, “André Gide et la sincérité,” in Les Cahiers de la quinzaine 6, no. 20 (5 April 1930): 17. 98. Porché, LAmour gui rose dire son nom, 183. 99. Jean-Marie Jadin, André Gide et sa perversion (Paris: Editions Arcanes, 1995), 37. I find this book extremely problematic. 100. Emily Apter, André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1987), me 01. Jadin, André Gide et sa perversion, 55; and Rivalin-Padiou, André Gide: A corps défendu, 113-19. 102. Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 164.

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infinite reflection on the self. Moutote argues, in synchrony with Jadin and other scholars, that Gide opened up this unending chain of reflection as a means of unraveling and thus approaching the truth of his pédéraste “secret” or desire.’ Gide’s characters sometimes enter this world of Goethean “elective affinities, anticipated desire, attraction, and infinite reflection through what he called actes gratuits (free acts) unmotivated, wholly irresponsible actions, an aspect of fictional character development he had earlier explored in such works as Le Prométhée mal enchainé and Paludes and in Lacfordia’s free act of murder in Les Caves du Vatican. An acte gratuit was a disinterested act committed by fictional character for unknown or inde-

cipherable reasons, having less to do with external circumstances than with the complexity of human nature. “I don’t think I believe |in disinterestedness |,” Gide wrote in response to a published critique of acte gratuit in 1927, “but imagine that an individual’s potentialities and inner meteorology remain a bit more complicated than [the critics] ordinarily make them and that what [they] call the bad potentialities are not all egocentric.”'°* Often Gide or one of his characters comment on the acte gratuit within the text, allowing it to affect the very process of writing itself. An acte gratuit could result in gratuitous narrative development, illogical consequences of events, and improbable coincidences, or what Sartre, using Gide’s own genre designation for Les Caves du Vatican, called “soties.’'° Gide and his contemporaries associated the acte gratuit with the anxiousness of his political, pédéraste self. Actes gratuits were his way of “reacting against immobility,» Daniel-Rops argued, or of battling “the sphinxes of conformism,” as Gide told Ramon Fernandez.'®° Charles Du

Bos saw the acte gratuit as a form of “abandonment of self” that he equated with “trouble,” and which he thought emanated from the “zone

103. Daniel Moutote, André Gide: Esthétique de la création littéraire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1993), 71-84. 104. Gide, entry for 1 May 1927, in J-II, 29-30. Gide repeats this comment and gives a more indepth view of the acte gratuit in André Gide, Entretiens avec Jean Amrouche 1949, 4 CDs (Paris: Ina/ Radio France 1997). See also Marie-Denise Boros Azzi, “L’Acte gratuit: Une mise en abyme du processus créateur chez André Gide,” Modern Language Studies 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 124-34; and Lily Salz, “André Gide and the Problem of Engagement,” French Review 30, no. 2 (December 1956): 131-37. 10S. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Gide vivant [1951],” in Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 85-89; and Apter, André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality, 3-4.

106. Daniel-Rops, Notre inquiétude: Essais (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1927), 162; and André Gide to Ramon Fernandez, 1934, quoted in Delay, La Jeunesse d’‘André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1956-57), vol. 2,

549. Daniel-Rops is the pseudonym for Henri Jules Charles Petiot, a Catholic writer who supported André Gide.

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of Gidean perversity.’'°’ Gide argued that such “absurd” fictional acts and

narrative play did not imply esoteric meaninglessness, as many critics believed, but rather functioned as a catharsis or purgation for the author, the medium by which s/he sublimated life into art (as Gide had done with the Goethean melodrama in Proserpine). “Our actions attach themselves to us like light to phosphorus,’ Gide commented, hinting at his belief in the transformative potential of random acts.’ Through the acte gratuit Gide could express his pédéraste desire without aestheticizing or documenting it, thereby avoiding what he saw as the potential literary pitfalls of poésie pure or littérature engagée. By allowing his characters to

engage in free, unmediated acts he linked their personal experience of their sexuality to the political and material reality around them and thus found a node around which to express a sexual sense of human relations within the symbolic language of the classic French novel. Most of Gide’s

political detractors remained unconvinced of the efhicacy of the acte gratuit in this respect, however.

™ AGAINST THE GRAIN In the late 1920s and early 1930s Gide’s articulation of pédéraste subjectivity through writing took place against a backdrop of an abusive intellectual culture, in which critics had frequent recourse to the use of devastating insults. Didier Eribon has remarked insightfully that “Gide’s discourse [in

Corydon] is entirely under the influence of the homophobic violence against which he wishes to fight." Marcel Jouhandeau recognized this aspect of homosexual self-definition in his Christian study De l‘abjection, published in 1939, in which he described how impossible it was for homosexuals to escape the defining maneuvers of the insult, which stigma-

tized them, exerted discursive power over them, and led them to feel barred from the experiences of “normal” people.’° Eribon believes that 107. Charles du Bos, Approximations, quoted in Daniel-Rops, Notre inquiétude: Essais, 167, 169; and Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 244.

108. Gide, quoted in Daniel-Rops, Notre Inquiétude: Essais, 170. 109. Didier Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 316; translated by Michael Lucey as Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 224; and Louis-Georges Tin, ed., Dictionnaire de l’homophobie (Paris: Puf, 2003 ). In 1931 Louis Martin-Chauffier remarked that “Gide composes himself actually by opposing Catholicism. This responds to his need to be a sort of founder of morals, as a means of satisfying in himself the unsatisfied moralist he has never ceased to be. This is an artificial construction that I regret on multiple levels.” He hoped that “the insults that hurt him don’t make him stiff, or fix him in an attitude that he will not be able to recognize is artificial”; Martin-Chaufher, “André Gide et la sincérité,” 18, 19. 110. Marcel Jouhandeau, De labjection (Paris: Gallimard, 1939).

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insults functioned as “performative utterances” and contributed greatly both to gay self-definition and to gay subjectification in the twentieth century. The publication of Corydon, Si le grain ne meurt, and, most important, the novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs led to a French literary debate on “homosexual” representation that began in the late 1920s and raged on into the early 1930s, up to the time of the premiere of Perséphone.”' The debate on

homosexuality overlapped to some extent with the religious debates on anxiousness but involved a somewhat different set of intellectuals who addressed other constituencies and attracted other readers.''* The writers and critics involved in the literary debate expressed their views in several key publications. A passionate inquiry, “L Homosexualité en littérature” (Homosexuality in literature), was conducted by one of Gide’s most determined opponents, Eugéne Montfort, in the journal Marges in 1926; “Enquéte sur l’André Gide” (Inquiry into André Gide) was undertaken on the occasion of Gide’s sixtieth birthday by the journal Latinité in 1931; numerous essays appeared in such journals as Les Nouvelles littéraires and

L’En dehors; and countless independent monographs with limited distribution were published by Gide detractors, such former friends as Du Bos, and supporters like Francois-Paul Alibert and Ramon Fernandez.**’ Almost all of the authors identified themselves defensively as not being homosexual and emphasized that they were judging the literature they read from an outsider’s perspective. The fact that nonconformists had so little voice in critical literary discourse at the time led to a journalistic culture of voyeuristic homophobia driven by the wish to expose and document male same-sex practices for the purpose of moral critique. The prejudiced terms of the dialogue did not necessarily reflect general attitudes

111. Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 105-37. Gide kept a small collection of reviews of these three works in his archive. I found the reviews of Les Faux-Monnayeurs to be particularly critical of Gide’s articulation of his sexuality and pertinent to a discussion of his writing in the late 1920s.

112. Critics who reviewed Corydon tended to be sarcastic, mocking Gide’s enterprise rather than demanding repentance, as his Catholic detractors sometimes did. A small collection of these reviews is kept in AG-BLJD. In a bitterly sarcastic article Jean de Pierrefeu imagines what would happen if homosexuality became the norm and men were arrested for flirting with women. See Jean de Pierrefeu, “Les Bonnes feuilles: Dix ans apreés,” L’Oeuvre, 17 June 1930. See also Eva Ahlstedt, André Gide et le débat sur

l‘homosexualité de L’Immoraliste (1902) a Si le grain ne meurt (1926) (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1994), 71-94, and list of articles at 247-54. 113. See Eugéne Montfort, “L’Homosexualité en littérature,” Les Marges 3S, no. 141 (15 March 1926): 176-216; reprinted as “Enquete: L Homosexualité en littérature,” with an introduction by Patrick Cordon in Cahiers Gay-Kitsch-Camp 19 (1993): 7-67; and Jacques-Victor de Laprade and Jacques Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,” Latinité: Revue des pays d'occident 7, no. 1 (January-April 1931): 35-132. For a much fuller bibilography, see Ahlstedt, André Gide et le débat sur ’-homosexualité, 213-82.

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toward homosexuality in France, however: Daniel Guérin later remembered that Parisian social and night life was free of “antihomosexual prejudice” and that homosexuals themselves viewed the whole matter of their victimization with a good dose of “mundane cynicism.”'* The debate on Gide's literary representation of pédéraste sexuality found its most intense expression in the writings of renowned and au-

thoritative Christian critics and prolific writers such as Henri Massis and Charles Du Bos, who for years exchanged feuilletons, letters, jour-

nal articles, and monograph-length publications about the subject.'' Du Bos formulated his wholesale condemnation of Gide’s decision to come out publicly as a pédéraste in an experimental form of labyrinthine prose that resembled in some respects the stream-of-conscious philosophizing of Charles-Albert Cingria.'’® Writers, philosophers, and

medical doctors also published inflammatory pamphlets and essays against Corydon that sold well and probably reached a fairly broad public. This group included Porché, Camille Spiess, and Dr. Henri Drouin—a venereal disease expert who used the pseudonym Francois Nazier to publish his satirical pamphlet L-Anti-Corydon. The pamphlet consists of dialogues among Sappho, Casanova, and such famous inverts as Alcibiade, Lucien, and Verlaine, taking place on the banks of the river Styx in hell, in which Nazier mocked Corydon’s pretentions to Socratic argument; his Sappho defends women against Gide'’s unjust attack on their capacity for pleasure.''’ Porché’s L'Amour qui nose dire son nom is a striking document for the insight it gives into the prejudicial terms of the literary discourse with

which Gide had to contend while he worked toward finding positive 114. When Barbedette and Carassou asked Daniel Guérin decades later whether between the wars he had ever met homosexuals who felt guilty, Guérin answered: “No. That feeling translated with them

into a mundane type of cynicism.” He admitted that “there was no antihomosexual prejudice.” He thought there was especially little prejudice among working-class homosexuals, and he concluded that “homosexuality was a practice before it became a discourse during that whole period”; Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 44-45, SO. 115. Two of the most important publications in this respect are Henri Massis’s Jugements, vol. 2 (Paris: Plon, 1924); and Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide. 116. Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide; and Lettres de Charles Du Bos et réponses d André Gide

(Paris: Corréa, 1950). Du Bos’s early critique was picked up and expanded in Gabriel Marcel’s “André Gide et le probléme spirituel,” La Nouvelle Revue des jeunes 1, no. 89 (10 July 1929): 759-71; and in Henri Massis, “La Faillite d’André Gide,” La Revue universelle 38, no. 112 (15 September 1929): 737-43,

and 39, no. 14 (15 October 1929): 219-25; reprinted in the supplement to the second volume of Massis’s Jugements (Paris: Plon, 1929) and as “La Défaite d’André Gide,” in D'André Gide 4 Marcel Proust (Lyon: Lardanchet, 1948). See also Ahlstedt, André Gide et le débat sur l/homosexualité, 158-62. 117. Francois Nazier, L’Anti-Corydon: Essai sur l’inversion sexuelle (Paris: Editions du siécle, 1924),

47-48.

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literary expression for his pédéraste subjectivity in the early 1930s.""* Porché made something of a name for himself when he published this study of the representation in literature of “unique loves” and “inverted forms of desire” in 1927, in part in response to Gide’s Corydon and Si le

grain ne meurt. Although Gide claimed to disagree with everything Porché said, he liked him personally and found his work significant enough to write him an open letter in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, included in 1929 as part of a brief correspondence in an appendix to the

second edition of Corydon.'” Porché explicitly identified himself as not belonging to the sexual groups he liked to write about. In LAmour qui nose dire son nom he struck a curious and disconcerting tone by committing himself to providing “information’—and promising to argue fairly for homosexuals and give them the just treatment they had not received before—but then concluding from his observations that homosexuality was indeed a vice and worthy of ruthless condemnation. Initially only fifty-six copies were published, but the pamphlet was frequently cited in the French press in the late 1920s and, though few people today read or talk about it, achieved some renommeé as a singular document of homosexual history.'*° Eugéne Montfort’s “L'Homosexualité en littérature” likewise provides compelling evidence of the “policing” and hostile literary milieu Gide had to negotiate in formulating his pédéraste subjectivity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Montfort had once greatly admired Gide, but their relationship soured when Gide hired him to direct La Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1908 and then abruptly fired him a year later when relaunching the journal in a new format. After this incident Montfort had returned to editing Les Marges, ajournal that competed directly with La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, and from then on he considered Gide his rival and frequently pub-

licly condemned him as a “homosexual.” Over the years Montfort conducted numerous inquiries in Les Marges, including one on the most ugly monument in Paris (February 1919) and one about literary freedom

118. Michael Lucey discusses Gide's negotiations within the literary field when he came out openly as a pédéraste and how this affected the way he tried to position his work for posterity in “Practices of Posterity: Gide and the Cultural Politics of Sexuality,’ in André Gide’s Politics: Rebellion and Ambivalence,

47-71. 119. Gide writes in his open letter to Porché, “How surprised I was in reading your book to find just about nothing I could agree with as I moved from page to page.” Gide, “A Francois Porché, Janvier 1928,”

NRF 16, no. 184 (1 January 1929): 60; reprinted in Corydon, 142.

120. For a brief introduction to Francois Porché, see Ahlstedt, André Gide et le débat sur lhomosexualité, 74; and Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, 106-37.

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under censorship (February 1923). For the inquiry on homosexuality he gathered some of the most vicious homophobes he could find. Montfort organized his inquiry in response to an article on Gide in Le Temps, in which the writer and literary critic Paul Souday had commented on how distasteful he found Gide's lack of moral reflection on his depictions of

same-sex desire in Les Faux-Monnayeurs and the presence in the novel of characters resembling Proust’s Charlus.’** Montfort asked the contributors to answer four questions: (1) whether there was too much homosexuality in literature, (2) why, (3) whether homosexuality might influence French morals, and (4) what could be done about it. His inquiry found considerable resonance, as well as eliciting a critical and mocking response from Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars), the notorious fin de siécle music and literary critic and onetime husband of Colette. In Le Troisiéme Sexe, Willy joked about the spectacular prudishness, hypocrisy, and prejudice of the inquiry and about how French writers constantly felt the need to proclaim their heterosexuality (without using that term) and impeccable morals and to pretend they did not notice homosexuality, as if afraid to be associated in any way with the sexual practices they voyeuristically liked to write about. Willy also noticed the phobic flashes of fear and rage that ran through the debates on homosexuality—a “panic terror” that hinted at what a profound threat homosexual voices represented to French writers’ heterosexual literary privilege.” Critics involved in the debate on homosexuality in literature worried less

about how to reconcile homosexuality with Christian dogma (the main thrust of the Renouveau catholique’s campaign against Gide) than with how homosexuals represented themselves in literature. To use Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou’s terms, they cared far less about “homosexual acts” than about “homosexual speech.’’*? Many of these critics claimed that they did not care either way what “homosexuals,” “inverts,” or “uranists” did but 121. Paul Souday, “Les Livres. André Gide: Les Faux Monnayeurs,’ Feuilleton du Temps, 4 February 1926; reprinted as “Les Faux-Monnayeurs,’ in Souday, André Gide (Paris: Simon Kra “Les Documentaires,” 1927): 95-105. Souday was particularly appalled by Gide’s open depiction of male same-sex love: “[There are] annoying analogies between André Gide’s various heroes and Mr. Charlus and his friends. Oh! There is no crudity in the language here. All of this is discrete, veiled, and a very innocent reader would not necessarily understand what it’s all about. On the other hand, it’s all too clear. Truly, it becomes intolerable, especially with Gide's seriousness and insipid sentimentality.’ Souday, André Gide, 99. A large number of Souday’s reviews of Gide’s works are kept among Gide’s newspaper clippings in the AG-BLJD. 122. Willy, Le Troisiéme Sexe, quoted in Cahiers Gay-Kitsch-Camp 19 (1993): 12, and translated into English in The Third Sex, 11-14. 123. Barbedette and Carassou argue that the sentences handed down to the editors of Inversion for the act of having published and sold the journal demonstrated that in 1920s France “the isolated homosexual act must have been judged less dangerous than its representation or relation. In other words, the judiciary apparatus sought less to punish homosexuals acts [ faits] than homosexual speech [ dire|”; Paris Gay 1925, 147.

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that they just wished they would not talk about it, and especially not publish such explicit details about it, because this went against what they understood

as a fundamentally Latin and deeply French quality of pudeur, or public modesty—the very issue that motivated the nineteenth-century French laws on indecent exposure that were used to persecute same-sex relations. ‘These critics were deeply invested in keeping homosexuality a secret, relegating it to the realm of fantasy, and controlling its public visibility. Through their “criticism, “mockery,” and “indifference” they hoped to regain control over public discourse and reestablish an ancien régime of French public modesty.’

Most critics associated public modesty and ancien régime decorum with neoclassical aesthetics, which they read as an expression of a profoundly French sensibility and tradition. They defended their arguments against homosexuality by appealing to these aesthetics and to Platonic philosophy, which they adopted as absolute standards for judging modern French literature. They argued that homosexuality could be quite moving if it fulfilled the requirements for the beautiful in art by being sub-

limated, addressed in the third person, or portrayed fictionally through beautifully structured prose. But it went against good taste and common moral sense if depicted too realistically. Camille Spiess pushed this dichotomy between ideal and real homosexuality to the extreme by exalting the androgyne philosophically as a Nietzschean “Ubermensch capable of regenerating the world,’ while condemning literal “homosexual sex” as practiced or described in literature.'*° Du Bos, too, concluded that writers

should repress their “subterranean” or “devilish” passions, and strive toward ancient Greek sublimation of feeling in beautiful form.'”° Porché condemned realistic depictions of same-sex relationships, which he distinguished from what he called “lyric uranism,” or the admirable poetic visions of same-sex desire depicted in art and “the sacred religion’ of poetry. Porché thought young men discovered lyric uranism unknowingly in school through reading the classics (especially Plutarch and Virgil), Saadi, Hafiz, Shakespeare, and the modern poetry of Verlaine and Rimbaud.'”’

124. On the issue of who controls speech and how, see Didier Eribon, “Avant-propos,’ in Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité, 14-15. 125. Camille Spiess, “L’Inversion sexuelle: Origine et signification,” L’En dehors (1930): 6. 126. Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 310. 127. Porché insists that he and his fellow classmates never noticed the erotic nature of these texts when taught them at school, “first of all because of the type of general unreality that gave every classic text a fog

of boredom through which the best schoolboys read them.” He thus positions himself as being attracted aesthetically to homosexuality but not fully conscious of what he was experiencing—an ambivalent stance he maintains throughout his book and that enables him to enjoy artistic depictions of homosexuality without fearing that they might corrupt his morals. Porché, LAmour qui nose dire son nom, 28.

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He considered the ancient Greeks, Plato in particular, models of how to sublimate “rude or uncouth desire” in the pursuit of the good and beautiful in art. “The passion is good if the vigor it communicates is controlled, managed, and purified,” he theorized.'** He concluded that beautiful literature that fictionalizes homosexuals is acceptable but that realistic images of interlaced bodies leads to “disgust,’ “nausea, “aversion, “loathing, and “profound pity.” When he experienced the “presence of brutal realities,’ “precise images, “people in the flesh,” or “bodies, because it’s all about them and their madness’—as in the image of Oscar Wilde loving Lord Alfred Douglas—then he couldn't “contain [his] aversion.”'” Every word Gide ever wrote about his sexual experience encountered this impenetrable wall of relentless prejudice. Porché tried to find an unassailable moral and philosophical basis for condemning homosexuals by insinuating that they were incapable of love if they could not remain chaste; he defined love between men in its highest and most noble form as “pure” or “purified” friendship. Like many of his French contemporaries Porché admired the asceticism and renunciation of physical pleasure found in the noble friendships and platonic love of ancient Greece and perpetuated in the emblematically French male friendship and love between Montaigne and Le Boite.*” Porché concluded that only those who were “born inverts” were capable of chaste love; those who acquired inversion during their lives, by contrast, never

escaped the danger of feeling sexually attracted to the men they befriended.'*!

Porché also mirrored a contemporary bias by associating sexuality with nationhood and arguing that homosexuals were more at home in Germany.” Numerous respondents to the “Enquéte sur André Gide” shared this opinion. The Italian Alberto Consiglio argued that Gide appealed to the Germans because of their intense experience of defeat

and destruction in World War I.’ The Rumanian writer Pamphile Seicaru commented that the few homosexuals there were in Rumania lacked “that aggressive cooperative solidarity” that one witnessed among

128. Ibid., 100. Porché also writes, “Sexual inversion considered objectively as the subject of description and analysis can not be confused with lyric uranism’; ibid., 35. 129. Ibid., 169. 130. Ibid, 102. 131. Ibid, 235. 132. Ibid, 56. 133. Alberto Consiglio, in Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 79.

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homosexuals in Germany.'** The Czech respondent Eugéne Bestaux at-

tributed the lack of Latin interest in Gide to the fact that he broke all rules of pudeur, or public modesty—one of the qualities most cherished by all Latin peoples.’ The French correspondent Camille Mauclair, one of Gide'’s fiercest detractors, attributed homosexuality to a “germano-judeoslavic” tradition that had led after 1918 to the “revenge of culture against the Mediterranean spirit.”!*°

Intense fear about realistic depictions of men having sex with each other and the possibility of their mutual love led critics to condemn the use of the first-person pronoun—an autobiographical framework—in the

description of same-sex relationships. They felt that the confessional mode threatened the foundations of the artwork by blurring the distinction between fiction and reality, and between the author and the narrators and characters s/he created."’’ Du Bos argued that the “I” of Corydon was tendentious because Gide left ambiguous whether he shared the opinions of his famous narrator.'** He agonized over Gide's revelations about his sexual life in his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, and questioned the

ambiguous “I” of the journal Gide published on writing Les FauxMonnayeurs. And he wished that Gide had waited to publish his memoirs,

because he thought all autobiography should appear posthumously. “Whether his name is Racine, Watteau, or Debussy,’ he wrote, “we can say that the supreme dignity of the classic artist rests in the inviolability of his voice. '” Porché likewise rejected Gide's Corydon and Si le grain ne meurt

for not being literary enough: the former too strongly resembled a treatise, and the latter was too self-revelatory and thus “embarrassing.” “The sublime white steed that Plato depicts in Phaedrus as the allegory of the most noble enthusiasm [ élan | of the soul,” Porché wrote; “Corydon sends him back to the stable. It’s the other horse that he mounts, the beast with a black coat and short neck, with a hooked forehead, the symbol of brutal desire.’ Porché and others argued that Proust had avoided committing 134. Pamphile Seicaru, in ibid., 75. 135. Eugéne Bestaux, in ibid., 75. 136. Camille Mauclair, in ibid., 109. Mauclair ran a campaign against homosexuality in the provincial French press in 1926. See Ahlstedt, André Gide et le débat sur Vhomosexualité, 126-29. 137. Lucey, Never Say I.

138. Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 248. Du Bos critiqued Gide's “objective tone,” which he compared to that of Remy de Gourmont and thought inappropriate. He concluded that “it is really too easy for a homosexual to pretend to be a heterosexual—a heterosexuality in which moral standards are doubled by another standard that one sees, alas, all too frequently, namely a deficiency of spirit—with the sole aim of serving his cause”; ibid., 264-65. 139. Ibid., 310. 140. Porché, LAmour qui nose dire son nom, 207.

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such errors in taste by separating his panoramic portrait of French moral life from his own person; he, unlike Gide, had created a literary masterpiece whose merits are independent of its thematic content. By using the first-person pronoun, writers like Gide transformed male same-sex sexual relationships from a permissible—because fictional— erotic fantasy into a living threat to social order. Contributors to the inquiry “L'Homosexualité en littérature” felt panicked about the negative impact honest revelations might have on French moral life. Their fears were related to worries about whether homosexuality was “congenital” or “acquired,” a popular scientific topic of conversation at the time, in part as a consequence of the writings of Marc-André Raffalovich. If congenitally so, the homosexual was safe, but if had acquired the condition, he presented a threat not only to the French family but also to moral behavior." Porché thought that “chance inverts” entered a liminal realm in which their sexuality became difficult to contain and police, potentially infecting or contaminating others and thus posing a moral danger to French society.'** These arguments reveal a common pattern: whether speaking about nationality, religion, or sexuality, French intellectuals between the wars asked repeatedly and with great consternation to what degree people could throughout their lives acquire new identities, sexual practices, or behaviors; what significant human freedoms and moral dangers such choices entailed; and how power could be maintained and gender, national, and racial boundaries assured in such a pluralistic and potentially

amorphous world. These intellectuals displayed fierce resistance to changes in national identity, kinship laws, or what they perceived to be essential norms of behavior. The theory of “acquired homosexuality” led many critics to compare it to religion as a “practice, and they condemned homosexual writers for trying to convert youth to their cause through seductive words and other missionary activities. In his response to the inquiry “L Homosexualité en littérature,’ Francois Mauriac—a Christian who publicly repressed his

141. Porché dutifully notes that Karl Westphal discovered in 1868-70 that one could be born an invert; he considers this revelation to be very German, and the thought of it haunts him for the rest of his book. He addresses the numerous contexts in which homosexuality could be “acquired” and concludes that there are four types of inverts: (1) “constitutional” “real” or “born” inverts who re associated

with the well-known morphology and “type” of the effeminate man—these are “untreatable”; (2) “chance inverts,’ whose “anomaly” is caused by a forgotten trauma and who can be cured by psychotherapy (which functions, in Porché’s description, like a witch conjuring a cure or conducting an exorcism); (3) inverts who remember their “acquisition” with fondness and rejoice in it; and (4) healthy, happy, mentally stable inverts. Porché, LAmour qui nose dire son nom, $4, 66-70. 142. Ibid., 229-33.

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own homosexuality—acknowledged his fears about “coming-out rituals” when he wrote in incredulous italics “many who were hiding will no longer hide."'* Francois Nazier argued that the fact that Corydon was first published in twelve copies in 1911 and then in 5550 copies thirteen years later demonstrated that Gide had been “gathering” disciples; he warned his readers of the dangers of Gide's “proselytism’—a word frequently used in reference to homosexuals in the French press at the time.“* Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud spoke of “triumphant pédérastes” like Oscar Wilde who thought they were above the law and attracted disciples with their tailored vests and shined shoes.'** Maurice Réja went a step further in an incen-

diary, and panic-stricken article in Le Mercure de France in which he attacked homosexuals for asserting themselves, disseminating “propaganda, setting popular trends, and acting like missionaries in constantly

By ° e e ° « e *

recruiting new young men to their ranks.'*° Réja expressed the fear that the

“cockchafers’-—a popular insult he used to describe “intermasculine lovers’—would overtake the world, invade French homes like a swarm of insects, and force heterosexuals into shamefully satisfying their sexual appetites behind closed doors. The “Gaulic Venus,’ “Parisian Aphrodite,’ and “love itself” needed to be defended against these “boiling-over little mad men and snobs who are totally crazy about the latest trends,” he wrote."” These literary critics took it as their duty to contain Gide and teach him to keep quiet. They condemned his loquaciousness on his sexual life and warned that he had an insidious influence on young people, who could be led into a life of deviance simply by reading what he had said. The rightwing critic Georges Leménagier (a.k.a. Georges Maurevert) commented in Montfort’s “L Homosexualité en littérature,” “Under the Moral Order, when France was still a healthy country, one spoke about such filth only under one’s breath, or behind closed doors. ... When France has become

143. Francois Mauriac, quoted in Montfort, “L-Homosexualité en littérature,” 204; reprinted in Cahiers Gay-Kitsch-Camp, 47. Guérin discusses Mauriac’s secret homosexual life and public denial of it in his interview in Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925. 144, Nazier, L-Anti-Corydon, unpaginated introduction and 45.

14S. Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud, “‘LAmour qui nose pas dire son nom: Corydon et sa muse,” Le Crapouillot (April 1928): 13. Of all the articles I read on this topic, this was the most hateful. 146. Maurice Réja, “La Révolte des hannetons,’ Le Mercure de France, 1 March 1928. Du Bos also speaks of an “increase in recruits,” as a result of which Gide no longer needs to “tremble”; Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 259.

147. Ibid. Du Bos also thought that pédérastes in the French literary world of his time appeared “less like victims than like pet favorites.’ He saw their increased visibility as a consequence of the “snobism” and obsession with “fashion” in literary circles. He did not doubt, however, that pédérastes might be victims in other social circles. Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 248.

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again what it should be—with the help ofa Man and his cudgel [ trique | —

these bad morals will disappear all by themselves.’'** More moderate critics did not go so far as to evoke the phallic disciplining influence of a strong man but rather more gently urged Gide to go back into the closet. “Are a writers morals, his private life, not an important subject for the public?” the fin de siecle decadent writer Rachilde asked. “YES on the condition that these writers don’t become exhibitionists, because then, logically, it will be the task of ‘honest men’ (as understood in the seventeenth century) to have them locked up.”!”” Fear about Gide’s influence as a pédéraste is reflected as well in a “debate on André Gide” that took place on 25 March 1930 at the Société d’Amitié Franco-Russe in Paris.'°° Gide's critics frequently employed verbal insults. Many referred to him pejoratively as an “invert’—a group with whom he explicitly did not wish to identify. Most often, however, critics used the general label homosexual

as a shortcut to rejecting Gide’s person and work out of hand. When Jacques-Victor de Laprade and Jacques Reynaud solicited responses to their “Enquéte” in Latinité on André Gide’s personality, universal influence, and image of an “honest man” of the future, many responded that they could not answer these questions because they could not see beyond Gide’s “homosexuality,” which they abhorred.’* They labeled Gide first and considered his work second. The torrent of invective strikes us today as inexplicably aggressive, especially given that the contributions were ostensibly intended to celebrate Gide on his sixtieth birthday. Rare among the contributions was the affirmative voice of Klaus Mann, introduced by the Latinité editors as somebody who “works on sexuality”; in his short entry Mann twice reiterated that Gide “is the man we love the most.’*’ By

148. Georges Maurevert, quoted in Montfort, “L'Homosexualité en littérature,” 203; reprinted in Cahiers Gay-Kitsch-Camp, 46. 149. Rachilde, quoted in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 98. Rachilde contrib-

uted a similar critique to Montfort, “L Homosexualité en littérature,” 49-50. 150. This debate was transcribed, as least in part, in “André Gide,’ Les Cahiers de la quinzaine 6, no. 20 “André Gide” (S April 1930). The essayists and speakers discussed Gide’s “harmful influence” (Adamovitch, 29) yet also defended him and spoke of him in positive terms. 151. De Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 35-38. De Laprade and Reynaud based their survey on Ernst Robert Curtius’s comment that, “like Nietzsche, André Gide discovered a new man, a new region of the soul” (35) and on Wilhelm Emanuel Siiskind’s response that that new man would be Protestant in the sense of being “democratic” (35-36). 152. Klaus Mann, quoted in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 51-52. Mann may have wanted to say that he “liked” Gide rather than “loved” him (both translated by the word aimer in French). In a contemporaneous review of Les Faux-Monnayeurs in German, Mann used the word “love” (lieben), so we can assume that he did love Gide. He writes there that “the man we love for his boundlessness, we also admire for his unrelenting honesty”; Klaus Mann, “Der Ideenroman,’ Neue Freie Presse, 10 February 1929.

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contrast, Alfred D6blin commented that he had read that Gide was a “ho-

mosexual” and therefore found the inquiry insulting. He considered it “impossible that the majority of Europeans—for whom the ‘honest man’

was, after all, not yet homosexual—could accept Gide’s general mentality.” Numerous other contributors argued that Gide’s homosexuality made him creatively passive and “sterile.” They transformed him metaphorically from an artist into a woman and then applied their entrenched and long-standing prejudice about the female capacity for creative intelligence.'** Camille Mauclair commented in italics that he “was horrified of Gide’s soul”; he implored readers to pray for Gide.’ Jean Tenant compared Gide to the bandar-log or “monkey-people’ described by Rudyard Kipling and concluded that “Corydon is a revolting book.’!*° Pamphile Seicaru went so far as to claim that few people would protest if Gide were

condemned to death.’ The fierce rage against “homosexuality” that fueled much of the critical and intellectual debates around André Gide in the 1930s reduced the term to an abstract marker of moral turpitude. Gide remained resolute and firm, yet sometimes clearly shaken, by the accusations of immodesty and immorality launched against him in the course of the debates on homosexuality. In print he rarely displayed his feelings about these attacks. But in his private notes and letters he sometimes expressed how the situation hurt him. In 1913 he wrote out in pen a translation of two lines of Walt Whitman's poem “Hours Continuing

Long, Sore, and Heavy-Hearted” from Calamus (1860) that Edouard Bertz had used to “prove” Whitman’s homosexuality. Gide’s scribbled translation hints that he may have felt afhnity for this part of the poem: Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed—but it is useless. —I am what I am;) Hours of my torment—lI wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover lost to him?

153. Alfred Doblin, quoted in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 42.

154. See, for example, the entries by Corrado Pavolini, Pamphile Seicaru, Gabriel Boissy, and Camille Mauclair in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 83, 91, 100, 109. Critics accused Gide of impotence, sterility, and feminine writerly habits throughout his life. See Patrick Cordon, “Présentation: Les Marges et La Nouvelle Revue Francaise: Eugene Montfort et André Gide,” in Cahiers Gay-Kitsch-Camp 19 (1993): 7-9; and Henri Planche, Le Probléme de Gide (Paris: Téqui, 1952), 47-62. 155. Camille Mauclair, quoted in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,” 109. 156. Jean Tenant, quoted in ibid., 132. 157. Pamphile Seicaru, quoted in ibid., 93.

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Is he too as lam now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? And at night, awaking, think who is lost? Does he too harbor his friendship silent and endless? Harbor his anguish and his passion?’**

Gide could also remain quite nonchalant about certain attacks on his person, however, as when Montfort published his “L Homosexualité en littérature”: “I had a weak moment and read in Les Marges the responses to that inquiry, in which Montfort, in response to Corydon, invited his flock of fellow members to take charge of me,’ Gide wrote in his journal on 2 November 1927. “What idiocy! What vulgarity! Their total ignorance of what they are talking about allows them to make easy insults and even easier jokes. Some of them write in good faith. I almost want to tell them that they are making a mistake and that I am not where they think I am. I am so little the monster they imagine that I find it hard to be even affected by their insults. Iam just sad about their miscomprehension. They are like the bull that charges into the red fabric thinking he will reach the torero. And they are amazed that I escape.”*” Gide’s image of the bull missing the torero is apt. In the year Corydon was published he fooled his detractors by successfully hiding the fact that he had fathered a child with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. In his classically

unpredictable manner he inverted the dialectic of the pédéraste by keeping his love of a woman and role as a father a secret at the very moment when he had chosen to come out as a pédéraste. Gide was devoted to his daughter, Catherine, and though he did not tell her that he was her father until she was thirteen, he often went to the movies and visited with her when she was a child.'®’ Catherine remembered that Gide felt more than affection for her mother and was in fact “quasi in love with her.”"*' She also recalled growing up in a strict but nonconformist atmosphere;

158. Gide translates the first two lines here as “Heures mordues et douloureux (J'ai honte—mais que faire a cela? Je suis ainsi) Heures de mon tourment—Se peut-il que d’autres hommes aient le méme, issue des mémes (émotions)?” Gide translated this poem into French, in ink, in the margins to Edouard Bertz, “A propos de Walt Whitman,” Le Mercure de France (1 July 1913): 204-10; folder 885, AG-BLJD. I have cited the original English version of the poem here. 159. Gide, J-II, 5S. 160. Catherine Gide, Entretiens 2002-2003, 25; 62. Catherine remembers that Gide was “extremely emotional” when he told her that he was her father (25). Gide’s loving attention to his daughter in the years coinciding with the publication of Corydon is also revealed in Elisabeth van Rysselberghe's Lettres a la petite dame: “Un petit a la campagne” (Juin 1924-décembre 1926), ed. Catherine Gide (Paris: Galli-

mard, 2000). Until Catherine Gide published these materials, there was scant information in the secondary literature on Gide's role as a father. An exception is Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998), 351-400. 161. Catherine Gide, Entretiens 2002-2003, 30-31.

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friends of her mother and father came and went, but she saw few heterosexual couples.'® Her mother’s decision to raise a child on her own was scandalous at the time, especially because she kept the name of the father a secret even from close relatives.'® Gide did not like to be pinned down about his sexuality, and he was upset when critics implied that women’s bodies repulsed him. In 1930 Porché suggested just that in an article for Les Nouvelles littéraires.'“* In a

letter to Porché responding to that article Gide wrote that he was “affected” by the “accusations” and was afraid his critics would judge him harshly because of them: I know that the word “accusation” is too strong and that you don't think I could take as an accusation something that appeared to youlike the simple recognition of a fact, anda reflection of my own confessions. But what words uttered by me, or what indiscretion of others, has authorized you to write, “a man for whom the female body is an object of repulsion” Dont yoururderstamd Even though

it is cordial, the tone of your article gives particular credit to this inferior imputation. I know you will temper it with a “Or at least for him the idea of woman is never linked to the pleasure of love”; but even this “never” (which is true of all the others, and especially Proust, as I know), is wrong when it comes to me.'®

Gide asked Porché to keep the contents of his response to himself, as he thought the subtleties of his attraction to women were too delicate a subject to explain to the press. Porché responded that he had thought Gide did not like to mix women and pleasure and that he admired women only as mothers or wives devoted to procreation.'® In a subsequent letter, he

told Gide that he suspected that Gide now no longer felt repulsed by women because he did not care anymore either way, having passed the age when sex interested him.’®’

162. Ibid., 75. 163. Anumber of those who knew of Elisabeth van Rysselberghe's pregnancy judged it to be unethical and “anticonformist”; this is revealed in a collection of letters kept by Maria van Rysselberghe, which Catherine Gide included in ibid., 127-48. Among these letters is a devastating critique from Gide's former confidant Henri Ghéon. See Henri Ghéon to Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, 19 May 1923; ibid., 138-39. 164. Francois Porché, “André Gide: “‘Défenseur de l’occident,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 28 April 1930.

165. This passage is taken from a draft of a letter from Gide to Porché, dated May 1930; folder 733-12, AG-BLJD. Gide crossed out many words in this draft. 166. Porché to Gide, 11 May 1930; folder 733-6, AG-BLJD. 167. Porché to Gide, 12 May 1930; folder 733-7, AG-BLJD.

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In the same year of this exchange with Porché, Gide completed the play Oedipe, in which he explored the tragedy of a man who causes great harm by willfully blinding himself to the past and the consequences of his ac-

tions. Oedipus’ daughter Antigone stands out in the play for her firm moral convictions, which she sustains in the midst of the moral confusion and political turmoil in which she lives. When her father realizes what he has done, Antigone remains loyal to him and accompanies him into exile. Her action reflects, I think, how Gide saw himself within the context of the moral crusades of his time: confident in himself and trusting in his moral judgment and in the love he felt for his daughter, he pursued his life path with inner faith, bending neither to his detractors nor to the moral codes imposed upon him by the religion and state in which he lived and yet always abiding by what he understood to be the law. In plucking the narcissus, his Persephone acts with similar inner conviction.

m PERSEPHONE THE PEDERASTE Gide’s erasure of the teleological force of desire in Perséphone through the elimination of the mythological ravishment and its replacement with a celebration of male pleasure defines this libretto as a key work of his sexual emancipation.’® By telling his story symbolically by way of an ancient myth, Gide avoided the problem of the first-person pronoun. The work is unusual in his oeuvre, however, for its focus on a young goddess; Perse-

phone was not a common figure of identification for homosexuals and pédérastes, although her mother Demeter surely was.'® Judith Peraino has pointed out that it was common for French and English poets and writers in this period to appropriate a sexualized lesbian subject position to express male same-sex desire.'”? Gay Wachman similarly writes that “lesbian and gay crosswriting’ were common ‘strategies of displacement and disguise for those who [felt] that they are sexual outlaws; such strategies were particularly apparent in gay men’s writing following the trials of Oscar Wilde.”"”*

168. Emily Apter writes that “Gide's subversive treatment of Greek myths and biblical parables, particularly those that underscore the violation of taboos or the testing of blood ties, implies a radically new society grounded on open sexuality, a kind of homosexual utopia, ideological compatible with Marxist ideals of individual self-realization”; Apter, André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality, 102. 169. See Andrew Radford, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1930

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 170. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 115-19. 171. Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 2001), 37-38.

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Gide did not often participate in cross-writing, however, and he claimed to dislike such “changing figures.’'’”* If he chose to articulate his pédéraste subjectivity through Perséphone, I believe it is because he interpreted her story symbolically; he identified not with her sexuality or gen-

der but rather with her choice and the temptation she faced in plucking the narcissus.'”’ The lesbian essayist and bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier described Persephone as a “symbol of the grain of wheat,’ which

was a talisman for Gide.'’* Perhaps he also thought of Persephone as a somewhat androgynous adolescent or ephebe, a bodily image that he admired in antique sculpture and Renaissance art and that Ida Rubinstein had celebrated on the stage throughout her career. Gide was familiar with Ludwig Preller’s nineteenth-century study of Persephone as a hermaphrodite in Demeter und Persephone; this book may have influenced him when he first began writing about the goddess in the 1890s.*”> Maybe Persephone also reminded Gide of one of Hippolyte Taine’s “young men around Plato’—an innocent adolescent about to embark on the adventure of initiation into pédéraste love. This would explain why the ephebe Mercury guides her journey at three key moments: when her mother entrusts her to the nymphs, when she refuses the pomegranate and gazes into the narcissus, and when she returns to the underworld. Mercury, whose presence in Perséphone may have been inspired by Satie’s Mercure,

represented Gide's sculptural and physical model of the ideal ancient Greek boy. In investigating the articulation of pédéraste desire encapsulated in the

moment when Persephone discovers the narcissus, I was struck by the overwhelming number of warnings with which the passage opens. ‘The prohibitions begin when Eumolpus first announces that whoever glances into

the narcissus will see “the unknown world of hell.’ The chorus is then instructed to “dance in a manner to prevent Persephone from approaching the narcissus,’ after which they abruptly warn Persephone not to approach

172. Justin O'Brien, “Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes,’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 64, no. 5 (December 1949): 933-52. It is important to note, however, that Gide was working during these years on a triptych (L’Ecole des femmes, Robert, Genevieve) in which he planned to speak in the feminine voice. He was close to a group of Anglo-French feminist writers and thinkers that included Dorothy Bussy (his translator), Elisabeth van Rysselberghe (the mother of his child), Enid McLeod, and Ethel Whithorn. See Apter, André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality, 136-37. 173. Gide later also identified with Phaedra; see Segal, Pederasty and Pedagogy, 322-23. 174. Adrienne Monnier, “Le Symbolisme de Perséphone,’ NRF 22, no. 250 (1 July 1934): 153. 175. Ludwig Preller, Demeter und Persephone: Ein Cyclus mythologischer Untersuchungen (Hamburg: Perthes, Besser & Mauke, 1837). Pollard notes Preller’s influence on Gide in Pe*P, 61.

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the narcissus; their plea is interrupted by Eumolpus’s calmer reminder of the unknown world revealed through the flower. Persephone leans over the flower and observes the shadows. The nymphs reiterate their warning, but Persephone plucks the flower, sealing her fate. Because no ravishment ensues, however, the series of warnings suddenly rings strangely hollow. What exactly are Eumolpus and the nymphs so urgently warning Persephone about if the narcissus is not the locus of danger (ravishment) but rather a source of human empathy? It appears that Gide has recreated the forbidding homophobic literary discourse of his day as an empty symbol, void of any true motivating force or real danger and yet still potent as the frame within which he interactively defines his pédéraste subjectivity. He shapes Persephone'’s home, the earth, in the image of his own homeland, France, as an alienated and defamiliarized place. Eumolpus’s part, added probably at Stravinsky's behest in 1933, represents the “policing French establishment” of that historical moment—a blank authority that forbids pleasure and against which Persephone dialectically explores her freedom by the act of plucking the narcissus. Eumolpus's hostile warnings are reminiscent of the narcissus's status in Gide's life as a potent symbol of the societal and religious taboo of his desire: “What makes Gide shiver with joy,’ Porché recognized, “was to mix images of pleasure with the feeling of insulted morals. He thus violates doubly the Law that formerly oppressed him: through the irregularity of the desire he finally satisfies, and thanks to

the horrible coincidence that the object of his desire debases itself the second it is desired.”!”°

The presence of Eumolpus does have an effect on Persephone’s pluck-

ing of the narcissus, as the section that follows demonstrates. She expresses desire less fervently in the 1933 Perséphone than in Gide’s 1909 and 1913 drafts for Proserpine; her words now sound like found objects in

bricolage. Gide still links the narcissus plucking to pédéraste desire by imagining the action’s being accompanied by music that will express Persephone's inquiétude. And yet the adjective now appears as if within quotation marks, as a loose and malleable signifier. In 1909 Gide had described the music at the moment of narcissus plucking in Proserpine as “penetrated by an unknown anxiousness ; in the 1913 version the orchestra was to “translate Proserpine’s growing anxiousness” as she plucked, while the chorus tries to draw her away from it, “anxious about her anxiousness. When he rewrote the text for Perséphone in 1933 he mixed aspects

176. Porché, LAmour qui nose dire son nom, 219.

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of these previous versions and added a new term for anxious: anxieusement: “The chorus has attentively surrounded Persephone and is leaning anxiously | anxieusement| toward her. An unknown anxiousness | inquiétude| slips into the orchestra that up to that time has expressed pure joy. The chorus tries, despite the unknown anxiousness, to rediscover its joy and drag Persephone into it.”"’’ When Gide redid the text for his complete works in 1948 he altered the passage again by replacing “unknown anxiousness” with “new anxiousness” (inquiétude nouvelle). It was as if he resisted the idea of fixing a noun so dear to his heart.'”* Gide may have used the term inquiétude in 1933 out of familiarity (it was one of his favorite words for describing himself) or a laziness motivated by the desire to salvage from Proserpine what he could. The word may simply indicate that his music aesthetic had not changed much in the intervening twenty years, or that he hadn't had time to think about the scene in any further detail since then. Perhaps he still felt that music as an art form

passed “under the radar” of the literary critics who policed his pédéraste voice, and that the word could thus still express desire as it had in both versions of Proserpine. In this he was right: the critical establishment did not worry about composers representing homosexuality in music; no equivalent exists in music criticism for Montfort’s “L Homosexualité en littérature.” And yet something about Gide’s blatant, almost literal borrowing of his descriptions of inquiétude from earlier libretti for Proserpine hints at the fact that he was acting not out of conviction but boredom. He no longer seems to have felt any need to express musically or lyrically a pleasure and desire that he had by that time publicly proclaimed to the world. Alternatively, he may purposefully have wanted to leave a trace, through an awkward cut-and-paste excerpt from an old libretto (and thus safely distant), of the intensity of his youthful pédéraste expression—a literary secret he

no longer had to keep. In the 1930s, Gide seems to be telling us through these retrospective stage directions, passionate unspoken pédéraste desire, like the exoticism of the Ballets russes, had become a thing of the past, the subject of disillusioned, nostalgic memory, a cited reference in a libretto reconceived as modernist bricolage. 177. Cf. passages in Gide’s 1909 and 1913 Proserpines with Persépone, P&P, 60, 63, 94; and draft 1c; microfilm 226.1, p. 956, PSS (published as example 5, SSC, vol. 3, p. 492). 178. Pollard remarks that Gide used the expression “unknown anxiousness” (inquiétude inconnue) in the two versions of Perséphone published in 1934: André Gide, Perséphone, NRF 22, no. 248 (1 May 1934): 745-61; and André Gide, Perséphone (Paris: Gallimard, 1934). See also Pollard’s commentary in P&P, 94n44. In his new edition of Perséphone, in 1948, Gide changed the term to “new anxiousness” (inquiétude nouvelle); see Gide, Perséphone, in Théatre complet d’André Gide, postface by Richard Heyd (Neuchatel: Ides et Calendes, 1948), vol. 4, 113-38. This is the version that Pollard reprinted in PeyP.

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Persephone’s reaction to plucking the narcissus is likewise muted. In Gide's 1913 Proserpine she had entered “a sort of funeral ecstasy” when she plucked the narcissus, whereas now only the faintest trace of that mystic transformation remains. Gide still allows language to disappear at this point of desire by requesting that the orchestra let out a programmatic “great moan, and that Persephone perform a dance that “expresses anxiousness and desolation.” And yet instead of offering a new interpretation of what her pédéraste desire may feel like, he merely reminds us of what it felt like for her back then. His approach to the representation of desire does not seem to have changed since before the war. By still associating the plucking of the narcissus with inquiétude, Gide evokes an affect that once had allowed pédérastes to recognize each other between the lines but was now publicly used to condemn them. “In terms of literature,’ Gérard Bauer wrote in Montfort’s “L Homosexualité en littérature, “it seems beyond a shadow of a doubt that this inquiétude, this

susceptibility marks works with a homosexual atmosphere. The first books of Mr. André Gide demonstrate this only through allusions, but if we examine in contemporary literature the work of a perfect author preoccupied with these problems like Mr. Jacques de Lacretelle, we find his heroes are constantly plagued by this inquiétude of persecution: [we see this] also in Jean Hermelin, Silbermann, and in La Bonifas, the homosexuality of which cannot be denied.”'” Porché thought that homosexuals tended to be anxious because they “had not yet entirely succeeded in freeing themselves from the idea—or from the doubt left over from the old idea—that they were guilty in front in God’'*® Jean Cassou found

evidence of such “violence of their inquiétude” in Rimbaud and Nietzsche.*** Gide opens Corydon with his main character’s confession that his project is motivated by the guilt he feels over having rebuked a young man in the throes of “that physical inquiétude” who subsequently committed suicide.'** The politically charged affect of anxiousness made pédérastes more present in French discourse (giving them a recognizable

affect and sensibility), while also persistently reminding of those who were absent—the victims of persecution or lost loves whose deaths shaped their nascent community.

Yet Gide did not associate inquiétude with pédéraste victimization, morbidity, or melancholia as many literary critics did; rather, he interpreted 179, Gérard Bauer, quoted in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,” 179. 180. Porché, LAmour qui nose dire son nom, 83.

181. Jean Cassou, quoted in de Laprade and Reynaud, “Enquéte sur André Gide,’ 101. 182. Gide, Corydon, 27.

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it as a source of afhrmative political energy and sign of genius in the tradi-

tion of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.'*’ Daniel-Rops was one of the few Christian intellectuals who supported Gide's positive interpretation of the term, for he recognized its significance as an indicator of Gide’s pédéraste desire (although his arguments remained between the lines in this respect).

“Inquiétude,’ Daniel-Rops wrote in his book-length study on the topic, hints at an “inconsistent mood” and “love of change.” “It is a fleeting and fragile desire that we don't even knowif we have, or that's escaping us. It is an instability of feelings and beliefs: one could kill somebody one loves in this state, happiness is just a call to unhappiness, nothing is eternal in the moral domain or in physical life.”"** Du Bos recognized inquiétude less positively as an expression of Gide’s “complexity, which he associated with inconsistency and a lack of sincere involvement in moral problems—the ambiguous realm of Gide’s anti-identificatory pédéraste subjective engagement.”*° ‘Ambiguity,’ “duality,” and “ambivalence” became catchwords of Gidean criticism in the 1920s and 1930s. For this Gide himself was partly responsible. “I have never known how to renounce anything,’ Gide wrote in Morceaux choisis in 1921, “protecting in myself the best and the worse at the same time. I’ve lived like somebody torn apart. But how do I explain to people that this coexistence of extremes inside of me hasn't brought inquiétude and suffering as much as a moving intensification of existence, of life. ... This state of

dialogue, which is pretty much intolerable for so many other people, has become necessary for me.”'*° Gide’s duality became politically controversial

in particular during World War II, when Gide rejected the Resistance and consciously attempted to find good in the Nazis in the hope of remaining fair to all sides. He compared his political stance to that of the Athenian historian Thucydides as described by Jean Schlumberger in 1913:

Thucydides did not listen to Spartacus's arguments out of his hatred of Athenian demagogy. Rather, it was because of a tendency of his otherwise uncommon and suspicious soul that compromised him to the depths of his will.

Thucydides wanted to know “both sides,” but not in order to penetrate his enemies’ secrets, denounce the reasons for their success, or reveal their weaknesses. ... One has to recognize in him, even in regard to Spartacus, that mixture of sympathy and curiosity without which there is no equity.

183. See Daniel-Rop's comments in Notre inguiétude: Essais, 25. 184. Ibid., 22. Du Bos considers Daniel-Rops’s arguments in Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 171-72. 185. Ibid., 3-5; 144-48. Du Bos acknowledges the affinities between Gide’s inquiétude (or trouble) and the spiritual tradition of Pascal. 186. Gide, “Pages inédites,” in Morceaux choisis, 6th ed. (Paris: NRF, 1921), 434.

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“T find myselfin these reflections,’ Gide added. “I will make them my own.”'*”

In 1945 Gide wrote René Schwob from North Africa (where he spent the war years): “I hope you find a serenity equal to mine in the darkness of your faith, as Fénelon says.’ With this statement he confirmed his ability to disassociate from conflict while yet involving himself in human suffering.'** Such equanimity, or indecision (depending on the point of view), found little acceptance in the crisis-laden and polarized political climate of Gide’s time.

The critical discourse around the word inquiétude lent the concept as it appears in Perséphone a quality both of dull familiarity and potent possibility. It looks like a found object and self-quotation and yet opens up the

possibility of indecision, inconsistency, and self-contradiction—the realm of the pédéraste lure. In spite of its overuse in the text, it suggests the passion of Gide’s once unspoken desire in Proserpine and the promise of the pédéraste pleasure exalted in Corydon. It had become commoditized and mundane yet not lost its critical and political potential. Plucking the narcissus as symbol of same-sex erotic temptation initiates Persephone's descent into an alternative—and pédéraste—world. Persephone’s act is an acte gratuit in the sense that it is “unmotivated,”

being simply the consequence of Persephone'’s naive desire to grasp something pretty, despite the warnings and without any thought of what that might lead to. Persephone reacts spontaneously rather than thinking rationally about her actions. Adrienne Monnier described the plucking of the narcissus as an act of “self-contemplation’ that led to an extreme reversal: “Individualism, pushed to its extreme, changes into its opposite and is converted into communism, in other words, into a desire for an integral humanity.’ Persephone’s acte gratuit brings to the surface, as it had three decades earlier, the tension between personal confession and classical style—free choice and the law—that characterized Gide’s ex-

pression of pédéraste desire. Du Bos thought that Gide struggled throughout his life between the opposite poles of inquiétude (or what he called the “labyrinth” ) and “serenity,” or “clear path,” as represented in the perfect form of his classical prose. As his “unhappy but confident” friend,

he hoped that Gide would continue to embrace the challenge of the former path, but do so as a means to an end beyond itself (in other words, with a sense of spiritual and moral questioning that would lead beyond

187. Gide, entry for 1S January 1941, J-IJ, 749. Gide quotes Jean Schlumberger, “En lisant Thucydide,” NRF S, no. $3 (1 May 1913): 713-14. 188. Gide to René Schwob, 19 February 1945, in Angel, Lettres inédites sur Vinquiétude moderne, 120. 189. Monnier, “Le Symbolisme de Perséphone,’ 152.

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pédérastie).'°° In the violent, shocking moment of narcissus plucking, Gide again crystallized all the contradictions of the debate on the “I” in literature, provoking to the breaking point Winckelmann’s trembling neoclassicism: through her unspoken act and silent musical affect of inquiétude, Persephone destroys in a flash the clear boundaries of the moral codes of her religion, as well as her free choice in matters of desire. Gide provides numerous clues to suggest that the shadowy underworld Persephone enters is the realm of pédérastie and logic of the lure. In his stage directions for the scene he repeatedly hints at Persephone’s affection for the nymphs and shadows, and at their sisterly bond. He further hints at the pédéraste nature of his hell by inserting into his text oblique references to pédéraste history. In Proserpine he had described the narcissus as “the flower Homer talks about . . . in whose chalice ‘all of starry Uranus appears’ —a quote from de Lisle’s translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.'’' “Uranus” immediately reminds of “uranisme’ and its source in Plato. Although Gide notes in the libretto that Proserpine saw the under-

world, not Uranus, and although the “starry Uranus” quote had disappeared in the 1933 Perséphone, it seems likely that Gide inserted it originally as a means of encoding the “uranism’ that thrived in his underworld; he frequently used foreign words or incongruous quotes to communicate encoded meanings in this way. Adrienne Monnier caught his

meaning; she noted that the narcissus symbolized “individuality” and that in contemplating the flower Persephone was led to both heaven and hell. “Uranus, king of the heavens, confined his children to Tartarus, the most profound part of hell,’ she wrote, in what seems like a veiled acknowledgment of Gide’s pédérastie. “Yet if the children of heaven sometimes wallow in the last reaches of those infernal marshes, the creations of

hell still sometimes achieve empyrean.’'’”” Christian critics frequently interpreted Gide’s pédérastie as a consequence of his consorting with the

190. Du Bos, Le Dialogue avec André Gide, 320. This is why Du Bos called one chapter in this book “Le Labyrinthe a claire-voie” (The clear-pathed labyrinth).

191. Gide, P&P, 61. The actual line from Leconte de Lisles is “Et de sa racine sortaient cent tétes, et tout le large Ouranos supérieur, et toute la terre et l'abime salé de la mer riaient de l’odeur embaumée.” Later, Leconte de Lisle comments that Persephone hoped to see her mother as long as she could also continue to see “la terre et l’Ouranos étoilé” (Homer, Hymne a Déméter, published in L’Odyssée, trans. Leconte de Lisle (Paris: Lemerre,1868), vol. 2, 441; reprinted in P&P, 197,

192. Monnier, “Le Symbolisme de Perséphone,’ 152-S3.

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devil, and they therefore situated him in the underworld. Associating pédérastes and uranists with the underworld, hell, Satan, and “Lucifer” was a recognized literary cliché at the time.'””

Gide shows that the Shadows have been “deceived in love” and are caught in the endless ritual of unfulfilled desire. This ritual we now recognize as representing the logic of the lure—that split second before or after

temptation that Gide associated most closely with pédéraste desire. In both his 1909 and 1913 versions of Proserpine, Gide vividly represented pédéraste desire when he showed Pluto introducing Persephone to the

perpetual hunter Orion, Hercules, Atalanta and Hippomenes, and Tantalus—all mythical figures who are “unsatisfied” in some way and “know no other torment than the vain pursuit of a possession that relentlessly slips away from them, than the eternal renewal of desire.” In the 1909 Proserpine,

Gide had allowed the nymphs to assure Persephone that these mythical figures had already escaped their plight by becoming “art”; with this passage, Gide had confirmed his belief in the ethical importance of sublimating desire through the act of writing. In his 1913 Proserpine, he had envisioned the mythical figures as miming their actions in brief vignettes on the second level of a multitiered stage to the lulling rhythms of a word-

less chorus; this theatrical moment would have suggested a representational space for a pédéraste desire that resisted both the epistemological security of French prose and the fixed figural possibilities of art, sculpture, and stage design. The ephemerality of such a pédéraste space would have been poignantly highlighted by the scene’s dreamlike occurrence at one

remove from the main action of the melodrama. The mimed actions of these figures would have appeared and faded behind a sea of clouds—pro-

jected only for flickering instants onto the screen of Pluto's and Persephone's imagination and thus remaining as elusive as the anxious music that Gide’s stage directions called for.

Gide captured the liminal representational space of pédéraste desire most poignantly in his 1909 and 1913 Proserpines in the scene between Persephone and Eurydice; this is the episode Stravinsky excised from the 1933 Perséphone. Looking back on this scene now, in light of our understanding of the sexual politics of Gide’s time, it becomes clear that Gide intended Eurydice as a symbol of the fleeting moment of the acte gratuit,

193. Murat, La Loi du genre, 96-107. In Nazier’s LAnti-Corydon, Casanova comments to Sappho that he had found a copy of Gide’s Corydon in Pluto’s “infernal library” (16). Homosexuality became most famously associated with hell in modern literature through Baudelaire’s femmes damneées, Verlaine's affair with Rimbaud, and Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer.

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in which all of life could change in an instant because of one action—an anticipatory affect that he used to characterize his pédéraste literary sub-

jectivity. As Gide knew from Ovid, Orpheus’s “glance backward” at Eurydice had led not only to her death but also to Orpheus's introducing

the love of boys into Thrace—and ultimately to his own death at the hands of jealous Thracian women, the maenads. His severed head, carrying his unceasing song, had landed on the Lesbian shore near Methymna,

establishing the foundation for the poetic legacy of Sappho. David Halperin, Heather Love, and many others have recognized in the “glance backward” that led to Orpheus's “backward glances” of pédéraste desire an iconic moment in the history of queer representation.'”* Love argues that Eurydice resembles the boy who vanishes into the night in Foucault's taxi, a disappeared lover, desirable because gone. She aligns Orpheus’s story with that of Lot, who in looking back on the destruction of Sodom

and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 remembers the “violence perpetuated against those accused of the grave sin of homosexuality” and the “consequences of the refusal to forget such losses.”’” In Perséphone Eurydice is gone, and along with her the elusive symbolic

realm she inhabited. Gone too is Persephone’s intoxicating plunge into the depths of the underworld and Pluto’s presentation of moving tableaux of desirous gods on the stage within a stage that Gide at one time envisioned there. In their place Gide now set up a much more rigid distinction between normative sexual policing on earth (identified obliquely with France) and the implied freedom of pédéraste desire in the underworld— identified with a people who, as the libretto for Perséphone indicates, are “sad, anxious and discolored,” feel “neither hate nor love,’ and repeat unremittingly the “incomplete gesture of life.”° Gide heightened this distinction still further with a more urgent projection of the quest to legitimize pédéraste social commitment. Persephone no longer swoons with intoxicated desire when she plucks the narcissus, as she had in Gide's 1909 and 1913 Proserpines, but chooses,

rather, to help a people less fortunate than herself with a patriotic act of charity. By reinterpreting the narcissus plucking in this way Gide locks the

194. David Halperin, “The Best Lover,” and Helmut Puff, “Orpheus after Eurydice (According to Albrecht Diirer),” in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and

Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 8-21 and 71-95; Love, Feeling Backward, 46-82. 195. Ibid,, 5. 196. Gide struggled at first with these lines. Cf. Gide, drafts 1a, 1b, and 1c; microfilm 226.1, p.941 (draft la), p. 949 (draft 1b) and 956 (draft 1c), the latter published as example 5, SCC, vol. 3, 492; and PerP, 94.

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promise of losing oneself in Africa or the underworld into a reciprocal sym-

biotic tension with the more dominant image of Persephone as a selfless pédéraste who commits to national service. Persephone simultaneously wants to merge with and maintain a boundary to the Shadows she meets in the underworld—a dichotomous attitude that reflects the symbiosis of pleasure and social utility at the heart of Gide'’s Africanist pédérastie. Gide imbues the Shadows with the familiar sameness within prominent difference that characterized his relationships with African adolescents: Persephone feels empathy for them; she wants to join them and offer her life in their service.

And yet they are utterly different from her in their affects, gestures, and mythology—they even originate in Homerian texts that differ from hers.

Gide’s Persephone takes on two official roles deeply admired by the French establishment: that of a missionary sent by the Catholic Church to convert the heathen, and that of a colonial administrator. In the 1930s, French citizens were familiar with missionary activity as a respected form of colonial relation that grew out of the imperial practices of the French

Catholic Church and was characterized by a charitable desire to help others and convert them to Christian faith. The word missionary surfaces frequently in reviews and primary documents related to Perséphone. In his

production notes Copeau described Triptolemus as an “itinerant missionary’ sent by Demeter to bring agriculture to humanity.'”’ Copeau had had extensive personal experience with the subject: just a few years before work on the Perséphone production began his daughter Edi had become a missionary in Madagascar.’”* Countless French families, like Copeau’s, associated the missionary service with a heart-wrenching separation from

their children and the sacrifice of personal happiness for the sake of a higher moral good. This combination of grief, sacrifice, and moral righteousness was deeply familiar to French citizens in the 1930s. And yet, as Montfort’s “L Homosexualité en littérature” demonstrated, the idea of the missionary could also have threatening connotations, depending on how it was used. Missionary work was noble when undertaken by the French in the colonies but threatening if associated with homosexuals who were supposedly converting young men to their cause. Critics admired and ennobled missionary work and conversion when practiced by French people as a means of asserting their imperial control, but they condemned the very 197. Copeau, paste-on; folder 730, subfolder 2, p. 10, FJC-BNF. 198. Copeau’s daughter Edi decided on 4 October 1930 to become a sister in Les Soeurs Bénédic-

tines Missionnaires de Vanves. She first traveled to Madagascar as a missionary in 1931. See journal entry for 4 October 1930, in Jacques Copeau, Journal: Deuxiéme partie, 1916-1948, ed. Claude Sicard (Paris: Seghers, 1991), 362; and CGC, vol. 2, 427-28, 439.

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same work when they perceived it as being practiced on themselves. ‘This situation explains why Gide may have wanted to allude to the idea of missionary work in the narcissus-plucking scene and to use irony to rescue for pédérastes a term frequently used prejudicially against them. By supporting his belief in the pédérastes’ capacity to participate in the “right” kind of missionary work, he was legitimizing them in a national French context. Gide’s Persephone resembles not only a Christian missionary but also

a colonial administrator—a role much closer to Gide’s heart and more reflective of how he understood his relationship as a pédéraste in Africa. As a critic of the Church he may have felt ambivalence about French missionary work in Africa. Yet he appeared supportive of colonial administrators who did not attempt to convert Africans to a religion in which they did not believe but strove rather toward improving their lot in life—or so Gide could believe. His Persephone shares this middle-of-the road political commitment: she departs for the underworld filled with imperial idealism. But disappointment, hardship, and frustration lead to her simmering anti-colonial sentiment (or, more generally, a vague desire to help others and change the status quo). Her pédéraste attitude to alterity is characterized, like Gide’s, by a nagging conflict between nationalist pride and patriotic allegiance, on the one hand—a desire to return home—and a sense of duty about fighting for justice for suppressed peoples, on the other. Gide complicates this imperialist narrative by overlapping onto it the memory of a more traditional French neoclassical ideal: Persephone will ultimately strive to unite with the Eleusinian priest Triptolemus, whose

very existence will break the bonds of death and force her immediate return to the earth. During Persephone’s sojourn in the underworld Pluto will try (though in vain) to force her to abandon her pity and assume her rightful political power. She will learn about acknowledging her past by biting into the pomegranate offered her by Mercury and gazing into the narcissus. There she will see that King Seleucus has entrusted her mother with raising Demophon, who will become Triptolemus. The story of her pédéraste passion will thus end in the union with the latter. Given that Persephone would unite with Hades according to the ancient myth, her marriage with Triptolemus in Perséphone seems almost blasphemous,

confirming Gide’s own description of himself as the “shit disturber” (emmerdeur) of Christianity.'”” By adding this subplot to his story, Gide enabled a bifurcated teleology of Persephone's pédéraste desire: it moves

199. Gide, quoted in SSC, vol. 3, 475.

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both outward toward the French colonies in acknowledgment of the ideal of alterity enabled by the 1930s transnational politics of imperialism, and inward toward Greece as a confirmation of the dialectic of self and other ingrained in the abiding neoclassical traditions of the French nation. Triptolemus’s sudden arrival at the end of the second tableau remains unconvincing as a resolution to the drama, however, and in the third tableau Gide will refuse to fulfill the promise Triptolemus has awakened, suggesting through his indifferent pastes and cuts the impossibility of sublimating pédéraste desire into neoclassical form in an age of acute sexual definition, and of the first person pronoun.

ay

> Igor’s Duality

Stravinsky had little patience with Gide’s depiction of the narcissusplucking scene. He did not believe in using the “I” or first-person pronoun in literature or music, as Gide had done in Si le grain ne meurt and was now calling for in his personalized stage indications and autobiographical subtext for Perséphone. Stravinsky’s comments, both at the time and later in life, indicate that if he had participated in or even known about the 1926 Marges journal’s inquiry into “L Homosexualité en littérature” he would undoubtedly have aligned himself with those who opposed the use of the personal pronoun for confessional sexual self-revelation. Stravinsky valued etiquette, correct manners, social decorum, and polite speech, all of

which he considered indispensible to the aristocratic musical culture in which he felt most at home. Of all Perséphone’s collaborators he was the one most deeply invested in pudeur publique (public modesty), a quality of social conduct he had embraced even before coming to France and that facilitated his smooth integration into French bourgeois life once he got there. Stravinsky fiercely guarded his privacy, and he left only scattered traces of his private thoughts. Pyotr Suvchinsky later remembered that pudeur publique had tremendous importance as a “moral category” in Stravinsky’s life. Rules appealed to Stravinsky because “they were for him

an interior necessity, born out of a blurred combination of pride, humanity, purity, and inborn modesty. With these qualities he could assure

himself and others that nothing concerning his psychic life would be revealed or betrayed; they also proclaimed to the world that he did not want or know how to—simply couldn't be—a penitent or sentimental confidant.”’ A “certain ‘modesty’ was natural to him,” Théodore Stravinsky commented to Nadia Boulanger about his father decades later.” Stravinsky’s uneasiness about personal confession inflected how he publically related to nonconformists. He apparently told Robert Craft in

an interview in the 1960s that he thought that Gide “was not grand enough as a creator to make us forget the sins of his nature, as Tolstoy makes us forget the sins of his nature.’ With almost thirty years’ hindsight,

1. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Igor Strawinsky,” Contrepoints 2 (February 1946): 23-24; integrated into Un siecle de musique russe (1830-1930), ed. Frank Langlois (Paris: Actes Sud, 2004), 200. 2. Théodore Stravinsky to Nadia Boulanger, 3 October 1960, VM BOB-28149, DM-BNF. I am grateful to Kimberly Francis for drawing my attention to these letters.

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Stravinsky also remembered somewhat uncomfortably that only Gide’s lips and mouth moved when he spoke, and that he wore a little smile that looked ironic. “If I had not known so much about Gide, wouldn't I have been more open with him myself?” he apparently asked Craft. He remembered how the critics in 1934 had condemned Perséphone as a “dramatically flaccid patchwork’—an interesting choice of adjective that does not

match the opinions of the existing reviews and hints at the fact that Stravinsky or Craft may have sometimes carelessly assumed the legitimacy of the popular opinion that pédérastie was connected with impotence. “Narcissi and pomegranates are better kept in the cupboard of comic props now associated with the Gide-Wilde age,’ he and/or Craft conclude in that conversation.” Thus, whereas Gide spoke openly about his sexuality in numerous roundtables, letters, and publications during the early 1930s, Stravinsky never mentioned his. Although he was in constant demand as a celebrity, he was also in the privileged position of not having to speak: his marriage to Ekaterina and marital infidelities had not caught the attention of tabloid journalists as Gide’s sexual life had done (for an impression of how Stravinsky was sought out by his fans and admired as a celebrity conductor and musician, see figure 5.1).* In the early 1930s Stravinsky suppressed his “I” in other ways as well: he adopted a masochistic regime of diet and personal fitness that often led him to the brink of utter physical exhaustion. He suffered from colitis and, later, ulcers, and friends could invite him to dinner only if they cooked according to his rigid dietary proscriptions.° “My father is doing much better,’ Théodore Stravinsky wrote

3. D&D, 37-38; reprinted in MeC, 176-78. According to Craft, Stravinsky showed “protectiveness” toward homosexuals as a consequence of his relationship with his beloved brother Guriy, who had been his closest confidant in childhood and died tragically of typhoid fever in Romania during World War L. Craft lists Jean Cocteau, Charles-Albert Cingria, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Edward James among Stravinsky's homosexual friends. See Robert Craft, “Bungled Biography,” Musical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2001): 398. Iam grateful to Byron Adams for drawing my attention to this article. Stravinsky kept several pictures of Guriy and his army unit in Romania in 1916, including one in which an unidentified soldier embraces Guriy affectionately from behind and another in which a soldier has his arm around Guriy and leans against him suggestively. See photos 91 and 91, PSS. 4. American journalists wrote about Vera Sudeikina's affair with Stravinsky and infidelity to her husband Sergei Sudeikin, for example, and criticized her as a gold-digger, but without mentioning the fact that Stravinsky was married at the time. See “Tragedy of the Famous Artist’s Lost Wife: Unhappy

Serge Soudeikine [sic]|—Deserted by His Beloved Sonia [sic] Because She Admired the Genius of Stravinsky, the Great Musical Composer, More Than His,’ Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine Section, 29 March 1925, 2; reproduced in IVP, 63. 5. When Rubinstein invited Stravinsky, Madame Debussy, and Nadia Boulanger to a dinner party on 7 April 1933, she promised that “we will all follow a diet, if you wish.” See Rubinstein to Stravinsky, undated telegram; microfilm 102.1, p. 1023, PSS; Craft translates this line differently in SPD, 299.

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André Schaeffner in 1931, “better than last year but not yet fully back to his normal state. He wants to combine too many diets at the same time

and those combinations are not always felicitous.’ When Stravinsky found out in the summer of 1933 that Théodore needed an appendectomy, he became excited by the intricacies of the operation and requested

6. Théodore Stravinsky to André Schaefiner, 16 January 1932, no. 274, Fonds André Schaeffner, Médiathéque Musicale Mahler (hereafter FAS-MMM).

Igor’s Duality m 293

such a procedure for himself and other family members.’ He actually underwent the operation and had part of his intestines removed; given the chance, I think he would have metaphorically purged the rest. Stravinsky's inherent squeamishness about personal confession translated into a two-pronged strategy for creating his public persona, a strategy he solidified as an émigré in France, whereby he gave frequent interviews for the purpose of advertising performances of his music and at the same time allowed

others to speak for him in books and pamphlets published under his name. Stravinsky learned the promotional value of media coverage while touring as a musician and conductor in the late 1920s. In his interviews from this period he invariably expressed gratitude to the musicians and orchestras performing his music, praised the musical traditions and physical beauty of the country he found himself in, and stressed the importance of audiences experiencing music as conducted or performed by the composer himself. He always tried to present himself in a favorable light, even when doing so meant taking some liberties with the truth, and to say what he thought people wanted to hear. He molded his public persona to please his public, and in so doing displayed a remarkable capacity to reflect a range of cultures and ideologies. Although he could be charming and personable, and seemed to enjoy small talk, he rarely let reporters see anything he did not wish them to see. Despite all this public posing, he expressed strikingly consistent thoughts on a number of issues.°

In the 1930s, Stravinsky also established the second prong of his strategy: his practice of collaborating with friends on essays, lectures, and

monographs in which he established his philosophy as a composer. Through his narrative negotiations with friends in completing these works he perfected the form of speech for which he would later become famous in his “conversations” with Craft, which consisted of telling stories through third parties who served as narrative masks behind which he

7. D&D, 43. Stravinsky probably developed his hypochondria in part as a consequence of his parents obsession with illness after the death of their first son, Stravinsky's brother Roman; see SBPK, vol. 1. Janet Flannery wrote eloquently of Stravinsky's hypochondria in “Profiles: Russian Firebird,’ New Yorker, 5 January 1935, 2S; quoted in SPD, 301. An extensive correspondence between Stravinsky and his many doctors is kept in the PSS. 8. I disagree with Stephen Walsh's conclusion that Stravinsky flagrantly contradicted himself in these interviews and displayed an “infuriating disregard for what ordinary human beings understood as artistic or intellectual consistency.” Stravinsky scholarship in general has been damaged by the widespread and false assumption that we cannot know Stravinsky because of his tendency to lie or pose in public. See Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 93. Many of Stravinsky’s essays and interviews were published in obscure newspapers. A wide selection of them is kept in microfilm 118.1 and in uncatalogued binders arranged in chronological order, PSS. See also Valérie Dufour, Igor Stravinski: Ecrits et entretiens (1910-1940) (Paris: Actes Sud, 2012); and Victor Varunts, I. Stravinsky: Publitsist i sobesednik (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1988).

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could inhabit a semipublic space of rhetorical ambiguity. Such a narrative strategy can be interpreted as an exaggerated form of public modesty, the desire to close public access to his private life and complicate the source of his utterances. It also hints at Stravinsky’s rejection of social and personal history in favor of constructed accounts of his life. Richard Taruskin and

others have sometimes argued that callous careerism led Stravinsky to abandon his voice to his friends, in the hope that their erudition and talent would allow him to achieve greater posthumous glory.” Other critics believe that Stravinsky may have used helpers to complete the type of busywork he did not want to do, indeed, that his penchant for ghostwriters indicates a lack of moral fiber or an excessive need for control (preferring

to predetermine what critics wrote about him by having them work for him, rather than leaving them to their own devices). Valérie Dufour has suggested, on the other hand, that Stravinsky might more charitably be interpreted as a “co-author” who communicated his thoughts orally to friends and then relied on them to transcribe faithfully what he had said." Stravinsky’s practice of allowing his friends to speak for him reached its

extreme prewar expression in the autobiography, Chroniques de ma vie, that Walter Nouvel cowrote in 1936, and in the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he prepared to give at Harvard in 1939 and subsequently published as his Poétique musicale—which Suvchinsky and Roland-Manuel famously

coauthored."' In these two works Stravinsky blurred the distinction 9. See Richard Taruskin, “In Stravinsky’s Songs, the True Man, No Ghostwriters,’ New York Times, 13 April 2008. 10. Valérie Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes (1910-1940) (Brussels: Editions del’ Université de Bruxelles, 2006), 236-37. See also Ute Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religiésem Bekenntnis: Igor Stravinskijs

Asthetik zwischen 1920 und 1939 (Hofheim: wolke, 2007), 43-47. In 1931 Henry Malherbe singled out André Schaefiner as the first critic to become a spokesperson for Stravinsky when he interviewed the composer for his monograph Strawinsky (Paris: Rieder, May 1931). He referred to Schaeffner, in reference to Goethe, as Stravinsky's “Eckermann’; Malherbe, “Chronique musicale: M. Igor Strawinsky,’ Feuilleton du Temps, 9 September 1931. Suvchinsky thought the collaborative aspect of Stravinsky's published writings made them a uniquely interesting subject of study for future musicologists and psychologists. See Suvchinsky, “Pour un Centre d'Etudes Igor Strawinsky,’ typescript; microfilm 277.1, p.1$6, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. 11. Igor Stravinsky, Poétique musicale sous forme de six lecons, ed. Myriam Soumagnac (Paris: Har-

monique Flammarion, 2000); translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl as Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, bilingual ed., with a preface by George Seferis (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). I have used these editions because they are the most widely distributed and available. See also Robert Craft, “Appendix L: Roland-Manuel and La Poétique Musicale,’ in SSC, vol. 2, 503-17; Valérie Dufour, “Strawinsky vers Souvtchinsky: Theme et variations sur la Poétique musicale,’ Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 17 (2004): 17-23; Dufour, “La ‘Poétique musicale’ de Stravinsky: Un manuscrit inédit de Souvtchinsky,’ Revue de musicologie 89, no. 2 (2003): 373-92; Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes, 213-44; Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 29-52; and Myriam Soumagnac, “Préface: Les Ecrits d’Igor Stravinsky,’ in Igor Stravinsky, Poétique musicale, 11-55. On Nouvel’s involvement in the Chroniques de ma vie, see Robert Craft, “Appendix K; Walter Nouvel and Chroniques de ma vie, in SSC, vol. 2, 487-502. Materials relating to the Poétique musicale and the Chroniques de ma vie are kept in microfilms 116.1, 117.1, and 257.1 (Dossier Roland-Manuel), PSS.

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between his voice and the voices of his friends to such a degree that scholars today still wonder what he “actually” intended to say and why he

let his friends say it for him. In both these works his friends communicated his ideas on the basis of extensive discussions with him, thus at one remove yet in his presence—rather analogous, actually, to Eumolpus's speaking in the presence of the dancing Persephone, or the narrator's anticipating the stage action in Oedipus Rex. The tension between a third-

person ghostwriter and a silent yet corporeally present first person effectively destabilized Stravinsky's voice. Nothing could have been more

unlike Gide’s sincere self-revelation through his writing. Stravinsky's writing practice worked to his advantage when he was at the height of his powers and using his friends’ intellectual talents to good effect, as in the Chroniques and Poétique, but it also made him vulnerable to abuse in later life when he became ill and lost control.’” Gide’s and Stravinsky's different attitudes toward the role of an author point to the fact that the use or suppression of the first-person pronoun in France was not a neutral act but rather linked to social, racial, class, sexual, and gender privileges and to struggles for representation. Gide used the “I” as ameans of acknowledging his pédéraste subjectivity. Conversely, Stravinsky rejected the “IT” in part to confirm his membership in an aristocratic elite that represented itself according to hegemonic norms. The political option of omitting the first-person singular was not open to those, like Gide, who were involved in struggles for visibility and equality.

Stravinsky developed his narrative and discursive strategies as a composer and celebrity in part in response to the fraught debate on his national identity that took place between Soviet and Russian émigré critics, composers, and intellectuals during his years as an émigré in France. Boris Asafyev, Boris de Schloezer, Arthur Lourié, and Pyotr Suvchinsky stand out as four Russian critics who shaped how he conceived of and represented himself as a Russian composer in these years. Although all four men were associated in some way with St. Petersburg, each adopted a different ideological 12. Robert Craft remains Stravinsky's most controversial ghostwriter. Stravinsky described Craft as “creating” him ina letter to Deborah Ishlon of 15 March 1958, quoted in SPD, 438-39. In the 1970s Théodore lamented to Nadia Boulanger that Craft was taking advantage of his father’s dementia in old age. He wrote of his “indignation about the ‘interview’ articles fabricated by Craft to contribute to the myth that

the master is still mentally in form.” “When I think, dear friend,” he continued, “that the completely clouded cerebral state of my father prevents him even from recognizing his own music when someone puts arecord on? Itis tragic.” Théodore Stravinsky to Nadia Boulanger, 27 January 1970, VM BOB-28149, DMBNF. These letters must be read within the context of the legal battle between Craft and Stravinsky's children. Théodore complained about Vera and Craft in letters to André Schaefiner. See one undated letter and those of $ January 1973, 18 November 1974, and 4 December 1974, nos. 284-88, FAS-MMM. I believe

Craft's interviews represent as much Craft's opinions as Stravinsky's memories. I have thus used them sparingly in this book, and only when I could corroborate the information given in them in other sources.

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and aesthetic perspective on what it meant for Stravinsky to be considered “Russian” in a transnational age of cataclysmic political upheaval. Boris

Vladimirovich Asafyev (1884-1949), who wrote under the pseudonym Igor Glebov, had studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and quickly risen to prominence as one of the most important music critics of prerevolutionary Russia. He articulated the pre-Stalinist humanist and later Soviet materialist view. Boris de Schloezer (1881-1969 )—the only one of the four who was not from St. Petersburg, though he had briefly lived there—came from an affluent bourgeois family in Vitebsk. His mother was Belgian, and he had studied musicology in Paris and Sociology in Brussels (where he completed a doctoral degree on L’Egoisme in 1901). He had close personal ties to Alexander Scriabin (who was married to his sister) and represented the humanist, Western European, aestheticist approach.’’ Pyotr Suvchinsky (1892-1985), introduced in chapter 2, was an aristocrat who spoke French and German fluently, organized concerts and intellectual journals, studied music in St. Petersburg with Felix Mikhailovich Blumenfeld, and was a great connoisseur of literature.'* He filtered his ideas through a Eurasianist perspective. Arthur Lourié (1891-1966) was born into a Sephardic Jewish

family but converted to Catholicism in 1913." He studied composition and piano at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg before leaving school to join the futurists and strike out on his own as a composer. Later he articulated a

Hegelian dialectic view tempered by Eurasianist, modernist, and neoThomist views. It is significant that Boris de Schloezer, Stravinsky, and Asafyev—born in 1881, 1882, and 1884, respectively—were separated by a generation from Lourié and Suvchinsky, born in 1891 and 1892. Members of the younger generation, as Gun-Britt Kohler has observed, were not as rooted in late nineteenth-century Russian culture as their elders."®

Asafyev, de Schloezer, and Suvchinsky began formulating their ideas about Stravinsky's national and émigré Russian identity in the exciting

13. Gun-Britt Kohler, Boris de Schloezer (1881-1969): Wege aus der russischen Emigration (Cologne:

Béhlau, 2003), 7-54. Kohler also discusses the possibly Jewish heritage of de Schloezer’s mother. He gives no evidence for this assumption, however (8). 14. Irina Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky (1892-1985): Etude de l’émergence d’une personnalité: Son époque, ses travaux et sa pensée a la lumiére de sa correspnodance et de ses écrits,” Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), 2007-8, 15-47. 1S. On Lourié's date of birth, which is often erroneously given as 1892, see Klara Moricz, “Shadows of the Past: Akhmatova's Poem without a Hero and Lourié'’s Incantations,’ Twentieth-Century Music S, no.

1 (2008): 80. On his conversion, see ibid., 83. For excellent background on Lourié, see Klara Méricz, “Decadent Truncation: Liberated Eros in Arthur Vincent Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great,’ Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 2 (2008): 181-213. 16. Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 19-21.

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years of cultural renaissance preceding the revolution in Russia, when their careers first became intertwined with one another and with the music of Stravinsky. Russian critics began to reject Stravinsky as a member of their national Russian school after he moved to Paris in 1910, and especially after he rewrote his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s ending to Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov in 1913.” Two years later Rimsky-Korsakov’s son Andrei published a scathing critique of Stravinsky in the Russian journal Apollon, and he ignored Stravinsky’s music completely in the journal he

founded that year, Muzykal’nyi sovremennik (Musical contemporary), which was funded by his coeditor, Suvchinsky, and regularly included con-

tributions by Suvchinsky, Asafyev, and de Schloezer.’* In his review of Stravinsky's rewritten Boris ending in Apollon, Andrei argued that Stravinsky had already begun to abandon Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's teachings soon after Petrushka (1910-11) and that in his music he had “deliberately established pseudonationalism |Izhe-natsionalizm | above real nationalism

| narodnost’].”'? His words are evidence of the bad feeling between those who stayed in Russia and those who achieved artistic success in Western Europe, as well as of the tension around the question of Stravin-

sky’s place in the national canon before the Russian Revolution (and before Stravinsky’s turn to Neoclassicism). In Russia the lines were drawn among (1) academicists—those who believed in the rigid yet “universal” conservatory training associated with Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein and Chaikovsky; (2) nationalists—the Mighty Handful (Miliy

Balakirev, Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai RimskyKorsakov, and César Cui); and (3) modernists. Asafyev and Suvchinsky embraced the project of modernism, felt strong mutual respect for each other, and did not agree with Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov’s condemnation of Stravinsky.*® After Andrei refused to publish Asafyev’s positive review of a

14 January 1917 Russian Musical Society concert of Petrushka in Muzykal'nyi sovremennik because he judged it to be based on unscientific

17. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), vol. 2, 1035-118. 18. Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,” 24-35. 19. Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, “Balety Igorya Stravinskogo” |The ballets of Igor Stravinsky], Apollon 1 (1915S): 54-55. Dufour translates this unusual Russian word as “Ersatz nationalism” in Stravinski et ses exégetes, 22. Taruskin translates it as “artificial pseudonationalism” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 2, 1120.

20. Suvchinsky’s strong respect for Asafyev is evident in an undated letter to Andrei RimskyKorsakov [1917], and ina note in a letter from Sergei Prokofiev to Boris Asafyev of 23 May 1925; quoted in Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 34, 46.

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method, Asafyev and Suvchinsky thereupon resigned, withdrew funding, and founded their own journal, Melos, in which they explored neo-Kantian formalism, modern music, and Bergson's philosophy of élan vital; Berg-

sons ideas later became the common ground shared by neo-Thomist, Franco-Russian modernist, and Eurasianist philosophies.”

The Russian Revolution shattered this intellectual community. De Schloezer immigrated in harrowing circumstances over Brussels (1920) to Paris in 1921.” Bilingual in Russian and French and educated in the West, he at first scraped together a living writing articles for a wide array of French

and Russian émigré journals, translating Russian authors (works by Mikhail Lermontov and several by his good friend and philosopher Lev Shestov), and publishing a groundbreaking book in Russian on his brother-in-law, Scriabin, whose children he was now raising. Suvchinsky immigrated to Sofia in 1920.*’ There he became friends with Nikolai Trubetskoy, who worked with him to establish the Eurasianist movement—a loose net-

work of diverse Russian intellectuals who planned the political future of nonmonarchist, post-Bolshevik Russia from the vantage point of their European exile. In 1921 Suvchinsky left Sofia for Berlin, and in 1925 he moved back to Paris, where he reconnected with many modernist composers and old friends from St. Petersburg, including Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev.** Lourié at first stayed in the newly organized Soviet Union and served under Anatoliy Lunacharsky as music commissar of the Narkompros

21. See Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,” 36-39. Suvchinsky and Asafyev tried to continue the journal Melos after Suvchinsky took up a post as political commissioner of the revolution in Kiev in 1918. Suvchinsky organized Melos concerts in Kiev and played Stravinsky’s Petrushka for four hands with Vladimir Butzov (45). On Asafyev’s philosophy, see David Haas, “Boris Asafyev and Soviet Symphonic Theory,” Musical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 412-14; and Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 2, 1119-24.

22. See Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 13, 111-98; and Marina Scriabin’s introduction to Scriabin: Artist and Mystic [1975], trans. Nicolas Slonimsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), vii-x. De Schloezer wrote his Scriabin book while fleeing Soviet Russia, during which time he was forced into a stint in the White Army and contracted typhoid. The simultaneous publication of his Scriabin monograph in Russian and articles on Stravinsky's neoclassicism in French speaks volumes about how he negotiated the traumatic fact of his forced emigration. In 1923 he suffered an emotional crisis and attempted suicide. 23. See Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 48-66; Katerina Levidou, “The Encounter of Neoclassicism with Eurasianism in Interwar Paris: Stravinsky, Suvchinsky, and Lourié,’ Ph.D. diss., St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, 2008, 62-76; and Konrad Walterskirchen, “Pétr Suvcinskij (1892-1985),” in Pierre Souvtchinski, cahiers d étude, ed. Eric Humbertclaude (Paris: L Harmatton, 2005), 19-34, 55-70. 24. On Suvchinsky’s relationship to Prokofiev, see Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 89-103; Elena Pol'dyaeva, “Souvtchinski et Prokofiev,’ trans. Michel Maximovitch, in Humberclaude, Pierre Souvtchinski, cahiers d étude, 127-62; and Pol'dyaeva, V muzykal’nom krugu russkogo zarubezhya: Pis'ma k Petru Suvchinskomu (In the musical circle of Russia abroad: Letters to Pyotr Suvchinsky] (Berlin: Gesellschaft fiir Osteuropa-Férderung, 2005).

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(National Commissariat for Enlightenment). He immigrated to Berlin in 1922 and two years later moved to Paris, where he became a devout follower of Jacques Maritain and friend to Boris de Schloezer.* He faced considerable hostility from his fellow émigrés, however, because of his known ties to the despised Bolshevik government at home.” Asafyev was the only one of the four to stay in the Soviet Union. He advised Lunacharsky, taught

as a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory after 1925, and established himself as a major critic, musicologist, and administrator. As a modernist who effectively led the Assotsiatsiya sovremennoy muzyki (Association for Contemporary Music) and had close ties to the West, Asafyev fit only uncomfortably in this Soviet materialist camp, however.”’

Two phases in the history of the polemics about Stravinsky's national identity are important to how he came to construct his narrative voice and, consequentially, the sexual politics of Perséphone. The first occurred in the early 1920s, when Stravinsky turned to a new “objective” style in works like Les Symphonies d’instruments a vent (1920) and the Octet (1923), in which he challenged Soviet and Russian critics to engage with the philosophical question of how he as a Russian artist could achieve uni-

-..«-».;a

versal significance (in other words, become “classic” ) while remaining nationally distinct. De Schloezer and Suvchinsky became embroiled at that

time in a bitter dispute over the distinctiveness of the Russian people, which may have influenced de Schloezer in his historical decision to define Stravinsky as a neoclassicist in the Western tradition. They disagreed primarily over Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist politics, which are central to the story I tell about Perséphone.** Their debates coincided with France's recognition of the Soviet Union and Lenin's purging of the intellectuals in 1922,

an event that proved psychologically devastating to émigrés and heightened their already anxious sense of having permanently lost their homeland.

25. Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 16S—66n200. Kohler notes the highly personal nature of the correspondence between Lourié and de Schloezer in the 1930s, which is kept in the Fonds Boris de Schloezer, housed at the Bibliothéque Louis Notari in Monaco. 26. Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 43. Russian émigrés in France suspected Lourié of being a Bolshevik sympathizer and made his life extremely difficult. See Detlev Gojowy, Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus (Laaber: Laaber, 1993), 132-33; Levidou, “The Encounter of Neoclassicism with Eurasianism,’ 57-58; and the correspondence between Lourié and Stravinsky in SPRK. 27. See Marina Frolova-Walker, “From Modernism to Socialist Realism in Four Years: Myaskovsky and Asafyev,” Muzykovedenie [Musicology] 3 (2003): 201.

28. My interpretation of Stravinsky's relationship with Eurasianist thought differs significantly from that offered by Taruskin in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 2, 1319-459; “Stravinsky and the Subhuman: Notes on Svadebka,” in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 389-467; and “Just How Russian Was Stravinsky,” New York Times, 18 April 2010, 21, 23.

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The second phase in the polemics about Stravinsky’s national identity, as they are relevant to Perséphone, occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Asafyev and de Schloezer published monographs on Stravinsky, and Suvchinsky abandoned his Eurasianist activism in favor of music criticism. In his writings of this period Suvchinsky developed a philosophical theory about Stravinsky that was rooted in Eurasianist thought and

emphasized Stravinsky's dual nature as a Russian composer who split himself between a private sphere of mystical revelation of the material world and a public sphere of Christian subjugation to universal laws. Stravinsky's behavior during these years reflected Suvchinsky’s analysis (although which came first is unclear): he spoke of himself as a subjugated

“personality” and expressed admiration for charismatic authoritarian leaders, yet at the same time he acknowledged that he was attached to presymbolic spheres of communication. Stravinsky's dualistic outlook shaped his setting of the narcissus-plucking scene in Perséphone. In what follows I will discuss the two phases of the polemics around Stravinsky as a means of setting the stage for my analysis of Stravinsky's music for Perséphone.

M@ THE NEOCLASSIC POSEUR The debate between Suvchinsky and de Schloezer that took place shortly after their emigration from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and was

sparked by the publication of Trubetskoy’s Evropa i chelovechestvo (Europe and Humanity) and the first important Eurasianist collection of essays, Iskhod k Vostoku (Exodus to the East). The fundamental disagreement between the two men circled around the question of Russian distinctiveness. In “Sila slabykh” (The Strength of the Weak)—one of his contributions to Iskhod k Vostoku—Suvchinsky postulated that a faux intelligentsia seduced by European falsehoods had abused the Russian people before and during the revolution and that the latter would achieve their true destiny only when the intelligentsia in exile (he and his Eurasianist friends) guided them back to their true character and purpose.” He believed that the Russian people had a specific collective character 29. Pyotr Suvchinsky “Strength of the Weak” in Pyotr Nikolaevich Satisky, ed., Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasian, trans. with a bibliographical essay by Ilya Vinkovetsky, additional translations by Chaterine Boyle and Kenneth Brostrom, ed. Ilya Vinkovetsky and Charles Schlacks, Jr. (Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, Jr., 1996), 4-11. This essay was originally published as “Sila slabykh,” in Pyotr Nikolaevich Savitsky, Iskhod k Vostoku (Sofia: Rossiysko-Bolgarskoe kn-vo, 1921), 4-8. See also Pyotr Suvchinsky, “Inobytie russkoi religioznosti” {The otherness of Russian religiosity], Evraziyskiy vremennik 3 (1 923) : 81-106.

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that distinguished them from Europeans.” He implicitly accused the Europeans of imperial domination in his homeland, and he encouraged his countrymen to maintain their sovereignty and realize their true destiny in a post-Bolshevik Eurasianist theocracy.*’ In “Epokha very” (The Age of Faith), his second contribution to Iskhod k Vostoku (Exodus to the East), Suvchinsky again critiqued the Bol-

sheviks for denying the importance of the individual and of individual religious experience. The Eurasianist collectivity he imagined would be unified but accept the internal differences between its members.** In the 1923 article “K preodoleniyu revolyutsii” (Toward overcoming the revolution) he argued that true Russian people reject Bolshevik materialism, acknowledge the individual experience of Russian mystical traditions,

and subjugate themselves to the universal dogma of Russian orthodoxy.”

In an article on “Mirosozertsanie i iskusstvo” (World view and art), published the same year, he suggested that composers efface their individuality in the service of form in religious music.** He believed that

the Russian character is marked by a duality between mysticism and

30. Suvchinsky “Strength of the Weak,” in Exodus to the East, 9.

31. Suvchinsky critiqued imperialism and the idea of a universal culture and encouraged cultural relativism in “Eurasier,” Der Querschnitt 13 (1926); translated from the unpublished Russian original into French by Laurence Lombard as “1923/24: LEurasisme,’ in (Re)lire Souvtchinski: Textes choisis par Eric Humbertclaude, ed. Eric Humbertclaude (La Bresse: Eric Humbertclaude, 1990), 65-71. In this essay he urged émigrés to redefine their country on the basis of an “organic Russian and Orthodox vision’ as a non-Western spiritual empire situated in Turania—the geographical space between Asia and

Europe (pp. 51, 59, 65, 67, 69-70). Later, Suvchinsky’s interest in Russian sovereignty led him to explore the structures of Russian society and the “typology”-—-his favored term-—-of Russian creative artists. On Suvchinsky’s anti-colonialism, see Sergei Glebov, “Le Frémissement du temps: Petr Suvchinsky, leurasisme et l'esthétique de la modernité,’ in Pierre Souvtchinski, cahiers d étude, 167. Trubetskoy offers a more expanded critique of European imperialism in Nasledie Chingis-Khana: Vzglyad na russkuyu istoriyu ne s Zapada a s Vostoka [1925], translated by Anatoly Liberman and Kenneth Brostrom as The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity, ed. Anatoly Liberman, with a preface by

Vyacheslav V. Ivanov (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991). See David Chioni Moore's “Colonialism, Eurasianism, Orientalism: N.S. Trubetskoy’s Russian Vision,” Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 321-26. 32. Suvchinsky, “The Age of Faith,’ in Savitsky, Exodus to the East, 20, 26-29. This essay was origi-

nally published as “Epokha very” in Savitsky, Iskhod k Vostoku, 14-27. Here Suvchinsky writes that “religious culture postulates a spiritual basis of the individual. Each individual, in relation to any other, elicits unique illuminations, and consequently, is unique in quality” (20). 33. Pyotr Suvchinsky, “K preodoleniyu revolyutsii” [Toward overcoming the revolution], Evraziyskiy vremennik 3 (1923): 30-51; translated by Laurence Lombard into French as “1923: Dépasser la révolution,” in Humbertclaude, (Re )lire Souvtchinski, $2-53. 34. Pyotr Suvchinsky, “Mirosozertsanie i iskusstvo” [World view and art], in Sofia: Problemy dukhovnoi kul’tury i religioznoi filosofii [Sofia: problems of spiritual culture and religious philosophy], ed. Nikolai Berdyaev (Berlin: Obelisk, 1923), 112. See Levidou, “The Encounter of Neoclassicism with Eurasianism,” 111.

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obedience to Orthodox dogma. Later he would postulate that this duality was essential to Stravinsky's creative persona. De Schloezer fundamentally disagreed with Suvchinsky’s project of distinguishing Russians from Europeans on the basis of religion, mystic prac-

tices, or alleged relationship to the East. He criticized Suvchinsky’s contributions to Iskhod k Vostoku and Trubetskoy’s Evropa i chelovechestvo

in three reviews that appeared in the émigré journals Poslednie novosti (Latest news) and Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary notes) in 192122.°° De Schloezer attacked Suvchinsky and Trubetskoy for following oldfashioned Slavophil mysticism, neglecting Christianity, lacking a concept of “culture,” defining “the East” unclearly, and exaggerating the distinctiveness of Russian orthodoxy.*° As a secular thinker yet interested admirer of Léon

Bloy and as someone who socialized with such Catholic intellectuals as Charles Du Bos and Gabriel Marcel, de Schloezer disputed the possibility of distinguishing Russian culture from Christianity in the West.’ He did not think of himself as a victim of European imperialism and did not

believe in promoting Russian sovereignty as an antidote to Western secular humanist traditions. Europeans had developed the idea of humanity, promoted progress, and were striving toward universality, he argued. They had established humanist values based on the achieve-

ments of Greek and Roman antiquity and Christianity, which he agreed were worthy of dissemination and also central to Russian cultural traditions.* Either to assure his intellectual position in exile in the wake of his ugly quarrel with some of his fellow refugees or out of true philosophical conviction, de Schloezer chose this moment to make the spectacular move of

35. Boris de Schloezer, “Evraziytsy” {Eurasianists], Poslednie novosti, 1 November 1921; “Kn. N. S. Trubetskoy-Evropa i chelovechestvo (Rezension)” [N. S. Trubetskoy: Europe and Humanity

(review) ],” Sovremennye zapiski 4 (1921): 376-81; and “Zakat Evropy” [Europe’s Decline], Sovremennye zapiski 12 (1922): 339-48. De Schloezer joined a lively debate about Eurasianism between Russian intellectuals that continued until 1930. For sources, see Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 168-69n213. 36. De Schloezer, “Evraziytsy”; “Tagore: La Maison et le monde (Rezension)” [Tagore’s The Home and the World (review) |, Sovremennye zapiski 5 (1921): 365-71; and “Tagore-Natsionalizm” | 'Tagore: Nationalism], in Sovremennye zapiski 8 (1921): 389-93. See Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 170-77. 37. Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 14. Nikolai Berdyaev commented in 1924 that de Schloezer “does

not accept the very fact of belief. Religion appears to him static and motionless”; quoted in ibid., 159-60. See also Boris de Schloezer, “Noveishaya literatura 0 Dostoyevskom” [Newest literature on Dostoyevsky], Sovremennye zapiski 17 (1923): 451-65. De Schloezer’s rejection of Berdyaev’s faith may be another reason why he did not get along with Suvchinsky. 38. See Boris de Schloezer “Zakat Evropy” [Europe's decline], Sovremennye zapiski 12 (1922): 348; and Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 167-80.

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appropriating Stravinsky for European classicism. In 1923—a year after his last critique of the Eurasianists appeared in Sovremennye zapiski— he published three articles in French in which he first defined Stravinsky's music as “classic” and “neoclassicist’—first neoclassique, then, later, nouveau style classique or simply classique—in other words, as embodying the universal, humanist, European values that that he believed all Europeans and Russians shared, though Eurasianists like Suvchinsky

rejected them as imperialist.’ De Schloezer linked Stravinsky’s turn toward “objectivity” and “classic art” (art classique) with Le Sacre and Petrushka and described the composer as a “Russian-European” or Western master. “He has assimilated into European musical culture and penetrated its laws and traditions,’ he concluded. “This revolutionary is not an émigré; he is a child of the country where he works and creates music, and of which he transforms the musical concepts that were also his.”*° De Schloezer’s strikingly apolitical, aestheticized, and neutrally nonnational term neoclassicism appealed to his European colleagues, who quickly adopted it as an effective label for Stravinsky’s second style. This in spite of the fact that de Schloezer himself felt hesitant about the

term and by December 1923 had rejected it because he found it too close to “academicism’—the conservatory-type compositional route that critics in Russia had so negatively judged in the prerevolutionary period.” De Schloezer based his definition of neoclassicism on the fundamental idea that immanent musical forms revealed aesthetic truth in and of themselves. In his article on Stravinsky in La Revue musicale from 1923 he insisted that classicism consisted “of giving a work an absolute and completely autonomous existence, and not letting anything but purely formal considerations intervene in its structure, and arranging those elements that conform to a certain specific logic particular to each art.’* His attraction

39. See Boris de Schloezer, “La Musique,” La Revue contemporaine 71 (1 February 1923): 245-48; “La Saison musicale,’ NRF 21, no. 119 (1 August 1923): 238-48; and “Igor Stravinsky,’ La Revue musicale 5, no. 2, special issue on Igor Stravinsky (1 December 1923): 97-141. The latter article appeared in

Russian as “Mysli o Stravinskom,” Zapiski nablyudatelya (1924): 184-219. De Schloezer contrasts Stravinsky's neoclassicism with Schoenberg’s neo-Romanticism and rootedness in psychology. Markus Bandur gives an excellent overview of de Schloezer’s terms in “Neoklassizmus,” Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, Handbuch der musikalischen Terminologie 1, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995), 289-94. 40. De Schloezer, “Igor Stravinsky,’ 120-21. 41. See Boris de Schloezer, “Igor Stravinsky und Serge Prokoffieff,’ trans. Rita Boetticher, Melos 4 (1924-25): 472; and Bandur, “Neoklassizmus,” 291. 42. De Schloezer, “Igor Stravinsky,’ 133.

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to the idea of the autonomous artwork led him to reject neo-Thomist hermeneutics and especially the theories of Ernest Ansermet, who in 1921 had argued in an important article in La Revue musicale that Stravinsky’s

music after Petrushka was “objective” or “plastic” (in Maritain’s neoThomist sense) because of the way it followed “eternal and unalterable rules” or “absolute values.’ De Schloezer accused Ansermet (erroneously) of using the term realist and argued sloppily against him that Stravinsky’s music was actually utterly autonomous and “objective” and did not “represent any objective reality.’** Jean Starobinski later explained de Schloezer’s rejection of mimesis on the grounds that he was seeking “a certain truth, ‘that which is more true than himself, in other words a being, a substance, something concrete and intelligible, in sum an ontological value superior to the me of everyday life.”* De Schloezer did not believe that Stravinsky expressed his intentions or reflected a personal, lived experience in his music; rather, he created there a “neutral authorial voice.” De Schloezer developed this theory in dialectical

relation to his theories about the composer Scriabin, whose philosophy had strongly shaped his own.** In his article on Stravinsky for La Revue musicale in 1923, for example, de Schloezer defined the “I” in Le Sacre as existing on a neutral level as a “stopping point” (lieu de passage) where reality is manifested musically,” in other words, as a constructed or “artistic” self formed through speech and distinguished from the real or everyday self. He felt that Stravinsky had abandoned the individual in favor of a collective voice in his songs of the war years.*’ This theory of authorial voice proved attractive to French proponents of literary objectivity, including Jacques Riviére and Charles Du Bos. Du Bos, who had condemned Gide’s

43. Ernest Ansermet, “L’Oeuvre d’Igor Stravinsky,’ La Revue musicale 2, no. 9 (1 July 1921): 2-S, 13-18, 19. 44, De Schloezer, “Igor Stravinsky,’ 133. De Schloezer either knowingly or unknowingly rejects Maritain’s notion of mimicry in Christian art in this passage. I could not find the word réalisme in Ansermet’s original essay. Ansermet refers to Stravinsky's music as “epic” and not “realist,’ although his Thomist theory of mimesis implies a form of realism. See Ansermet, “L-Oeuvre d'Igor Strawinsky,’ 7-8, 13-14. Later, de Schloezer argued that Stravinsky had failed in his classicism because he had created art about art, rather than allowing art to mimic some kind of reality—an argument that is in conflict with his earlier views. See André Boucourechliev, “Boris de Schloezer,” in Yves Bonnefoy, ed., Boris de Schloezer, Cahiers pour un temps (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/ Pandora Editions, 1981), 21-22. 45. Jean Starobinski, “Des niveaux de l’oeuvre,” in Yves Bonnefoy, Boris de Schloezer, 47; and Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 41-53, 138-61. 46. See Boris de Schloezer, “Dva polyusa russkoi muzyki” [Two poles of Russian music], Sovremennye zapiski 7 (1921): 341—SO; and de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. 47. De Schloezer, “Igor Stravinsky,’ 122; 124-25; and “Psychologie et musique,” La Revue musicale 2, no. 8 (1 June 1921): 244~56. See also Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religiésem Bekenntnis, 226-29; and Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 46-52.

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confessional tone in Corydon, explicitly praised de Schloezer’s notion of objectivity.* De Schloezer’s classicist aesthetics reflect his involvement in the intellec-

tual milieu of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. He wrote his first articles on Stravinsky's neoclassicism just after he had been hired there as a music critic and when he was in the midst of corresponding with Gide about publishing in French the work of his friend, the philosopher Lev Shestov.”” His connection to this intellectual circle gives evidence of the direct historical relationship between the musicological discourse on Stravinsky's objectivity and the

literary debate on Gide's use of the “T” in literature. In both situations the critics denied difference and undermined politically disadvantaged groups’ struggles for self-determination (in Gide’s case the pédérastes, in Stravinsky’s the Russian nationals) by appealing to universal, humanist values. Later, de Schloezer recognized this political underpinning when he wrote in his review of Stravinsky’s Chroniques de ma vie in 1936 that “a systematic and fairly conscious rejection of the discovery of [the] ‘I} is in reality just as meaningful and characteristic as sincere confessions and lyrical outpourings.”*” Once it is situated in its original historic context, de Schloezer’s inven-

tion of the word neoclassicism can be understood more clearly. The term

takes on relative rather than absolute meaning, in that it represents a reaction to Eurasianist, neo-Thomist, and Soviet interpretations of what it might mean for a Russian composer to compose classicist music after the revolution. De Schloezer rejected both materialism, on the one hand, and religious and national particularism, on the other. By interpreting Stravinsky as a European classicist he stole Suvchinsky’s thunder and sabotaged the latter's tentative project of establishing Stravinsky as an artistic mascot for the Eurasianist movement. De Schloezer’s critique of Eurasianism caused considerable damage to his relationship with Suvchinsky. Before publishing his review of Iskhod k Vostoku he wrote Suvchinsky to warn him about what he was about to do. “I won't hide from you the fact that Iskhod k Vostoku arouses the strongest

48. Du Bos misunderstood de Schloezer when he reinterpreted his notion of a “stopping point” (lieu de passage) in a Bergsonian vein in his diary; quoted in Georges Poulet, “Boris de Schloezer,” in Yves Bonnefoy, Boris de Schloezer, 29.

49. In 1923 Gide and de Schloezer collaborated with Jacques Schiffrin on a translation into French of Pushkin’s La Dame de pique (Paris: La Pléiade, 1923). Gide also at first supported Lev Shestov. But tension grew between Gide and de Schloezer in the early 1930s, when Gide embraced Stalinist communism and withdrew his support for Shestov. See Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 149-50. 50. Boris de Schloezer, “Novaya kniga Stravinskogo” [Stravinsky’s new book], Poslednie novosti, 30 January 1936; reprinted in SPRK, vol. 3, 845.

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protest in me, both because of its form and content. Because of this, Fondaminsky |Ilya Fondaminsky, the editor of Sovremennye zapiski], a ‘Westernist, is afraid to let me write the review.”*' Although de Schloezer in the same letter amicably invited Suvchinsky to write something on Russian Church music for La Revue musicale, the damage was done. De Schloezer’s reviews of Iskhod k Vostoku caused a rift so bitter that he and Suvchinsky did not correspond again for twenty-seven years (until 1948 ).°

Stravinsky paid perhaps more attention to de Schloezer than to Suvchinsky and the Eurasianists during the years when these debates were taking place. He does not seem to have known Suvchinsky’s and Trubetskoy’s writings of this period, and it is unlikely that he was at this

time composing according to Eurasianist or “Turanian” principles, as Richard Taruskin has argued. Stravinsky had completed both of the pieces Taruskin uses as evidence before he reconnected with Suvchinsky— who was, moreover, the only Eurasianist with whom, as far as I know, he

discussed the movement. Stravinsky completed Mavra in March 1922, which was premiered with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets russes at the Paris Opéra that June, several months before Stravinsky first met up again with Suvchinsky in November. Les Noces, though premiered in Paris in June 1923, had been completed in 1917—long before the Eurasianists existed as

51. De Schloezer to Suvchinsky, 25 September 1921, in Elena Pol'dyaeva, V muzykal'nom krugu russkogo zarubezhya, 274, Pol'dyaeva describes Suvchinsky’s disagreement with de Schloezer on 269-70. $2. De Schloezer had first invited Suvchinsky to contribute an essay on religious music to La Revue musicale in a letter dated 4 March 1921, RES VM DOS-92 (50), DM-BNF; quoted in Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky,’ 64. After 1948 de Schloezer and Suvchinsky again maintained cordial relations. Suvchin-

sky wrote an unpublished essay on de Schloezer in 1969, as well as the article about him for Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. See Akimova, “Pierre Suvchinsky,” 273. 53. In Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Taruskin associates Stravinsky with the Eurasianists on

the basis of a diary entry by Romain Rolland from 26 September 1914. Taruskin, acknowledging that this comment foreshadowed the movement, adds that “it is hard to assess how much Stravinsky was involved in Eurasianism, although he was a model for them” (vol. 2, 1128, 1133). He cites one Russian review by Ilyashenko from 1914 as the source of what he calls the Eurasianist feature of nepodvizhnost’

(vol. 1, 954) and a letter from Chaikovsky to Mme von Meck as a possible source for the Eurasianist feature of drobnost’ (vol. 1, 138). I have not found evidence that these terms were associated with the Eurasianists. In a later essay Taruskin quotes more explicitly from the works of Trubetskoy and the Eurasianist philosopher Lev Karsavin, yet without demonstrating the historical connection between these texts and Stravinsky; Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman: Notes on Svadebka,” in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 389-

467. Stravinsky knew Karsavin in the 1910s, but Karsavin did not join the Eurasianist movement until 1925. He became very active in the Parisian group, especially through his close friendship to Suvchinsky, who married his daughter Marianna in 1933. Karsavin’s connection to Eurasianism was characterized by conflict and contradictions; he moved to Lithuania in 1927 and left the movement in 1929, See Francoise Lesourd, “Karsavin and the Eurasian Movement,’ trans. Jack Pier in Dmitriy Shlapentokh, ed., Russia between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 61-94; and Stefan Wiederkehr, Die eurasische Bewegung (Cologne: Béhlau, 2007), 42, 54.

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a group or had individually emigrated from Russia. When Suvchinsky reached out to Stravinsky on 22 November 1922 it was to talk to him not about Mavra or Les Noces but about Le Sacre, and to report on the scandal caused by Ernest Ansermet’s sensational premiere of the work in Berlin.” Whereas Stravinsky was only remotely aware of the Eurasianist movement in the early 1920s, he knew of de Schloezer’s influence in the French cultural scene and avidly read his articles in French and Russian.» De Schloezer’s negative review of Mavra—an emblematic émigré work that challenged the hu-

manist notion of neoclassicism—therefore hit a nerve.°° This review from 1922 shattered Stravinsky's faith in his critics and left him bitter for decades. The Suvchinsky—de Schloezer debate that followed, like the preceding scandal surrounding Le Sacre but on a smaller scale, demonstrated the danger of getting involved in émigré ideological wars. Privately, Stravinsky expressed his disgust with de Schloezer’s writings and broke all personal contact with

54. Suvchinsky and Stravinsky socialized in Berlin in the early 1920s. On 14 November 1922 Suvchinsky wrote Trubetskoy from Berlin that he had met Stravinsky and “got along very well” with him (quoted in SPRK, vol. 3, 534). Suvchinsky wrote Stravinsky a few days later, on 21 November 1922, about Ansermet’s premiere of Le Sacre (SPRK, vol. 2, 534). On 25 November 1922 Suvchinsky wrote Trubetskoy, “I had a heart-to-heart with Stravinsky, who was here for about two weeks, but this was only in the professional sphere of music” (SPRK, vol. 3, 539). Suvchinsky also attached an unidentified “brochure” by Trubetskoy to a letter to Stravinsky dated 21 June 1925 (SPRK, vol. 3, 134). On the whole Stravinsky’s relationship to the Eurasianist movement seems to have consisted of a series of missed opportunities. In 1928 he had to decline an invitation to lunch with Suvchinsky and his fellow Eurasianist Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky because he had a previous engagement with the director of Columbia Records. (See Stravinsky to Suvchinsky, 13 June 1928, SPRK, vol. 3, p. 285.) In 1961 Suvchinsky wrote Schaefiner that “I remember proposing to [ Trubetskoy] to meet Stravinsky and Prokofiev, but these plans never materialized, even though Trubetskoy lived with me in Clamart when he came to France on Eurasian business”; Suvchinsky to Schaefner, 6 July 1961, no. 261, FAS-MMM. (It is possible that Suvchinsky was hiding

the truth here, however, as he tended to do when speaking about Stravinsky.) There is no mention of Stravinsky in the Suvchinsky-Trubetskoy correspondence (N. S. Trubetskoy: Pis'ma k P. P. Suvchinskomu, 1921-1928 [N. S. Trubetskoy: Letters to P. P. Suvchinsky, 1921-1928] (Moscow: Russkiy put’, 2008). In short, I found no documentary evidence in the course of my research to support the thesis that Stravinsky engaged with Eurasianist thought before he reconnected with Suvchinsky in Paris after 1925.

5S. On the importance of de Schloezer’s aesthetic as a context for Stravinsky's, see Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 226-42. 56. Boris de Schloezer, “Mavra,” Poslednie novosti, 22 June 1922; and “Les Ballets russes: Trois créa-

tions,” NRF 19, no. 106 (1 July 1922): 115-20. De Schloezer tried to minimize the damage his review had done to his relationship to Stravinsky by writing him an apologetic letter, in which he claimed that the edi-

tors had “deformed” his article, and that anyway his judgment could have been wrong. (See Boris de Schloezer to Stravinsky, 27 [unclear month] 1922; microfilm 103.1, pp. 8-13, PSS.) Stravinsky wrote Ansermet that he had heard that the French article was “twice as violent as the one in the Russian paper,’ to which Ansermet agreed that de Schloezer “can’t understand, that’s a given.” Ansermet tried to convince Stravinsky that the article was not as bad as Stravinsky thought. Stravinsky to Ansermet, 11 August 1922, and Ansermet to Stravinsky, 10 September 1922, in Correspondance Ansermet-Strawinsky (1914-1967), ed. Claude Tappolet (Geneva: Georg Editeur, 1991), vol. 1, 14, 28. In this period Stravinsky discussed Mavra frequently with Ansermet, who was preparing a translation; see Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégétes, 110-11.

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him.’ Publicly, however, he adopted an ambiguous position that allowed critics to conclude that he agreed with de Schloezer's “neoclassicism.”**

Stravinsky protected himself from de Schloezer and other critics by separating more dramatically in this period between subjectivity—his own private experience of intimate emotions, interiority, passionate physical immediacy, mystic revelation of the material world, and cherished memories—and subject, his construction of a public self with which to cope in a public sphere of uncharitable critics, European foreigners, and skeptical audiences and performers whom he felt he had to control with an iron hand. He stylized himself by subjugating his personal will and ex-

pressive needs to the demands of a facade of objective aesthetic forms, and by describing his music as an “object” or “fact, thereby naturalizing it and removing it from the sphere of philosophical debate, history, and politics.’ In perfecting this duplicity he became one of the savviest émigrés in the Russian community—agreeing to all the labels the critics mapped onto him and expressing his resentment only to his closest friends. In public Stravinsky, curiously, sided with de Schloezer’s interpretation of his development, explaining his classicist turn as an outgrowth of his

love of Western classical music and admiration for Russian composers

57. Stravinsky frequently mocked de Schloezer’s last name with its presumption of aristocratic heritage (de Schloezer). Suvchinsky remembered that Stravinsky always claimed that de Schloezer, “who pretended to be a Belgian Baron, was a Jew.’ He claimed that Stravinsky displayed an anti-Semitic attitude toward de Schloezer, especially ina letter of 9 July 1939 in which Stravinsky referred to de Schloezer as a “dirty Jew” (Dreckjude). See Stravinsky to Suvchinsky, 9 July 1939, pp. 1214-15 (original Russian); 1458-59 (Heidi Tagliavini’s German translation); and 1460 (Tagliavini’s notes); microfilm 277.1, Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. Iam not sure which Russian word Stravinsky used in the original letter. Years later de Schloezer apologized to Stravinsky for how he had treated him. (De Schloezer to Stravinsky, 30 May 1962; microfilm 103.1, pp. 73-74, PSS.) He fretted over his rift with Stravinsky and admitted publicly that he had always acted in his relationship with Stravinsky like a “deceived lover”; see de Schloezer,

quoted in André Boucourechliev, “Boris de Schloezer,’ 20-22. Gun-Britt Kohler has commented on the lack of evidence in the Fonds Boris de Schloezer of a relationship between Stravinsky and de Schloezer; Kohler, Boris de Schloezer, 119.

58. Valérie Dufour notes that Stravinsky meticulously kept about thirty of de Schloezer’s reviews and “took such care of their classification that they take on the allure of pieces of evidence.” Stravinski et ses exégétes, 122. These reviews are kept among de Schloezer's correspondence with Stravinsky in microfilm 103.1, pp. 3-61, PSS. Most of them are from the Poslednie novosti. 59. See Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas about My Octuor [1923],” trans. Edwin Evans, The Arts (January 1924); reprinted in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 574-45. Stravinsky objected to Evans’s English translation of this article, the original French version of which is kept in the PSS; see Henseler, Zwischen “musique pure” und religidsem Bekenntnis, 59n130. In 1924 Stravinsky commented in a Spanish interview that he didn't like his music to be called objective, although he felt it was more objective than subjective. “I present to audience musical objects, musical facts [ objetos musicales, hechos musicales]. 1 hide behind the work to the point of withdrawing. The public comes into contact with these objects, these facts, and feels emotion or not.” Stravinsky quoted in Andrés Révész “Un gran compositor: Igor Strawinsky y la musica moderna,’ ABC (Madrid), 25 March 1924.

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who had successfully synthesized Western traditions into their musical language.” In an affront to the communists, Stravinsky began to refer to himself as a Russian musician in the classical tradition of Pushkin and Chaikovsky (blithely ignoring the fact that this falsely positioned Chaikovsky in opposition to the Mighty Handful).®' And yet from the start he also hinted that his classicism had pluralistic philosophical roots, urging the public to think of neoclassicism as something more “than a mere imi-

tation of the so-called classical idiom.” He denied any relationship between classicism and specific musical traditions and by the late 1920s he was speaking of “musical form” as the true substance of classicism.” Stravinsky’s decision to advertise himself as a classicist who created musical objects coincided with a period in his life when he was beginning to find it increasingly necessary to distance himself publicly from political events in his homeland.®*’ When Joseph de Geynst asked him in 1924 about the state of Russian art, for example, Stravinsky responded with irritation: “I left Russia in 1914 and I’ve been living mostly in Biarritz | France]. I don’t have any more news from Russia than you do, my dear monsieur, and the news we do receive is contradictory. What do you want

60. See, for example, “Stravinsky auf der Probe,’ Neues Wiener Tageblatt, 18 March 1926. In this interview Stravinsky refers to himself as a “Westerner” ( Wesfler). “As a musician Western culture means

a tremendous amount to me, he comments. 61. Taruskin discusses Stravinsky's polarized vision of Russian history in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 2, 1532-34. He refers to an interesting open letter by Stravinsky dated 1 October 1921, which was translated by Edwin Evan into English in the Times. See also “Une lettre de Stravinsky sur Tchaikovsky” Le Figaro, 18 May 1922; reprinted in La Revue musicale 3, no. 9 (1 July 1922): 87. Stravin-

sky aligned himself with Chaikovsky at the very moment when the Bolsheviks were rejecting the latter, as he made clear in an interview in England in 1921. (“A Tchaikovsky Revival: M. Stravinsky on his Music,” Times, 4 November 1921.) A few years later, he commented in a Belgian interview on how successful he found Chaikovsky’s “French-Russian mixture” (mélange franco-russe). See Joseph de Geynst, “Un entretien avec Igor Strawinsky,’ La Patrie belge 6, no. 1 (January 1924): 18-19; reprinted as “Un musicien russe a Bruxelles: Un entretien avec M. Igor Stravinsky,’ L’Etoile belge, 15 January 1924. Almost

a decade later, Stravinsky commented again that he admired Chaikovsky not for his sentimentality, but for avoiding folklore. He said he appreciated his compositional technique and the sense in his music that the composer had been a man of the world (die weltmdnnische Note). See “‘Strawinsky’ tiber deutsche Musik: Gesprach mit dem Komponisten,’ Kénigsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 November 1932. Later, Stravinsky also associated with Pushkin’s universal Russian nationality as described by Dostoyevsky in his speech on Pushkin from 1880—a text Stravinsky's friends also frequently cited when describing him. 62. Stravinsky, “Avertissement,’ Dominant, December 1927; reprinted in French and translated by White as “A Warning,’ in Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 577-78. See also Joseph de Geynst, “Un entretien avec le célébre compositeur russe Igor Strawinsky,” L’Etoile belge, 22 May 1930; and Serge Moreux, “M. Igor Strawinsky a Radio-Cité,” L'Intransigeant, 21 November 1935.

63. Stravinsky first expressed heartbreak over events in his homeland in a letter he wrote to the Journal de Genéve on 30 December 1917. In this brief published letter, the composer speaks of the humiliation and mourning he feels over what the Russian Revolution has done to his country. See Igor Stravinsky, “Le Deuil russe” | Russian Mourning ], Journal de Genéve, 30 December 1917. 1 am grateful to Valérie Dufour for sharing this source with me.

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art to become in the midst of the actual preoccupations of my country?”™ Two years later he told a Viennese reporter, “I’ve been away from Russia for sixteen years and thus can't be for or against the Soviets. Thankfully I am not a politician but solely a musician.” And in 1928 he told a French reporter, “I don't think of myself as particularly Russian. ’'m a cosmopolitan, although of course I owe some of my qualities to my Russian nationality. I like music, the way all Russians like music.’®° This was also the time when Stravinsky began to flirt publicly with Maritain’s neo-Thomism as a way of appealing to a certain French audience, and to blur the notion of classicism with that of Christian art. His capacity to move between inter-

pretations of classicism demonstrates that he did not want to be pinned down on this point and sought an abstract formal realm—and unproblematic geographical location—to serve as a safe haven for his music. By the time of Oedipus Rex Stravinsky had solidified his practice of escaping critical scrutiny by composing in allegedly neutral compositional forms for his divided critics, while guarding his private self from public

view. “He wants to be only a musician,’ Leonid Sabaneyev remarked about Stravinsky in an essay on Oedipus in 1927. “Whether this is a pose—called forth by the demand of the contemporary European market, romanticism, whether ititisisananinternal compulsion—it +% ~

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Figure 6.7 Ida Rubinstein in Algeria, unknown photographer, Département de musique, Bibliothéque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Le Martyre she troubled these boundaries by on the one hand exerting power over Dioclitian in her resistance to his desire, while on the other portraying herself as the victim of radical acts of self-deprivation and pun-

ishment. In this way her erotic desire became intertwined with masochism and sadism. Emmanuel Audisio commented that Ida liked to play “fallen woman, Marguerite Gautier [La Dame aux camélias], Nastasia Filippovna [from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot]|—women who struggled in vain to free themselves from their physical lives and sublimate their desires into pure, immaterial love.’’*’ I do not believe that this attitude implies a self-hating stance or acknowledgment of Sapphist victimhood on Ida's part, as some scholars have too easily concluded.’ Rather, it involves the

157. Emmanuel Audisio, “Lettre de Rome: Mme Ida Rubinstein joue ‘L'Idiot’ au Costanzi,” Comedia, 20 April 1925. 158. Erin G. Carlston comments on this tendency in Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 49-50.

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possibility of Sapphic sexual power plays and more complex allegorical readings of Sapphic identity caught between social condemnation and private erotic pleasure. Ida's performative coupling of excessive passion with masochistic denial is reflected as well in a complex love triangle that developed between

her, D‘Annunzio, and Romaine Brooks during the production of Le

Martyre.’ ‘This triangle repeated a pattern familiar from the “L’'Homosexualité en littérature” inquiry: a strong man with a cudgel (D’Annunzio) violently forces a nonconformist (Ida) into submission and accentuates her pain by denying her the one woman she desires (Romaine Brooks). Ida was different from Gide, however, in that she welcomed instead of refusing the punishment.'®’ Ida’s masochistic submission to D‘Annunzio was evident to everybody involved in the production of Le Martyre. As she also suffered from paralyzing stage fright,

the impression was that she suffered personally during her reenactments of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom, as if she herself were in that moment being sacrificed for her religion of art. She shook uncontrollably while on stage, sweated profusely, and was panic-stricken while reciting her lines. Romaine Brooks considered D‘Annunzio’s treatment of Ida to be sadistic; she recalled finding Ida backstage one night, depleted and seated “curved over, as if the wings of martyrdom had carried away their

triumph.” Some have postulated that Brooks took revenge on D‘Annunzio, who was her lover at the time, by choosing this time to begin her affair with Ida.'*' For the revival of Le Martyre in Milan in 1926, D‘Annunzio’s demands on Ida were even more extreme. ‘This performance occurred within weeks of D’‘Annunzio’s invasion of Fiume—a

political act that served as a model for Mussolini and solidified D‘Annunzios allegiances to fascist thought. Before the show began, D‘Annunzio called for Ida to be carried on stage motionless, bound tightly with ropes, and pierced with arrows. The stagehands set her against a tree, where she remained, bound and unable to move and scarcely to breathe, while D'‘Annunzio took center stage and gave a long 159. De Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, 31, 33-34. He bases his argument about this affair on letters between Romaine Brooks to Montesquiou in the Fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, BLJD. 160. Gide was repulsed by masochism and sadism. He felt “indignant” about the negative portrayals of homosexuals in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and commented: “What's worse than this is that this insult to truth risks pleasing everybody: the heterosexuals because it justifies their prohibitions and flatters their repugnance, and the others because they will profit from the alibi, and from the fact that they have little resemblance with those [Proust] portrays”; Gide, entry for 2 December 1921, in J-I, 1143.

161. Souhami, Wild Girls, 130-31; and De Cossart, Ida Rubinstein, 31, 33-34, 163, 172, 174, 175.

Ida the Sapphic Fetish m 439

political speech. One of the dancers remembered that “visibly everyone was suffering with her, but she mostly with her physical discomfort.’ The entire staff, including the doctor from La Scala, watched in horror, until Toscanini burst on stage and told D‘Annunzio to stop. Even after

the lights were dimmed, D'Annunzio continued for a while longer to speak.'® It may be that Ida’s physical suffering was what D’Annunzio and others wanted to see—the proof that a strong man or Italian fascist could force sexual nonconformists into submission.'®

Through her display of masochistic suffering as Saint Sebastian, Ida hooked into a visual trope of decadence that was deeply significant to the Sapphic community. Sapphism had become widely associ-

ated with debauchery, drug and alcohol abuse, and a legendary “descent into eternal hell” after the scandalous trial over Baudelaire’s forbidden Sapphic poems from Les Fleurs du mal in 1857. Writers like Catulle Mendés, Lucie Delarue-Mardus, and many others had subsequently depicted Sapphists as tragic figures whose “insatiable” love led to moral and physical suffering.'°* Chelsea Ray thinks that Baudelaire’s intertwining of eroticism, morbidity, vampirism, violence, and

domination in his forbidden Sapphic poems inspired writers like Rachilde, Renée Vivien, and Natalie Barney. Barney responded to Baudelaire with her interpretation of masochism in sexual relationships between women in her unpublished novel Amants féminins ou la troisiéme (1926).'® Barney’s one-time lover Renée Vivien recreated herself in her poetry and novels and refashioned her body to become the living image of a suffering, self-hating androgyne or Baudelaire’s decadent femme damnée.'® Although the tide turned on this representational tendency in the early years of the twentieth century as deca-

dence declined in popularity and some Sapphists sought more affirmative means of self-representation, Ida’s masochistic decadence continued to hold great appeal and incite impassioned response even after World War I.

162. Woolf, Dancing in the Vortex, 97-98. 163. Bram Dijkstra speaks to this masochism in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Finde-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 53. 164. Albert, Saphisme et décadence, 1S9-78. Baudelaire’s line “Descendez le chemin de lenfer eternal!” is from his “Delphine et Hippolyte.’ 16S. Ray, “Decadent Heroines or Modernist Lovers,’ 35. 166. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 190-98.

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™ BROOKS, IDA, AND PERSEPHONE Ida rebelled against the commodifying theater industry of which she was so much a part by flirting with unrepresentable or Sapphic zones that contradicted the logic of capitalism. In a series of moving paintings and pho-

tographs, created between 1911 and 1917, Romaine Brooks drew a connection between this borderline Sapphic realm, Ida, and the myth of Persephone.’ She depicted Ida in an idealized fashion as a goddess, an archetype, a “long-necked, gray-skinned, androgynous sylph’ with an ephemeral body effaced by its service to the representation it allowed.'* In all of Brooks's paintings of Ida, that body balances dangerously between life and death, erotic sensuality and emaciated depravity, and always it is trapped in the purgatory of wartime Sapphic Paris. In 1911 (or possibly 1912) Brooks completed a pair of paintings of Ida

associated explicitly with Persephone (see figures 6.8 and 6.9 in insert). Brooks later photographed herself with both these paintings, making it clear that she thought of them as a thematic unit to which she felt an erotic visual relationship.'’® She and Ida took a series of photographs together in preparation for them, which also document an erotic origin for the project. The photographs start with Ida sitting on a coach dressed in an exotic, black-and-white spotted fur and show her gradually undressing, until in the final photograph she is standing naked but for a headband and high, white, laced-up boots.'”' The two paintings that emerged from this series of photographs document the dual nature of Ida as Persephone: she is the goddess of spring and brings fertility to the earth, but she is also mistress of death and keeper of its mysteries. The first of the paintings is titled La Femme avec des fleurs (The woman with flowers) or, alternatively, Spring (see figure 6.8 in insert). Here Brooks has painted Ida as a somber young woman posed elegantly in a vast green

space, her naked waif-like body only partially visible under a thick and

167. Brooks never painted as many portraits of any one person as she did of her lover Rubinstein, who both inspired her erotic imagination and provided an ideal Sapphic bodily type for her pictorial allegories. Joe Lucchesi gives a thoughtful account of Romaine’s relationship to Rubinstein in “‘An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak’: Romaine Brooks’s Portraits of Ida Rubinstein,” in Whitney Chadwick, Amazons in the Drawing Room: ‘The Art of Romaine Brooks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 73-87. 168. Michael O'Sullivan, “Romaine Brooks: Sex and the Sitters,’ Washington Post, 4 August 2008. 169. Friedman, “L’Emergence du sacrifice,” 91-92. 170. Lucchesi, “An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak,” 82. 171. Ibid., 81, 86n30.

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impenetrable black cloak. That cloak falls gently from her fragile Renaissance body and leaves a long trail beside her, spilling dangerously into the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. A pale white doe and the hint of undefined buildings or trees in the distance evoke a Renaissance landscape and give the painting a gentle, Burgundian, fairy tale feel. Although the young woman has one large foot firmly on the ground, her rootedness and gravity is called into question: a pale path winds through the canvas behind her, crisscrossing her torso and face and destabilizing her position. There are numerous hints that this unidentified young woman is Persephone, poised on the verge of her first experience of the underworld. A beautiful cascade of flowers spills from her hands, like water cascading from a jug, and lands on the ground as planted flowers. ‘The bright colors and downward motion of these flowers give the impression that the woman is giving birth to them and that she is perhaps intended to be an allegory of spring. And yet two isolated pieces of vegetation—a tiny narcissus flower in the lower left-hand corner and a very long, thin birch tree that dominates the length of the canvas on the right—constrict the floral abundance in the center and suggest wintery limits. Ihe young womans face is melancholy and dark, permeated by the shadow of death. Her soft body and fertile movements appear inhibited; she seems to be weighted down by the thick blackness of her oversized cape. She gazes at the narcissus as if aware of an ominous future, or painful past. Her posture and figure are reminiscent of the woman in the tapestries of La Dame a Ia licorne and can be read allegorically in that Renaissance tradition—but here in terms of forbidden desire.'””

Brooks makes her Sapphic desire palpable yet unseen by distilling in the image of La Femme avec des fleurs the central dynamic of attraction and shame associated with the narcissus plucking. By painting Ida as a young girl gazing at a narcissus with desire and dread, and by accompanying this image with a twin painting that reveals her gruesome death, Brooks hints at her Sapphic desire—the “unmarked” space of Ida's performance in Le

Martyre.'” Brooks’s allegory holds in magnificent tension the struggle between desire and shame, risk and punishment that marked her love. Ida, on the other hand, emerges as a Sapphist muse fulfilling her dual role 172. Lam grateful to Cassandra Langer for pointing out this connection to me. 173. Anna de Noailles likewise celebrates this unmarked space in her poetic response to Victor Hugo's poem on Persephone in Contemplations, which he wrote on the death of his daughter Leopoldine, who drowned in 1843. See Catherine Perry, Persephone Unbound: Dionysian Aesthetics in the Works of Anna de Noailles (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 227-29; and Phelan, Unmarked,

146-66.

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as virgin spring goddess and sister of the dead.'” In the soft contours of her melancholic form, “apparitional traces” remain of the relationship the two women had enjoyed and the desire they had shared." Brooks's melancholy Persephone stands alone like Gide’s Sicilian Proserpine, her connection to her mother utterly severed. She appears abandoned—even, like Brooks herself, abused.'”° The sorrow in her face reflects a loss of trust in parental, or any, love—a girl who remembers the

trauma of incest that occurred in her original myth when her father, Zeus, betrayed her by setting the narcissus as a trap so that her uncle Pluto could ravish her. The abused women in Barney's circle may have felt an affinity with this young scarred girl for her capacity not only to overcome the death of the ego caused by her parents’ betrayal but also to retain her tenderness and capacity for innocence when she returns from the dead. Ida could certainly identify with this experience, which is perhaps why she sat for these paintings: like Persephone, she had lost both her parents as a child. Later an uncle—her Pluto—had tried to commit her to a mental hospital because she wanted to be a dancer.'”’ She had avoided this fate by marrying a man she never saw again after her wedding and by ending contact with her extended family for the rest of her life. Although Ida rarely spoke about her exile from Russia, Marguerite Long later remembered that she spoke frequently and nostalgically about her homeland and that the first time she saw Ida cry was when Marguerite suggested they travel there together.'’* More than twenty years later, during her 1934 season, Ida continued to tell reporters that she had not

achieved anything easily.’ Perhaps she and Brooks bonded over their shared love of a young goddess whose story reflected their experience: the sorrowful and shattered yet indomitable and immanently hopeful virgin Persephone.

174. Many Sapphists identified themselves with spring. Gide wrote Natalie Barney in 1950, for example, that he longed to return to Barney's Temple de l'amitié, which “never has to fear winter, my dear Amazon, because of you"; Gide to Barney, 12 December 1950, quoted in Barney, Traits et portraits, 131. Vicinus comments on the cult of “sexually satisfied” virginity among Sapphists in Intimate Friends, 189. 175. Joe Lucchesi uses this eloquent expression in “‘An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak,” 85. 176. Romaine Brooks was abused by her mother, brother, and stepfather. She speaks of this abuse in “No Pleasant Memories.”

177. Rubinstein’s brother-in-law, Lewinsohn, had her committed to Dr. Sollier’s clinic in SaintCloud when she announced during a visit to Paris in 1908 that she planned to dance the part of Salome.

Her family in Russia responded to the situation by arranging for her immediate return home. See Depaulis, Ida Rubinstein, $2. 178. Long, “Images d’Ida Rubinstein.” 179. See Maurice de Walefte, “Montez, montez toujours, c'est ma formule de bonheur,” Le Journal, 13 September 1933.

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The dramatic black cloak in Brooks's painting appears to symbolize death. Messengers of death in ominous black cloaks appear with insistent regularity in nineteenth-century literature, art, and fairy tales; the paintings of Caspar Friedrich David come immediately to mind. Joe Lucchesi associates Brooks's images of Ida's frail body shrouded in a cloak more specifically with the fin de siécle Symbolist practice of linking death, erot-

icism, and the consumptive.'*® The black coat is also associated with D’Annunzio’s abuse. Aware that the coat was worth 80,000 francs, he once

placed a fake ink spot on it, and then watched Ida's discomfort when she discovered it.'*' The coat meant so much to Brooks that she painted a second portrait of Ida wearing it, Ida Rubinstein (dated 1917, but probably painted earlier). Brooks later nostalgically remembered having conceived this painting during a walk with Ida through the Bois de Boulogne, when her lover appeared to her as “an apparition in a black flowing cloak with sharp lights in its black satin reverse side.”'*” Brooks accentuated Persephone’ attachment to and knowledge of death by painting her as an emaciated corpse in the sister painting to La Femme avec des fleurs, which she titled Le Trajet (The crossing) or, alternatively, The Dead Woman (see figure 6.9 in insert). Here Brooks depicted Ida as a lifeless, cold body lying sprawled in monochrome colors across a canvas awash in fluid blackness, which spills dangerously from her hair. Cassandra Langer has read this image as an explicit representation of Brooks's erotic relationship to Ida: “What some spectators may find disturbing [about Le Trajet] is the exquisite visualization of the fleshy, wanton pleasure of shared Sapphic sexual bliss. This is a rare and outrageous depiction of opulent, unbounded,

pleasurable lesbian space.”**’ But that bliss seems wedded to the dark dreams of a necrophiliac: Ida looks emaciated and dead, swallowed by an impenetrable darkness that holds no promise for the future. In 1914 Brooks thematized the relationship between death and her desire for Ida in a third painting, La Venus triste (The weeping Venus), in which Ida lies in a curiously oversized bed against a gaping space opened

up by an impossible window, her ghastly body embalmed in a somber palette of grays, white, and black (see figure 6.10 in insert). Here Ida is not yet quite a corpse, but also not quite living either—hovering somewhere 180. Lucchesi, “An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak,” 75. 181. Maurice Donnay tells this story in Mon journal: 1919-1939 (Paris: Fayard, 1953), 41.

182. Brooks, “No Pleasant Memories,’ cited in Lucchesi, “‘An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak,” 80. 183. Cassandra Langer, “Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks by Whitney Chadwick and Joe Lucchesi,’ Woman's Art Journal 22, no. 2 (Autumn 2001-Winter 2002): 46.

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dangerously in between. Brooks has given her left leg and breast an ethereal beauty, hinting at how extraordinarily beautiful Ida must have been. But the viewer's impulse to enjoy that beauty is undermined by the suggestion that one is ogling a corpse. The strange lifelessness and shadows on Ida’s stomach, head, and right arm hint that the woman casually lying here is possibly already dead and that any desire the viewer might have to

enjoy this body is unspeakably forbidden. By capturing this sense of desire and prohibition, Brooks gave the Amazon community an iconic visual representation of the way many of them understood their own female same-sex desire.

In 1923 Radclyffe Hall used Brooks's La Venus triste as a motive to awaken same-sex desire in the main character, Susan, in her short story “The Forge.” Susan sees in the portrait “a body languid with too much pleasure, emaciated by too much suffering. Tears fell from under the closed eyelids, and the face seemed to hold the sorrows of the entire world. The flesh of the limbs was luminously white; but Susan felt as she looked again that the glow did not come from the moonlight alone but from something within the figure itself, something hidden, secret and eternal. In spite of its subject, this picture was holy, and bore a strange likeness to holy things.” Entranced by this vision of masochistic ecstasy, Susan temporarily leaves her husband to live with the woman who painted

that portrait (and who strongly resembles Romaine Brooks). Lucchesi has noted the historical significance of this lesbian reading of an erotic corpse that raises the specter of same-sex desire felt by the woman who created it (Brooks) and by those who gaze at it.'™4 In her poem on La Venus triste Natalie Barney compared Ida's martyred

corpse to that of the crucified Christ. Ida does not die for the sins of humanity; rather, she atones with her very body the sin of female same-sex desire to which she has given birth, just as she did in Le Martyre. Barney equates the martyrdom of this limp body symbolically with grief itself: Laid out as dead in the moonlight shroud, Beneath a derelict of cloud: A double wreckage safe from flight, High-caged as grief, in prisoned night— Unseeing eyes, whose clustering tears Tell the pure crystal of her years.—

184. Joe Lucchesi, “Something Hidden, Secret, and Eternal’: Romaine Brooks, Radclyffe Hall, and the Lesbian Image in “The Forge,” in The Modern Woman Revisited, 174, 177.

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No crown of thorns, no wounded side, Yet as the God-man crucified. Her body expiates the sin That love and life with her begin!'* Brooks transforms Ida into a corpse so that she can function allegorically,

like many of the subjects represented in her paintings. These subjects “have to be torn from their original setting and repositioned by the artist who wants to infuse them with new meaning, Bridget Elliott has suggested.'*° In her unpublished autobiography Brooks acknowledged that she intended La Venus triste to express the loss of an old world and the profound social changes she attributed to World War I. “Barbaric fighting,’ she wrote, “was detaching us from a familiar world with aesthetic expres-

sions that had reached their climax. ... Who other than Ida with her fragile and androgynous beauty could suggest the passing away of familiar gods?”'*’ From today’s perspective one might say that the symbiosis of same-sex desire and death generated by the allegory of Ida's corpse communicates what Heather Love has identified as the grief associated with the social impossibility of same-sex love. By portraying the object of same-sex female love as a corpse, Brooks and Barney reference the countless corpses of gender and sexual minorities that in Heather Love's view “litter” the history of Western representation.” The Renaissance imagery and Symbolist traditions of La Femme avec des fleurs evoke a melancholy “out of datedness,’ a retrospective style that Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace recognize as characteristic of Sapphic modernity. They argue that Barney and Brooks drew on decadent and Symbolist conventions of authors who had previously established nonconformist forms of representation, among them Oscar Wilde and Baude-

laire, to construct their Sapphist identity. Like Ida, they defied the avant-gardes mandate of “originality” and “progress” by turning backward, thereby affirming their place on the margins.” Heather Love describes the aesthetic strategy of looking back as a type of “feeling backward” that is characteristic of “queer’—or in this case 18S. Natalie Clifford Barney, untitled poem in Poems et poémes, autres alliances (Paris: Emile-Paul Fréres/New York: G. H. Doran, 1920), 12.

186. Bridget Elliott, “Deconsecrating Modernism: Allegories of Regeneration in Brooks and Picasso,’ in The Modern Woman Revisited, 47.

187. Romaine Brooks, quoted in Lucchesi, “‘An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak,” 83. 188. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. 189. Elliott and Wallace, “Fleurs du mal or Second-Hand Roses?” 7.

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Sapphic—sensibility. Modernity is bound up with backwardness, Love claims, in the sense that it relies on those who are socially excluded, like “homosexuals and lesbians,” for its notion of progress. “If modernization

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century aimed to move humanity forward, it did so in part by perfecting techniques for mapping and disciplining subjects considered to be lagging behind—and so seriously compromised the ability of these others ever to catch up.”!” Love argues that this leads to a modernist aesthetics marked by temporal split-

ting and historical ambivalence, which is particularly charged in the works of minority, queer, and marginal modernists. Elizabeth Freeman agrees that the sensation of asynchrony is a “queer phenomenon — “something felt on, with, or as a body, and experienced as a mode of erotic difference or even as a means to express or enact ways of being and connecting that have not yet arrived or never will.”’”’ Seen in this light, the backwardness of Le Martyre’s decadent Symbolism reveals itself as yet another symbolic facet of the expression of Sapphic desire. Did Brooks's sister paintings motivate Ida to commission a stage work on Gide's Proserpine, when she first saw his libretto in 1933? And did they come back to haunt her as she prepared to dance Perséphone?

™ PERSEPHONE: DECADENT GESAMTKUNSTWERK OR CATHOLIC MYSTERY? When Ida performed Perséphone in 1934 she was in her mid-forties and had not performed in three years. Although she had danced continuously throughout the 1920s, critics had started to notice her age and the dated quality of her Symbolist productions after about 1927. By the time she began preparing her 1934 season, she had long since broken contact with Romaine Brooks, and the émigré Sapphic community of which she had been part had started to scatter to the winds with the threat of a second

world war. In the wake of the stock market crash that devastated the French economy, audiences had also come to resent her extravagant displays of wealth. Her luxury now appeared grotesque, her beauty faded.

In her 1934 season Ida pursued a Christian agenda somewhat at odds with the expansive, decadent, erotic sacrality of her earlier productions. Rather than challenge the Church as a performer, as she had 190. Love, Feeling Backward, 5-6.

191. Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2-3 (2007): 159.

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throughout her life (especially in the role of Antigone), she now confirmed her allegiance to it. Born Jewish yet raised in the Russian Ortho-

dox Church, Ida had become increasingly interested in Roman Catholicism throughout the 1920s and 1930s, primarily through her contact with Gabriele D’Annunzio and later Paul Claudel. She would convert in 1936, and perform rarely after this date.'”’ Just before World War II, in 1938, she performed in Basel Jeanne d‘Arc au biicher, Paul Claudel’s oratorio on the Catholic saint Joan of Arc, with music by Arthur Honegger. Her theater career as a tragédienne thus opened and closed with two radically different interpretations of two passionate, martyred, androgynous French saints. Ida's invigorated commitment to Catholicism led to contradictions in her interpretation of the narcissus-plucking scene. As a Christian, she embraced Gide’s implied interpretation of Persephone as a missionary or aristocrat (like herself) who had descended into the underworld to help those less fortunate than herself. In an interview with André George she lauded Persephone’s decision to aid “suffering humanity” and described her in this Christian sense as “the first missionary.’'”’ Like Jacques Copeau, she had come to believe in the redemptive possibilities of Christian the-

ater and in an aristocratic ideal of the beautiful. “Theater directors are wrong to think that the public is not ‘interested in beautiful things,” she told Yvonne Moustiers. “When a work is beautiful, true, and human, the public always gets excited about it’"'”* Jacques Copeau's “intact faith,’ she

assured audiences before the premiere, would assure the success of the renewed sacred mission of her dance theater.'”° However, Ida was also still intent on exploring the liminal space of Sapphic desire by recreating in the narcissus-plucking scene the decadent transfiguration she had experienced in Le Martyre. She seems to have been feeling aftershocks from the powerful physical and spiritual transformation she had experienced while performing Saint Sebastian's

192. Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 161-66; and the later articles “La Conversion d’Ida,’ Marianne, 5 January 1938; and “Avant de créer a l’Opéra trois oeuvres nouvelles: Ida Rubinstein va faire une retraite chez les Bénédictines,” L'Intransigeant, 4 February 1938.

193. Ida Rubinstein, “Ma prochaine saison de spectacles de danses,” Excelsior, 10 December 1933; Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme quotes Rubinstein’s word missionary without citing her in “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Gazette de Monaco et de Monte-Carlo, 26 May 1934. See also the unsigned notice in La Victoire, 8 May 1934. 194. Demasy, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ La Wallonie, 10 May 1934.

195. Rubinstein, “Ma prochaine saison.” Rubinstein also praised Copeau in her interview with Jeanine Delpech; see Delpech, “Ida Rubinstein a l'Opéra.’

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martyrdom; in interviews for her 1934 season she spoke nostalgically about this performance as having been the high point of her theatrical career. She still expressed fierce allegiance to DAnnunzio and spoke about him as if he had single-handedly created or given birth to her as a living artwork through his theatrical direction.'”° “It is [D’Annunzio] who made me what I am,” she told Yvonne Moustiers of France militaire, who commented that “a thousand features of the illustrious poet merge in Ida's memory.’ Ida also told Moustiers about D’Annunzio’s having tortured her in 1926, leaving her on stage bound in ropes while he harangued the Milanese audience; “His speech lasted more than a half hour. And me, poor Saint Sebastian, forgotten on the stage, where I remained attached to the tree of my martyrdom the whole time,” she recalled, obviously aligning herself with his fascist power in spite of her victimhood.’”’ Ida expressed similar sentiments in her interviews with the Catalonian press: D‘Annunzio “is truly the poet who understood me best,” she told them. “If I had not met him, I would not have experienced the most beautiful moments of my life, and not only in the theater!”'® Whether oblivious to or defiant in the face of the drastic changes in her life and French society, Ida persisted in her attempts to realize the ideals

of D’Annunzio’s Symbolist theater that had shaped her career, even though that aesthetic was now painfully outdated. In her conversations with the press, she declared that she still thought of her dance productions as spiritual Gesamtkunstwerke that had the potential to transform humankind. One of the most important aspects of this aesthetic project for her remained the synthesis of the arts. The program notes for Perséphone—

they are unsigned, but the aesthetic content appears to have been guided by Ida—state that the work will unite “according to the antique formula,

the poet’s words, music, and dance.’'” Ida designed her entire 1934 196. Rubinstein had consistently praised D'Annunzio in her public interviews ever since performing Le Martyre in 1911. See Adés, “Les Souvenirs de Mme Rubinstein sur dAnnunzio,” Le Petit Parisien, 7 May 1923; “Voyages et projets: Ida Rubinstein, D'‘Annunzio et Saint-Georges de Bouhélier,’ Comedia,

August 1925; and especially Ida Rubinstein’s three articles: “Come conobbi d’Annuzio (con lettere inedite del poeta)”; “Ma premiére rencontre avec d’Annunzio,” Conferencia, 20 September 1927; and “Meine Beziehungen zu Gabriele d’Annunzio,” Neue Freie Presse, 5S November 1930. 197. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in Yvone [sic] Moustiers, “Ballets 4 ’Opéra,” France militaire, 30 April

1934. Rubinstein also gushes about D'Annunzio in Hoerée, “Une visite a Ida Rubinstein.’

198. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in “De la cort de Russia als balls russos: Alguns records sobre D’Annunzio, La meva collaboracié amb Paul Valéry i Maurice Ravel,’ Miradore (Barcelona), 28 February 1935. See also “Le Martyre d’Ida Rubinstein,’ =1934=, 9 May 1934. 199. Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein: Programme Perséphone Diane de Poitiers. Jacques Copeau may have helped Rubinstein with these notes.

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season as an art des années 30 revival of Symbolist aesthetic values, and she legitimized this venture by including Gide’s Perséphone and inviting Paul Valéry to write the libretto for another of the ballets on the program, Sémiramis. In 1928 Valéry had returned to a project from the 1890s—a

Symbolist opera libretto on the subject of Orpheus, with music by Debussy—as the basis of a libretto for Ida on the subject of Amphion, with music by Arthur Honegger. He had updated Symbolist aesthetic values in the earlier work and now spoke to the press at length about having reformulated them into a modern notion of “melodrama.” In an interview with André George for Excelsior, Ida, referring to these developments, described Sémiramis and Perséphone as “melodramas in the proper sense of the word, in which music, poetry, and dance find their perfect union.” “If dance, engendered by music and crowned by poetry,” she further explained, “is not afraid to unfold an action, a performance with characters, like that in lyric drama, it becomes a total spectacle—the language of which can move us the most. I believe in the nobility and power of such spectacle. I endeavor, with my collaborators, to give it its highest human significance.”*””

Ida perpetuated not only the values but also the extravagant luxury of prewar Symbolist theater, though such aristocratic opulence had begun to appear anachronistic to 1934 audiences. As Ida's fortune allowed her to rent the Paris Opéra for several days of rehearsals and evenings of performances whenever she wished, she had no trouble, however, convincing the director, her friend Jacques Rouché, that her projects were worthwhile.”’ Her private fortune could thus still protect her from the intrusions of modernity and create a safe haven for the perpetuation of ancien régime aesthetic values. In a telling interview for the Journal de Paris with the same journalist, Maurice de Walefte, who interviewed Valéry about the premiere of Sémiramis, Ida explained that she felt that it was her duty to serve as a moral leader in society through her “disinterested” (in her mind noncapitalist) investment in art for art’s sake. “Russia was always built on the brink of an abyss that is Asia!” she told de Waleffe. “Yet the

200. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in “Ma prochaine saison.” This passage of the article is subtitled “Un langage complet exprimé par le danse.” In an interview with Yvonne Moustiers, Rubinstein likewise described Perséphone as “a danced action rather than a ballet, a melodrama in the proper sense of the word: the dance will be accompanied by diction”; see Moustiers, “Ballets a l’Opéra.” 201. See the twenty-one letters from Ida Rubinstein to Jacques Rouché, kept in “S.A.S. Rubinstein lettres,” BMdO. ‘They are dated from 1926 to 1939 and consist primarily of Rubinstein’s negotiations with Rouché to rent the Opéra for her company.

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moujiks I knew were always happy and well fed... . Today, how horrible this famine and gloomy terror are! But we still have Paris. Paris, which has sheltered—ever since Berlin also decapitated itself—the most noble, disinterested, and proud spirits on earth. The form of theater that I love will never die, as long as Paris continues to exist. And Paris is well defended!” In this interview Ida also referred to Valéry’s “LAme de la danse’ as the source of her understanding of transformation in art. She spoke about the human spirit as a flame that never extinguishes. “One must always ascend, always unsatisfied, always ardent and agitated.” She dreamt of flying in a plane over the Andes to Cusco, ascending ever higher in her search for spiritual truth—thus giving a modern technological twist to her old Symbolist imagery.*’’ Her need to experience the vital immediacy of such

spiritual transformation live through dance in front of an audience led her to reject the idea of filming her work for posterity.**’ In another interview a year later she imagined a theatrical apotheosis of death in which

she transformed into pure light, as she had done in 1928 in Valéry’s Amphion”™*

Within the frame of this Christian, Symbolist project Ida designed her 1934 season to promote the female archetypes that she had championed throughout her life. In the interviews she gave that year she spoke frequently of her female models and positioned herself with Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt in a miniature pantheon of great fin de siécle actresses. She mentioned Bernhardt often, stressing that she had studied with the great actress for three years. She also declared that the ballets in her 1934 season were based on the lives of three great women who had experienced spiritual or social transformation of some kind. The program proudly announced that Ida would “identify heart and soul with

new heroines whose names will become inseparable from her own: Persephone, Semiramis, Diane.’*”’ In one interview Ida described Perséphone and Sémiramis as “sister works,” evoking Brooks's notion of the

202. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in de Waleffe, “Montez, montez toujours.’ Rubinstein had uttered similar lines in an interview with André Rigaud more than a decade earlier, when she quoted the line “I am coming! I rise! I have wings!” from Le Martyre, which D’Annunzio had written on the wings of her airplane Undulna. See his “Visites: Mme Ida Rubinstein nous dit ses souvenirs et ses projets.’ 203. When Jeanine Delpech asked Rubinstein whether she would film her dances, she replied: “I didn't think of that. I told you already... Once a work is finished, I dream only of the next one.’ Delpech, “Ida Rubinstein a l’Opéra.” 204. Rubinstein, “De la cort de Russia als balls russos.” 205. See Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein: Programme Perséphone Diane de Poitiers.

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sister images of Persephone.” In an interview with Jeanine Delpech, Ida admitted that “with these six ballets, I truly hope to incarnate the princi-

pal female types from Persephone to Diane de Poitiers and passing through Semiramis. You can’t imagine how passionate I am about this topic 9207

Diane de Poitiers and Sémiramis—the one premiered the same evening

as Perséphone, the other a few days later—highlighted the amorous exploits of seductive, powerful women. Both integrated displays of excess within classical contexts: Diane through Jacques Ibert’s orchestrations of historic French music and Michel Fokine’'s classical ballet choreography, and Sémiramis through Paul Valéry’s exquisite, classicist French prose.

Valéry constructed Sémiramis as a pantomimic melodrama of sadistic debauchery, in which the title character forces a beautiful, exotic male prisoner to have sex with her before, in an echo of Shéhérazade, calling on her Amazons to murder him brutally. “My night to the flesh, my flesh to

love, love to death,’ Ida cries out during her lovemaking scene—a line echoed by critics intrigued by its sensuousness.”°* Valéry had wanted this scene to be staged with the fragrance of incense and singing choruses lit by a gigantic candelabra as a backdrop for Ida, who was to wear only jewels

and lounge on an oversized bed covered with pillows.’ The melodrama ends with Ida as Semiramis sacrificing herself to the sun and becoming reduced to ashes when she disappears supernaturally in an apotheosis of life in death before metamorphosing into a dove.*"®

In her performance of Henri II's Renaissance mistress in Diane de Poitiers, Ida encoded female same-sex desire more explicitly than in any of her other roles. In this ballet Fokine provided retrospective Ballets russes

choreography, and Ibert orchestrated well-known sixteenth-century branles, gaillards, forlanes, and chansons.*"* Ida had commissioned the

206. Rubinstein, “Ma prochaine saison.’ 207. Rubinstein, quoted in Delpech, “Ida Rubinstein 4 Opéra.” 208. Gustave Samazeuilh, “Les Ballets d’Ida Rubinstein 4 Opéra,’ Annales, 18 May 1934. Numerous critics felt that Rubinstein butchered the final monologue in which these words appeared and thereby ruined the show. 209. Paul Valéry, Sémiramis: Mélodrame en trios actes et deux interludes, in Oeuvres, vol. 1, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Pleiade, 1957), 182. 210. See also Valéry’s description of the story in “Les Arts: Une opinion,” Le Mois 41 (June 1934): 217-22; reprinted in Oeuvres, vol. 2, 1578-79. Several critics compared Valéry’s Sémiramis to other known operatic versions of the story. 211. Several critics recognized this music and noted that Ibert had used Henry Expert's well-known

historical anthologies of Renaissance music as his primary sources. ‘The critics recognized Pierre Passereau's “I] est bel et bon,’ Jannequin'’s “Le Chant des oiseaux,’ and branles and pavanes by Claude Gervaise.

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libretto from the well-known Sapphist and onetime lover of Natalie Barney,

Elisabeth de Gramont, as part of what was planned as a series of works with the composer Jacques Ibert.*'* De Gramont’s ballet scenario created a frame for a series of elaborate tableaux that exalted the life of Diane de Poitiers, a beloved French princess known for the manner in which she used her feminine independence, cunning, and sexuality to achieve immense political power.’ Ida associated Diane de Poitiers with the mythical hunter Diana, with whom she had long closely identified.*"* The scenario gave her the opportunity to pose as the classic statue by Jean Goujon, to which critics had compared her for most of her career.*'* The production of this work also served as an elaborate excuse for Ida to display her greatest asset and source of lasting fame: her androgynous legs. Diane de Poitiers was often portrayed in the nude, and Ida’s outfit for her 1934 season was designed, as Maurice Brillant wrote, to “stun the king.””"®

Her performance as Diane inspired José Bruyr to quote Rodin’s famous phrase “One has to love women; they walk like masterpieces of art.” “It would be enough for [Ida] to appear—without moving a single line of her body—to evoke the most beautiful paintings in the Louvre and the Offices, from [Andrea] Mantegna to Jean Goujon.”’”’ In an interview before the premiere Ibert drew a parallel between Poitier’s and Ida’s feminine powers, extolling Ida as “a great artist whose only Love is “The Music, a quality that she combines with delicacy, taste, and an entirely feminine sensibility that has not been diminished by her fame.’ The scenario forefronted Ida’s female sensuality and had been conceived, Ibert concluded proudly and enthusiastically, “in joy.””"*

212. Rapazzini, Elisabeth de Gramont: Avant-gardiste, 520-79. Guy de Pourtalés was one of the few

critics to single out de Gramont in “Les “Ballets Ida Rubinstein,” Marianne, 9 May 1934. Rubinstein intended to stage a second work by de Gramont and Ibert, Le Chevalier errant, but retired from the stage before these plans materialized; see “Avant de créer a |'Opéra trois oeuvres nouvelles.” 213. Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud picked up on this feminine message and highly praised Rubinstein for choosing a French heroine for her 1934 season in “Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Le Figaro, 28 April 1934. 214. See Rigaud, “Visites: Mme Ida Rubinstein nous dit ses souvenirs et ses projets.” 215. Copeau kept a typed copy of the scenario, which includes de Gramont’s suggestions for music and also her suggestion that Ida should sit at one point “almost naked on the stage in the pose of Jean Goujon’s classic statue”; folder 719, Diane de Poitiers, F]C-BNF. 216. Brillant, “Les Fétes dansées et Mme Ida Rubinstein.” Critics were mortified, however, by what they described as Rubinstein’s utterly incompetent pas de deux with Anatole Vilzak. See, for example, Pierre-Octave Ferraud, “Le Premier Spectacle de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Paris-Soir, 2 May 1934. 217. José Bruyr, untitled article in Hebdo, 1 June 1934. José also quotes Baudelaire’s sentence “I hate movement that displaces the contours” (Je hais le movement qui déplace les lignes).

218. Jacques Ibert, quoted in Denyse Arnould, “Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein seront l’événement capital de la saison de Paris,’ Le Monde musical, 30 April 1934.

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Ida aligned Persephone with Semiramis and Diane de Poitiers as one of the three female stars of her 1934 season. The myth of Persephone, which

held personal meaning for her because of her relationship to Romaine Brooks, also resonated among many female writers and poets of her time,

who were inspired by the insights both into mother-daughter relationships and into the development of female sexuality and social relations. The Homeric Hymn highlighted the lives of Greek women, providing the

model of an Eleusinian mother-daughter bond to counter the central father-son constellation of Christianity.*'’ Carl Jung later underlined the feminine significance of the Demeter—Persephone cult, affirming the cathartic and rejuvenating effects it could have on modern women by revealing to them the atemporal, immortalizing, reciprocal psychic connections between mothers and daughters.*° During second wave feminism, Marylin Arthur and Nancy Chodorow drew on the myth to revise Freud’s analysis of female development in the pre-Oedipal phase.**' Whereas Arthur interpreted the myth in terms of Persephone choosing Pluto as part of her successful passage into adult female heterosexuality, Luce Irigaray argued for a more sexually ambiguous interpretation. What if Persephone had not embraced her heterosexual relationship to Pluto, Irigaray suggested, but rather oscillated sexually between her sense of duty toward Pluto, her husband, and her passion for Demeter, her mother?*” This ambiguity might explain the myth’s appeal to the female-centered world of the Parisian Sapphists and to Rubinstein. “It seems to me [ Perséphone] will be the thing in which my soul can finally express itself and that it has always longed for nostalgically,’ she wrote Stravinsky.’

219. Helene P. Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 220. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” in Carl Jung and Karl Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 162. 221. Marilyn Arthur, “Politics and Pomegranates: An Interpretation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,’ Arethusa 10 (1977): 7-47; and Nancy Chodorow, “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” in Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stan-

ford University Press, 1974), 43-66; reprinted in Fogley, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 214-42, 243-65. 222. Luce Irigary, “And One Doesn't Stir without the Other,” Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 6-18. 223. Rubinstein to Stravinsky, 18 August 1933; microfilm 102.1, p. 1029, PSS; included in Jean Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ BAAG 15, no. 73 (January 1987): 35-36. Rubinstein also displays great enthusiasm for Perséphone in a telegram to Gide of 8 March 1933; folder 773-5, AG-BLJD.

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M™ COLONIAL MIMICRY In her 1934 interviews Ida tried to arouse enthusiasm for her season programming by exoticizing herself and thus appealing to the public's taste for orientalist fantasy, as she had done in so many of her productions in the past. She knew that her success in performing the narcissus solo would depend on her verisimilitude in portraying a charismatic, mystic figure

and identifying herself with foreign and thus exoticized sacrality. To create a magical aura around her 1934 season, therefore, she acted other-

worldly in her interviews and shrouded the coming performances in mystery—as she had done throughout her professional life. “Her voice, with its singing inflections, seems to reveal sacred mysteries,’ Madeleine Portier commented after interviewing Ida while she lounged between “the blue cushions of an immense divan.”*** Another critic who interviewed her during the rehearsals for Perséphone thought she gave the impression of “interior ecstasy” even when offstage.” Arthur Hoerée commented that she had a natural potential for rapture because her voice “knows ecstasy and evokes the supernatural.” After a later interview he described how she had arisen from her seat, “sculptural like an Assyrian bas relief.” “How mysterious and soft her Asian glance!” he exclaimed.*””

In her interviews Ida often spoke about her travels in the French colonies and the parallels between her performance style and the sacred rituals she had witnessed there. She liked to discuss her ability to adapt to foreign cultures as if to convince the French public that she could just as easily assimilate in France (where she would become a citizen in February 1935). She adopted an attitude of studied ignorance in relation to the colonial politics that enabled her to make such trips, however. Such an imperial stance was out of date, for the French public was now more skeptical about colonialism and exotic display than they had been before the war. Not long before, Antonin Artaud had theorized about the mimicry of colonial states of possession in Le Thédtre du crauté, in which he evoked the metaphysical body of Balinese theater as a source of renewal for the French stage. The surrealists were also becoming interested in rituals of possession, especially within the context of the first French ethnographic

224. Madeleine Portier, “Entre Ida Rubinstein et M. Jacques Copeau,” Candide, 3 May 1934. 225. Henry Vautour, “Les Ballets d’‘Ida Rubinstein débutent ce soir a l'Opéra,’ Paris-Midi, 30 April 1934.

226. Arthur Hoerée, “Gala Ida Rubinstein aux Beaux-arts,” La Revue musicale 155 (1935): 304. 227. Hoerée, “Une visite a Ida Rubinstein.”

Ida the Sapphic Fetish m 455

expedition to Afrique occidentale frangaise in 1931. Ida ignored such trends and instead persisted in her nineteenth-century aristocratic practices of colonial tourism. She surrounded herself during her trips with luxuries, including a large staff that catered to her every need. In one interview she described how, for example, “on the deck of my yacht, I had a

dancer's bar set up and I| exercised even during rough weather! ... How intoxicating to dance in the middle of those waves.’*** With such stories she implied that her extravagant fin de siécle world of aristocratic privilege had survived the war, social change, and financial depression of the late 1920s unscathed. She was able to preserve, as if in a formaldehyde of remembrance, a relatively pure form of French Sapphist exoticism completely out of synch with the social and economic realities of her time.” In accordance with her habit of preparing for new roles by traveling to places where she could study models for behaviors, gestures, and gender roles that she considered appropriate, she had undertaken in the summer

of 1933 new travels to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the Marquesas Islands and Tuamotus in French Polynesia. In an interview that she and Jacques Copeau gave with Madeleine Portier from Candide between performances of Perséphone, Ida described her tourist experiences in these countries as if she was describing a theatrical spectacle. Portier opened her article based on this interview by reminding readers that Ida’s first trip abroad as a very young girl had been to Athens, where she had bowed down in front of the Parthenon and vowed to perform Antigone, and that the “Pacific” (i.e., French) colonies had now replaced Hellenism (Hellenade) as the inspiration for Ida’s art.*° She then turned to Ida’s description of a group of well-educated men whom she had seen accompanying the governor of the Easter Islands. Although the governor had identified them as tourists, she subsequently discovered that they were Chilean prisoners, which, she told Portier, amused her. Ida then described the islands,

which showed no evidence of crime and punishment or any of the

228. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in André Rivollet, “Le Retour de I’Ida prodigue,’ =1934=, 9 May 1934. 229. Exotic interpretations of the colonies no longer matched the social reality in Paris, where many émigrés from the colonies now lived. The early 1930s column on “Musique des blancs” by the critic “Le Sénégalais” in the journal Diapason gives evidence of this cultural shift. See, for example, “Musique des blancs,” Diapason 14 (December 1932): 8. 230. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in Portier, “Entre Mme Ida Rubinstein et M. Jacques Copeau.” Rubinstein clearly imitated Isadora Duncan by bowing to the Parthenon. One reviewer mocked Rubinstein for this act and compared her to Josephine Baker in her attempt to win legitimacy by bowing down to this monument of Western culture. He emphasized that the great acropolis of Renan’s Priére could not be sullied by such acts. See unsigned, “Les Danseuses de l’'Acropole,’ La Femme de France, 1 July 1934.

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disadvantages of civilization. Using colonialist vocabulary, she praised the “purity” of the society she had observed:

Everything is so marvelous, so pure, in this country where they ignore money. They covered us with garlands and floral wreaths, they threw into my boat fish gleaming like precious gems. The natives are gentle and charming beings; they danced for me, with naked feet, on reddened rocks. ... I too, long ago, walked on burning coals in [Le Martyre de] saint Sébastien.

During the interview Copeau apparently interrupted her description to suggest (probably sarcastically) that he could well imagine her in the

role of a Marquesan, to which Ida responded that this puzzled her because, unlike the Marquesans, she had never performed with naked feet. She seems to have resented his attempt to turn the tables on her representational game or to equate her art with their colonial spectacle. “These men know nothing of our world,’ she said, before going on to describe how she had also met on the island a French missionary who had been there for sixty years working in a church now overgrown with flowers and had hardly aged because of the gentle climate. With this she evoked one of her favorite benign images of French colonialists and missionaries innocuously merging into the landscapes they had conquered.” By exaggerating the exotic elements of her voyages, Ida created a narrative framework in which she could reinvent herself as a mythic heroine. André Rivollet picked up on this in an article announcing the premiere of Perséphone, in which he compared Ida to her favorite goddess, Diana. He wrote that when Ida arrived on the Galapagos Islands, “confident birds, avadavats, budgies, falcons, and hummingbirds came and perched in her coppery hair, on her shoulders, on the long arms of Diana the Huntress, and on the slightest of her fingers,” and that “the giant lizards with chame-

leon heads that infest the desert island were seduced by the enchantress.” Newspaper articles such as Portier’s and Rivollet’s disseminated the image that colonized peoples, and even animals, felt gratitude at being

able to share in Ida mythic beauty and that she gave them a gift by arriving on their shores. They reinforced Ida's image as a fairy tale princess.

231. Ida Rubinstein, quoted in Portier, “Entre Ida Rubinstein et M. Jacques Copeau.’ 232. Rivollet, “Le Retour de l'Ida prodigue.’ Rivollet probably copied this passage from an article he had written about seven years earlier, after Rubinstein had visited the Galapagos islands; see “Ida Rubinstein en voyage, Candide, 24 November 1927. It is unlikely that Rubinstein visited these islands again in 1933-34.

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(The woman with flowers), Collection Lucile Audouy, Permission: Smithsonian American Art Museum. Paris. Permission: Lucile Audouy.

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Ida the Sapphic Fetish m 457

M™ IDA AS SAPPHIC ALLEGORY The contradictions between Catholic faith, exaggerated wealth, Symbolist nostalgia, and colonial mimicry in Perséphone conspired to create a spectacle that distorted the dialectic of the dandy and pushed it to its extreme.

Ida still pursued her lifelong project of staging elaborate spectacles in which she presented herself as a fetish art object and as transfigured through her mimicry of colonial ritual. And yet times had changed. She had aged, and her style had become even more outdated than it originally was. Her transfigurative movements in plucking the narcissus no longer intimated transgression or hinted at the false consciousness of the commodity but rather objectified that transgression in cheap, fake-looking outer forms. This effect was exacerbated by the fact that she surrounded herself on stage with “dead” objects—props weighted with material his-

tory. In her frightened, clumsy stillness she had come to resemble the metaphorical “corpse” Benjamin associated with Baudelaire’s lesbian and modern allegory. The photograph of Ida's performance of the narcissus-plucking scene confirms Ida’s failure to transfigure as Persephone (figure 6.1). As always, she had chosen a costume that hinted at her desire to challenge traditional gender representations, yet the floor-length Grecian robe, though concealing her now middle-aged body, merely caused her to appear matronly, and it allowed few opportunities for the titillating display for which she had become famous. The fashion-conscious Ida had guided Barsacq in designing a costume to match the popular fashions of the early 1930s, which accentu-

ated pencil-thin female models with narrow hips and slender, boylike bodily features. In other words, she now expressed her androgyny not by posing as an adolescent boy but through the up-to-date fashion of the “New Woman.’ In this costume choice she may even have been playing into a popular advertising campaign from that time: one French company had named one of its most popular undergarments the Persephone girdle, after the goddess; André Coeuroy remarked jokingly on this marketing ploy during the production run. By evoking the ephebe contours of the New 233. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The New Woman as Androgyne,’ in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 245-349. 234. André Coeuroy, “A l'Opéra,’ Paris-Midi, 1 May 1934; reprinted as “‘Perséphone’ d'André Gide et Igor Stravinsky,” =1934=, 23 May 1934. The corset is mentioned again in an untitled notice in Ecoute, 5 May 1934. The original advertisement read: “Elegant women who are a bit heavy are enchanted by the new Perséphone girdle, no. 6674, in coral batiste, which replicates with incomparable comfort the most recent fashion of a figure with reduced hips.” This advertisement appeared frequently in Le Petit Parisien in the early 1930s.

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Figure 6.11 Ida Rubinstein, still photograph for Arthur Honegger’s Sémiramis, Bernard Lipnitzski-Viollet, May 1934. Permission: Roger Viollet/The Image Works.

Women as Persephone, Ida bent gender norms as she had so often in the past. In publicity photos for the 1934 season she occasionally wore pants.*°**

She also donned masculine attire (tights and stylized armor) in her publicity shots for Sémiramis, which show her posing melodramatically in gender-bending armor (see figures 6.11 and 6.12).

Ida sent contradictory signals in her performance of plucking the narcissus about how she understood her bodily image as a middle-aged woman. (see again figure 6.1) She tries to maintain the appearance of an adolescent, yet seems unaware of how she is failing in that goal. She looks like an older woman trying to look younger, masochistically revealing how uncomfortable she feels with her aging body. Age was a pressing topic for Ida's group

235. A famous photograph from 1928 of Rubinstein in riding pants and boots is reprinted in Jean-

Louis Vaudoyer, “Les Ballets d’Ida Rubinstein,” =1934=, 16 May 1934; and L.M.G. Arntzenius, “Nieuwe Werken van Strawinsky en Ibert,” De Telegraaf, 2 May 1934.

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Ida the Sapphic Fetish m 459

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of Sapphist friends, all of whom had established their artistic practices and identities in an era that idolized youth and Sapphist chic. In the early 1930s Elisabeth de Gramont commented on the obsession with youth culture in France, arguing that this had begun after World War I, when an entire gen-

eration of young people lost parents and, with them, the tradition of respecting or caring for old people. After the war young people “wanted to create a watershed and build cages where they could see old [people like] monkeys grimacing, de Gramont wrote. This is a “masculine generation” she went on to describe, oriented toward virile action, thought, and fashion. The European postwar generations ideals of beauty resembled those of the

embryonic Hollywood star system, when women began the practice of doctoring their bodies to appear youthful well into old age: “There was a time when women accepted aging all of a sudden and agreed to be soon nothing other than digestive tubes,’ de Gramont wrote, “that race of fat women sitting around at the pdtissiers has disappeared” De Gramont advised her friends to avoid the rat race and remain serene and confident in

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old age.”*° But in Ida’s case her words may have fallen on deaf ears, for Ida knew that her entire theatrical career depended on her capacity to convey an illusion of youth. The photograph of the narcissus-plucking scene also gives evidence of how the exaggerated opulence of Ida's production may have inhibited her ability to perform the act of plucking convincingly. The oversized, fake nar-

cissus, stylized “tree of dreams,’ pretty birds, and lavish costumes in the photograph look like “souvenirs” or luxury items taken straight off the shelf of a fashionable Parisian boutique.**’ Barsacq’s explosive temple, bursting at the seams with rare birds and lush, foreign vegetation, disrupts the stage. The items displayed here—especially the narcissus—appear curiously detached from their original symbolic meaning and stand bare as disassociated remainders of fin de si¢cle Symbolism. The past clings to them like mold to an abandoned closet and coerces their semantic meaning from the aesthetic outward toward the social and critical. Copeau had given particular attention to these props, which Ida had spent considerable money to buy; in recession-ridden Paris they stand out.*** Keith Lester remembered another production prop, the cup that Mercury was to use to offer Persephone water from the river Lethe in the second tableau. Ida had ordered this cup from Cartier—‘their biggest and best and made of silver, it ‘weighed a ton,” he remembered. “When Ida saw it, she uttered a shriek: ‘I’m meant to drink from it, not wash in it ... change it.” But it remained. Lester “soon learned how to resist its centrifugal pull in turns and managed to get rid of it rather earlier than had been intended.”*”’ The cup’s opulence

broke down its symbolic association with Lethe and left it stranded, like the narcissus, as a nostalgic floating signifier. The costumes for the production were equally extravagant. The nymphs’ costumes are made of expen-

sive fabric and had been commissioned from the best maisons de haute couture in Paris, Henri Mathieu and L. Soltages of the Maison Landoft (the last-named famous for the costumes they created for the Exposition coloniale in 1931). Ida ordered the gown for herself from the exclusive

236. De Gramont, Souvenirs du Monde de 1890 a 1940, 447-49. 237. The lavish program for the 1934 season likewise included glossy photographs and advertisements for haute couture (Madame Rosine, Jodelle, Au Louvre, Marie Antoinette, and Maggy Rouff), exclusive vehicles (Renault), and the Deauville hotel. 238. Copeau made lists of props for Perséphone; folder 731, subfolder 5, FJC-BNF. Barsacq sketched careful designs for the flowers held by chorus members, which in one case included the lengths of stems and flowers; see Barsacq’s slides for Perséphone, nos. 12353, 12359, and 12361, DAS-BNF. 239. Keith Lester, “Rubinstein Revisited,” Dance Research 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1983): 171.

Ida the Sapphic Fetish m 461

Madame Rosine.*”” These outrageously expensive costumes and props appear as symbols of the rampant capitalism that Copeau felt had led to the disaster of the French recession and caused the alienation of modern life.

Barsacq gives exterior form to the inherent contradictions of this extravagant capitalism by inserting his fantastic “Greek temple’ as a blatant symbol of Sapphic exoticism and urban modernism into the bare space of the cathedral. Collectively all these disturbing objects turned Copeau'’s solemn stage into a field of ruins reminiscent of Benjamin’s corpses. The photograph shows that theatrical illusion is disrupted not only by

the odd arrangement of props and singers but also by Ida’s awkward movement and posture. Her shoulders are hunched, and she is looking down at the narcissus as if she were afraid of it. Her body looks as if it might have been lightly trembling; her clumsy stance contrasts sharply with the technically exact, frozen mechanical gestures of the nymphs. Three other photographs from different parts of the production show Ida in similarly awkward or outdated poses, which must have seemed discordant with the rest of the production. In the first photograph, from the first tableau (figure 6.13), she appears to be declaiming in a melodramatic

style, mimicking the outdated performance style of her mentor and teacher, Sarah Bernhardt. Critics remarked that she pronounced the silent e's on the feminine endings of the verses during her recitations, perhaps as

an act of feminine resistance.**' Ida tilts her head dramatically and stretches her left leg while declaiming, as if she were recreating the tragic gesture she had created for her performance in Héléne de Sparte in 1912 (compare figure 6.2). In a second photograph (figure 6.14) Ida strikes a similar pose, hands clasped to her chest, for the moment in the third tableau when the adolescents celebrate her rebirth. The similarity between

the photographs hints that Ida may have been working with a limited repertoire of gestures. A third photograph (figure 6.15), taken perhaps

240. Henri Mathieu, of the fashion house Maison Landoff, mentions the costume designers for Perséphone in a letter to Copeau of 6 April 1934; folder 716, subfolder 2, p. 4, FJC-BNF. They are also mentioned in the printed program. Only a few critics remarked on the costumes, however. See Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud, “Mme Ida Rubinstein”; and Clorinde, “Les Elégances des ballets,” Comcadia, 2 May 1934. Clorinde mentions that “the costumes, magnificently designed by Mathieu et Solatgés [sic], with that great mastery that we know so well, reveal the subtle art of the costume designer who knows how to interpret the soul of a costume design by imbuing it with an indispensible and remarkable technique.” See also Jean Claude, “Perséphone, ou auteur trahi?,” in Ida Rubinstein: Une utopie de la synthése des arts a lépreuve de la scéne, 231.

241. An anonymous reviewer commented on Rubinstein’s pronunciation in an untitled notice in Art vivant, June 1934. On the pronunciation of the silent e as a sign of feminist resistance, see Perry, Persephone Unbound, 212.

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Figure 6.13. Photograph of the first tableau of Perséphone, unknown photographer, Studio Granere, Bibliothéque-Musée de Opéra National de Paris. Permission: Bibliotheque nationale de France.

seconds after the photograph with the narcissus (figure 6.1), shows Ida in a classic “Greek” pose of tragic grief. Her hands are held up to her face, her head thrown back, and her foot—this time the other foot—again daintily poised at a side angle. Here again she was copying something from the past, as indicated by Tribout’s drawing of a similar pose from 1912 (compare figure 6.3). This last gesture appears excessively melodramatic for Perséphone, especially as little in Gide’s text for the first tableau would have required Persephone to express such exaggerated sorrow. Her gesture also conveys an emotional intensity that would have contrasted with Stravinsky's contained music in this scene. It is difficult to imagine how Ida must have felt while she trembled in Sapphic ecstasy during the plucking of the narcissus— perhaps remembering Romaine Brooks, one of the few people she seems to have loved—while cynical audience members audibly snickered.

Ida's blurred movement in figure 6.1 suggests that beneath the grotesque opulence and stylized gestures she was still hoping to express Sapphic desire by transfiguring her body and entering a liminal space between

life and death. Through her reenactment of religious possession, she

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Figure 6.14 “An image of Perséphone, André Gide’s and Igor Stravinsky’s beautiful ballet, created at the Opéra as part of Mme Ida’s current season,” unknown photographer, Intransigeant, 18 May 1934, Collection Auguste Rondel, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission: Bibliothéque nationale de Opéra.

suggests that she may still have considered theatrical metamorphoses as a symbolic space for Sapphist representation. In those few moments of liberty that she had wrested from Stravinsky's spare score, she could temporarily relive the synthesis of the arts through dance that she had achieved with DAnnunzio. She could again enter the metamorphic space of Valéry’s Greek dancer Athikté and one more time simulate the rituals of possession that she continued voyeuristically to enjoy as a colonial tourist. Yet all

of this must have happened as in a spontaneous flashback: her body reacted to the logic of the twenty-three-year-old gestures of rapture still programmed into it, while her tongue worked around carefully rehearsed

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‘ — : PE » FE — ~~ ee ~ a. «™ Not only is a bed out of place in a field of asphodels, it is also curious that Gide deliberately positioned the bed at a distance from Pluto's house and thus in no relationship to either Pluto or the still-impending consummation of his marriage with Persephone. In Gide'’s description Persephone is in a curiously liminal state that only partially resembles death. In the second tableau of both earlier versions of Proserpine the goddess had appeared on Pluto’s arm, ready to be

introduced to the most notable Shadows and to ask Pluto questions about them. But in the 1934 version Gide describes her as arriving in Hades lying on a bed, with Pluto nowhere in sight. She has just undergone the tremendous psychic and spiritual journey of “dying’— traversing the Styx and the stages between life and death to arrive in Hades. Lucey has noted that in Les Faux-Monnayers Gide called for people to doze off or wake up; he indicated the “dispossessing effects of sexuality” by situating sexuality “in a problematic space between waking and sleeping.”® It

has occurred to me that Gide may have put Persephone to sleep to

65. Gide used the word “carried” (apporté) here rather than “supported” (supporté) as in drafts 2a and 2b. See P&P, 96n66. “Omit the bed?” (Supprimer le lit?) Copeau asks on his copy of Gide’s typescript of Perséphone; folder 726, p. 9, FIC-BNF. 66. Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 122-23, 142.

Voices fromthe Crypt m 495

indicate that she has just had a sexual experience that has left her dispos-

sessed; in sleep she is not aware of what she has just done and cannot therefore be held accountable. Gide defied death most boldly when he allowed the nymphs to accompany Persephone to the underworld as her confidants and protectors; they thereby resist the finitude of her loss. Gide was obviously attached to this idea; he included the nymphs in both Proserpine versions of in this scene. Following Lacan, we can identify the nymphs as representing Gide's aunt; they are narcissistically incorporated objects that defy the dynamics of grief and loss. As creatures that have resisted death and sleep and lived to tell the story, the nymphs compete with Eumolpus for narrative control of Persephone. Gide clearly sides with them, for in what he has them say they stay truer to Persephone’ actions on stage than Eumolpus does.

Gide originally wanted the curtain to rise as the nymphs sing their moving chorus “Sur ce lit” (R74:1). In drafts 2a and 2b he indicates that a “chorus of nymphs” would sing this poem. ‘This brief, beautiful poem, in irregular meter and short, perfectly rhymed verses, is unlike anything else Gide wrote for Perséphone—indeed, it is unlike anything else in his entire oeuvre. Ihe story Gide’s nymphs tell in this poem counters Eumolpus’s more famous narrative of the ravishment: Sur ce lit elle repose Et je nose La troubler.

Encore assoupie a moitié Elle presse sur son coeur Le narcisse dont lodeur La conquise a la pitié.*’ [On this bed she lies / and I don’t dare / trouble her. / Still half exhausted / she presses to her heart / the narcissus whose odor / conquered her heart and melted it to pity. |

The “Sur ce lit” poem appears in a separate narrative voice and as if from another world. It is another of the inconsistencies that riddle the second tableau. If the nymphs are speaking as a group, why do they use the first-pronoun singular “I” (je)? What has exhausted Persephone, and

67. Cf. Gide, drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 962 and 974, PSS (published as examples 7 and 19 in SSC, vol. 3, 493 and 499); and PerP, 96. This poem remains remarkably consistent between the varlous sources.

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why only “half”? And if she is so tired, how does she have the energy to press a flower to her heart? Is she, then, sleeping? Or is she dead? Or perhaps she is merely pretending? Her state appears curiously like that of the hypnotized but deceased subject in Edgar Allan Poe's tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’; when asked if he is sleeping after being pronounced dead, Valdemar responds “Yes!—no;—I have been sleeping—

and now—now—I am dead. This sentence has led both Derrida and Christopher Peterson to contemplate the linguistic possibilities of announcing one’s own death, or absence as being and presence—a rhetorical situation that is also mirrored in the suicide notes Gide collected for Corydon.®* And, finally, how did the nymphs know it was the odor of the narcissus that had intoxicated her? In the first tableau it was the sight of the

narcissus that had first attracted Persephone, although Gide had suggested the possibility of olfactory pleasure in plucking the narcissus in his 1913 Proserpine. According to what logic, however, is he allowing smell to induce human pity?” Gide appears to have let rhyme rule over reason.

Persephone awakens from the lullaby of “Sur ce lit” asking to know where she is, and whether it is dusk or dawn (R80:2-81:4). At the premiere critics were incredulous to hear these words, given that the stage set had not changed. In Gide's libretto Persephone’s words here make sense because she has just descended into the underworld; in Copeau’s staging they did not, because she remained in a grand cathedral. Even in Gide’s libretto it is a little odd that she should have been confused about where she was, as she had decided to travel there of her own volition. But Gide uses her confusion to give the Shadows, Eumolpus, and the Danaides the opportunity to explain to her what the underworld looks like. From his earliest drafts for Proserpine, Gide had planned to depict the underworld as void of desire and hope and emanating a melancholic lack of affect. Such a symbolic state of numbness was a consequence of Perse-

phone's unwillingness to possess the objects of her sexual desire and to engage with somebody beyond herself in a way that allowed erotic attachment and consequent possibility of loss. After using Homer's description of Hades in chapter 11 of the Odyssey to describe the underworld in his 1909 Proserpine, Gide had noted on a random piece of paper: “Draw on this melancholy—recommence underground the anxious hunts of previous

times—with far more animals than one had not killed anymore back 68. Peterson, Kindred Specters, 25-26. 69. Schaefiner commented on how strange he found it that the narcissus could inspire pity through its smell in “Avant la premiére de Perséphone.’

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then.’”? He had also used aspects of the underworld described in Pierre Louys's Ariane, where it is described as “indecisive, twilight, uniform, colorless, light.’’' In the version of Persephone’s melodramatic solo from Proserpine, which Gide had published as a fragment in 1912 (see chapter 1), he had described the underworld as a place where one could no longer wish for or be consoled by death and where nothing could calm deceived

love.” In both his 1909 and 1913 Proserpines, he had associated the underworld with unfulfilled desire as represented in the mythical stories of Hercules, Tantalus, Hippomenes, and Atalanta. Now, however, in his 1934 Perséphone, Gide replaced the vignettes representing the unsatisfied desire of Greek myth with a back and forth of commentary, in which the Shadows’ chorus, Eumolpus, and the Dan-

aides’ chorus respond alternately to Persephone’s questions (R82:1R99:4). The Shadows’ chorus begins by describing the lack of fulfillment

in the underworld in their chorus “Nothing ends” (Rien ne sachéve; R82:1-R83:3).”> Eumolpus then makes the sudden and notably direct statement—uncharacteristic for Gide—that “here the death of time creates eternal life” (Ici la mort du temps fait la vie éternelle; R83:3-R84:2). With this comment Gide recognizes the temporal dimension that accompanies melancholia—and the suspension of time required of neoclassical art.”* In draft 2a, Gide planned for Persephone to utter her next lines as she gradually awakens and recognizes the nymphs: “Persephone (recognizing the nymphs)” (Perséphone (reconnaissant les nymphes) ). She asks

them: “Nymphs, my sisters, my faithful companions / Ah: Why have you followed me... / What am I doing here?” (Nymphes mes soeurs, compagnes fidéles / Ah: pourquoi mavez-vous suivis ... / Que fais-je ici?).

Eumolpus responds that she will rule over the Shadows, leading Persephone to ask “Plaintive Shadows, what are you doing?” (Ombres plaintives,

70. Gide, manuscript note for Proserpine, collection Catherine Gide, quoted in Pollard, introduction to P&P, 35. 71. Pierre Louys, “Ariane ou Le Chemin de la paix éternelle,’ La Revue blanche, July 1894; included as app. 7 in PerP, 138. See also Pollard’s comment on p, 21.

72. Gide, “Proserpine (fragment d’un drame),” Vers et Prose 28 (January-March 1912): 19-21; quoted in P&P, 75n37. 73. Gide assigned this chorus to “The Chorus of Shadows” (Le Choeur des Ombres) in drafts 2a and 2b but changed this to “The Chorus” (Le Choeur) in the published version of the libretto. Cf. Gide, drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 963 and 974, PSS (published as examples 8 and 19, SSC, vol. 3, 493 and 499); and P&P, 97. 74. Gide first used this line in “Proserpine (fragment d’un drame),” P&P, 75n37.

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que faites-vous?).’> Curiously, the Danaides rather than the Shadows respond to her—adding a final inconsistency to the opening of the scene.” Gide's vision of a benevolent purgatory in which sturdy nymphs resist mourning by evading the fate of death was negated by Copeau's and Stravinsky’s interventions. Both strongly rejected Gide’s idea of allowing the nymphs to survive Persephone’s death, and they erased all trace of the nymphs in their responses to drafts 2a and 2b of Gide's libretto. Copeau modified Gide's scene

description, first replacing the nymphs sleeping next to Persephone with a chorus of “Shadows, then deliberately crossing out the word nymphs and replacing it with Shadows throughout the rest of the tableau.” Neither he nor Stravinsky wanted the nymphs to sing “Sur ce lit.” In draft 2a, next to Gide's indication that a “chorus of nymphs” would sing this poem, Stravinsky notated in Russian: “Why nymphs? What if a male chorus were to sing this part? Nevertheless, it is not mandatory that these verses be done by a character (or two) on the stage.’”* Copeau may have discussed this passage with Stravinsky. On his copy of Gide's typescript he suggests in a brief note that if the nymphs

were still sleeping they would not be able to sing. He then crosses out the word nymphs. In the final libretto “Sur ce lit” is sung by a neutral “chorus” (Le Choeur).” In draft 2a Stravinsky also crossed out Gide's stage direction that

Persephone should recognize the nymphs as well as the lines in which she asks them why they have followed her. He lets Persephone ask the simple question “What am I doing here?” ( Que fais-je ici?). The question Persephone wanted to ask of her nymph confidants is thus not in the final work.*°

Stravinsky’s and Copeau's resistance to the nymphs suggests that they recognized and disagreed with Gide's attempt to defy the logic of death. 75. Gide draft 2a; microfilm 226.1, p. 963, PSS (published as example 8, SSC, vol. 3, 493). Gide includes the stage direction that Persephone should recognize the nymphs in P' and P’ as well. See P&P, 97n74.

76. Copeau or one of his assistants writes “Danaides?” next to the word “Shadows” every time Persephone mentions them in this short scene, as if he was confused about why Persephone should be asking questions to the Shadows if the Danaides were responding to her. See Copeau’s comments on Gide'’s typescript; folder 726, pp. 10-11, FJC-BNE. 77. See Stravinsky’s remarks on Gide's drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 962 and 973, PSS (published as examples 7 and 18, SSC, vol. 3, 493 and 498); and Copeau’s comments on Gide’s typescript in folder 726, pp. 9-10, FJC-BNF. In the published libretto Gide follows Copeau in replacing the nymphs with the Shadows in his description of the scene when the curtain rises (PeP, 96). This change renders the scene nonsensical because it is questionable whether the undead Shadows can sleep. 78. See Stravinsky’s comments on Gide’s draft 2a; microfilm 226.1, p. 962, PSS (published as example 7, SSC, vol. 3, 493). Craft's translation is on p. 486. 79. See Copeau's comments on Gide's typescript in folder 726, p. 10, FJ/C-BNF; and PeP, 96.

Copeau's and Stravinsky's correction here causes inconsistencies in the story because whereas the nymphs had a dramatic reason to mourn Persephone’s loss, a neutral chorus does not. 80. See Stravinsky’s correction on Gide’s draft 2a; microfilm 226.1, p. 963, PSS (published as example 8, SSC, vol. 3, 493). Gide integrates Stravinsky's correction into draft 2b, but at first keeps his stage direction

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They may have also sensed the power of feminine community that the nymphs provided to Persephone and Gide's subtext of the underworld as a realm of the pédéraste lure. By suggesting that the chorus be male, or offstage—unrepresented and thus without gender—Stravinsky clearly wanted to preempt impressions of this kind before they could arise. It is of course possible that he was thinking purely in terms of the narrative logic

(how could nymphs exist in hell?) and vocal contrast (which for him almost always involved an erasure of sameness, or, in this case, same-sex relations). But whatever their motivations, with their corrections Stravinsky and Copeau effectively silenced Gide’s attempt to install the nymphs in the underworld as a symbol of defiant, resistant mourning.

Archaic Fantasies Gide shifted gears stylistically in the middle of the exchanges among the Shadows’ and Danaides’ choruses, Eumolpus, and Persephone by inserting a brief poem to be sung by the Danaides: “Attentives sur les rives” (R86:2-R91:4). The alternating of three-syllable with five-syllable, short, rhymed lines of this poem stand out and create a sense of temporal disjunction. While filling their bottomless jars the Danaides sing to Persephone in these short, epigrammatic phrases, which replicate the rhythm

of their actions. They perform the rhythms and gestures of an antique statue suspended between life and death, nonliving yet far from dead, and capable of assuring their author's immortality:

Attentives Patiently Sur les rives on the banks

De l’éternité of eternity Vers les ondes Hovering by the shallow Peu profondes waters Du fleuve Léthé of the river Lethe

Taciturnes Silently Dans nos urnes in our urns

Puisons tour a tour drawing by turns

Cette eau vaine this idle water Des fontaines from the sources

Qui senfuit toujours. that always escape. for Persephone to recognize the nymphs. Cf. Gide, draft 2b; microfilm 226.1, p. 974, PSS (published as example 19, SSC, vol. 3, 499). The stage direction is omitted in the published libretto. See PeP, 97.

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Gide creates temporal distance here by alluding to the tradition of the Greek epigram, or, as he called it, “epigraph.” Although this poem is not in the verse form of the epigram, it vaguely imitates the brief and ironic tone

of that form. Epigrams, which became known to Gide’ generation through the popular Anthologie grecque, are very short poems, often inscribed on tombs, which served to sum up an action, a persons life, or an event.*' The French interpreted the genre liberally. A distant ancestor of the modern tombstone engraving, epigraphs could capture the character of the deceased in a catchy saying or short poem; in their conciseness and immediate impact they resemble the symbols carved on nineteenthcentury tombs across Europe. In 1898 Gide had composed an extended, mock “Greek epigraph” that resembled “Attentives sur ces rives” in its affect. Patrick Pollard found enough similarity between the two poems to include the 1898 epigraph as appendix 4 in his edition of Perséphone. Gide wrote this poem from the perspective of a “stranger, or tourist, observing an ancient tomb, possibly in Syracuse. (In the third tableau of Perséphone, however, he describes Perse-

phone’s tomb as “Etruscan.’)*” In the poem a goddess appears to the stranger in the form of a sculpture or relief: she has no mouth, perhaps because the sea air, wind, and time have eroded and smoothed out her stony surfaces. She is the perfect ghost: corporeal, alive yet dead, and observing

the poet who cannot entirely observe her. Love whomever you may, she tells the stranger, because you will never see that person again after you die.

In fact, she consoles him, your virtue will get you nowhere. There is no judgment after death, no Hades, no meadow of asphodels, but just ashes that can “wait eternally for the dark night to end.” Gide has nothing to fear.

Danse des Morts Dance of the Dead Sur une tombe antique On an antique tomb

au bord de la mer at the seaside

(imité [de l’Anthologie] d'une (imitation of Greek epigraph

épigraphe grecque) [from the Anthologie | ) Ici coule une eau pure. Here a pure water flows.

Etranger! Bois-en; Stranger! Drink from it. 81. Friedrich Jacobs and Félix Désiré Dehéque, eds., Anthologie grecque (Paris: L. Hachette, 1863).

82. In his stage directions for the opening of the third tableau of Perséphone, Gide describes the entrance to Persephone's tomb as “barred at first by a sheath of rock in the manner of Etruscan tombs.” See PeP, 107.

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Hate-toi; la Nature Hurry, Nature

Ne dure doesn’t last

Pour toi qu'un instant. for you more than an instant.

Etranger, la joie, Stranger, neither joy, Lamour ni lespoir nor love nor hope

Ne verdoient blossom

Plus au-dela du tombeau. beyond the grave. La vertu, la, n’a plus de force. Virtue, there, loses its strength.

Moi, mort, je tapporte Me, dead, I bring you

Le secret des morts the secret of the dead

Afin que la vie so that the life Que jenvie of which I am envious T apparaisse alors will appear to you

Plus belle, more beautiful,

Un plus rare bien, a more rare possession,

Si je te révele if I reveal to you

Quelle nest suivie that it is followed

De rien. by nothing.

Consomme a loisir Indulge at your leisure

Lamour délicate in delicate love Et le doux plaisir and sweet pleasure

Car l'ame fidéle because the faithful soul

Ne revoit jamais never again sees

Jamais ce quelle that which it

Aimait. loved.

Etranger! écoute! Stranger! Listen!

Il nest plus de route, There is no road,

La-bas. over there.

Je crus qu'une barque I thought a small boat

Transporterait would transport

Mon ame fidéle my faithful soul

Aux prés d’asphodeles: to the field of asphodels:

Cela nest pas vrai. that is not true.

Il nest pas de barque There is no little boat

Dans les Enfers in hell.

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Il nest pas d’Eaque There is neither Aeacus

Ni de nautonnier; nor navigator

Ni de chien Cerbére nor dog Cerberus

Et ni de Minos nor severe

Sévere Minos Pour juger les morts; to judge the dead;

Et ni dasphodeles ... and no asphodels...

Les ames fidéles Faithful souls

Ici ne sont rien— are nothing here— Rien qu'un peu de cendre, nothing but a bit of ash

Qui peut bien attendre that can well wait

Eternellement eternally

Que finisse ou dure for this dark night

Cette nuit obscure to end or endure

Eternellement. eternally.

Pour qui n/a pas de bouche For someone who doesn't have a mouth

Jai beaucoup trop parle. [’ve said too much.

Que si ceci te touche But if this touches you,

Tant mieux all the better.

Je te dis en hate I say in haste

Adieu. good-bye.”

Gide’s pilgrimage to an Etruscan tomb in “Dance of the Dead” and its epigrammatic trace in the Danaides’ chorus reflect a means of working through grief that is characteristic of late nineteenth-century British aestheticism. The tradition of reflecting on or mourning the past through aesthetic contemplation of “living” or even “speaking” ancient sculpture is thought to have begun around the year 1857, when the pioneering British archeologist Charles Newton discovered ancient statues of Demeter and Persephone (two of the former and one of the latter) by Praxiteles in a small cave sanctuary dedicated to Demeter in the Greek port of Cnidus.**

The Oxford Hellenist Walter Pater celebrated Newton's discovery in his seminal essay “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,’ which appeared in 1895 in his posthumous reinterpretation of antiquity, Greek Studies.

83. Gide, “Danse des morts,” La Coupe (June 1898): 89-90; given here as in PéP, app. 4, 123-25. 84. Radford, The Lost Girls, 27-28.

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Gide’s appeal to antique sculpture in Perséphone reflects his reading of this volume.*

The practice of mourning the dead by contemplating evidence of loss in ancient relics goes back even further, however, and developed in part as a consequence of the rise of archeology as an academic discipline in nineteenth-

century Europe.*° In Gide’s youth many Europeans associated archeology with the sensational excavations at Pompeii, which had begun in 1748 but did not gain widespread popularity until a century later. Europeans of several social classes, and especially women, were introduced to the undertaking through affordable books, lithographs, and a veritable explosion in tourist travel, which became possible after stability came to the region with Italian unification.’ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834), the second best-selling novel in history, had personalized the history of the site for countless European and American readers decades earlier, bringing vividly to life the people who lived there in ancient times. By the 1860s visitors could also marvel at the macabre “corpses” being reconstructed at Pompeii by Giuseppe Fiorelli’s innovative “plaster casts.” An archeologist imprisoned after the 1848 revolution and then released, Fiorelli had discovered in 1863 that by pouring plaster into the hardened pyroclastic matter created by decaying organisms at Pompeii, he could reveal the physical shape of the organisms. Trapped in the ordinary, poignant, touching activities they were engaged

in at the moment of their sudden deaths, and surrounded by the material remnants of their intimate and domestic lives, these petrified corpses inspired tremendous empathy and fascination. Resurrected now through the marvels of modern science, they seemed to tremble with the living memory of their past lives, suggesting the possibility of vital or live presence in all relics, ancient sculpture, and stony archeological remains. These stone ghosts captured the imagination of Gide and other early modernists, haunting their reception of

Greek and Roman art with passionate, nostalgic memories and grounding their aesthetic experience in a sublimation of experiences of alterity.**

85. Gide first read Pater’s Greek Studies in 1922. See Stephen Bann, “Pater’s Reception in France: A Provisional Account,’ in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), 59; and Pollard, introduction to P&P, 23. 86. Radford, The Lost Girls, 16-48. Virginia Zimmerman discussed new attitudes toward time and history in relation to the founding of both geology and archeology as academic disciplines in Excavating Victorians (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008). See also Goren Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

87. On nineteenth-century tourism in Pompeii, see Thorsten Fitzon, Reisen in das befremdliche Pompeji: Antiklassizistische Antikenwahrnehmung deutscher Italienreisender 1750-1870 (Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter, 2004). 88. Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, 97-143.

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Pater played a key role in the humanization of ancient sculpture, which he interpreted as rooted in human ritual and thus as a symbolic form that reveals human behavior and emotions. Based on his experience of seeing Dante's bones on display in Florence—part of a nineteenth-century culture of exhibition and veneration of relics—he had developed early ona strong “sentiment of pity for the dead” as a cultural motive for aesthetic experience.*’ As a consequence he had come to conceive of his visits to archeological sites as a form of “visits to the grave.””” His aesthetic stance became informed by a nascent consciousness of how people lived in the past, or what Shawn Malley calls “archeological aestheticism.””! These attitudes are evident in Pater’s “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ in Greek Studies. Here Pater interprets Praxiteles’s statues of Deme-

ter and Persephone based on his sensual relationship to them.” He distinguishes between three distinct phases in the myth of Persephone and Demeter: a first mystical phase, a second literary stage, and a third artistic or “ethical” stage in which Demeter becomes an abstract symbol of reconciliation.””’ He devotes the largest part of his essay to Demeter’s grief. He

thought that the emotion she expressed resembled the archetypal emotions later prevalent in European art, whether in Michelangelos Pieta, Corot’s peasant women, or Leonardo da Vinci's Virgen de las rocas.”* Demeter the grieving mother became for him a transcendental image of change and loss—an image onto which his contemporaries could also map Victorian ideals of female domesticity.” Pater revised the standard Apollonian view on Hellenism in his time by ascribing to Greek religion and art a “worship of sorrow, or romantic spirit—a turn that is also signaledin Oscar Wilde’s De profundis and Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragédie.”®

89. William F. Shuter, “Visiting the Dead,” in Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92-93. 90. Ibid., 98, 99, 137. 91. Shawn Malley, “Disturbing Hellenism: Walter Pater, Charles Newton, and the Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, 391-92. 92. Walter Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1914), 144. 93. Ibid., 83-91, 93, 139-51. See also Linda Dowling, “Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Recon-

ciliation with the Earth,” Victorian Studies 31 (1988): 209-31; and Malley, “Disturbing Hellenism,” 94-95. Wolfgang Iser gives an excellent description of these three stages in Walter Pater: Die Autonomie des Asthetischen (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1960), 111-15. 94. Pater, Greek Studies, 114. 95. Malley, “Disturbing Hellenism,’ 95-108. 96. Pater, Greek Studies, 110-11. See also Stefano Evangelista, “‘Outward Nature and the Moods of Men’: Romantic Mythology in Pater’s Essays on Dionysus and Demeter,” in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, 107-18.

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Pater aestheticized and consecrated grief, thus, as Wolfgang Iser notes, “taking out the sting by making it sublime.” In recent years, queer theorists have shown increased interest in the politics of Pater'’s aestheticism and its relation to late-Victorian constructions

of homosexuality. They have sought to refocus modernist studies to take into consideration the homosexual subculture of archeological tourism that was linked to Pater’s aesthetics as a key forum for the articulation of same-sex male desire. Heather Love argues that Pater chose the isolating maneuver of turning toward the past in a period of progress. She describes this as a “politics of refusal... the key practices of which—secrecy, ascesis, the vaporization of the self, and temporal delay—depart significantly from

the modernist protocols of political intervention.’ Pater, she argues, rejected modernist political subjectivity in favor of escaping into a world of aestheticism, which she equates with “political quietism, withdrawal from the world, hermeticism, nostalgia, a slack relativism, and the elevation of beauty above justice’”’ Pater also instigated a wider cult of the Demeter of Cnidus, particularly among writers like E. M. Forster.’ And yet Lesley Higgins, Michael F. Davis, and others have noted how obscured this history became in the twentieth century as a result of the rabid homophobia of “masculinist high modernist culture,’ especially that of T. S. Eliot and T. S. Hulme.” In the discipline of musicology Richard Taruskin established these very authors as authorities on classicism as it relates to Stravinsky; I assume he would have thought twice if he had been aware of their role in the silencing of queer tradition. Pater’s aesthetics give us a valuable context for understanding the way Gide treats grief in the Danaides’ underworld chorus “Attentives sur les rives.’ He, like Pater, related empathetically to what he saw in ancient sculptures, displacing whatever he felt onto ancient art and in the process transforming his own emotion into aesthetic experience. Unlike Pater,

E. M. Forster, and others, however, Gide bonded not with the Cnidus Demeter as suffering mother or mater dolorosa but rather with the joyful maiden Persephone. As his 1898 poem “Danse des Morts” reveals, he 97. Iser, Walter Pater, 114. 98. Health Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 58.

99. Ibid., 53-71; and Love, “Walter Pater's Queer Modernism,’ in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 19-43. 100. Radford, The Lost Girls, 172-223. 101. See Lesley Higgins, “No Time for Pater: The Silenced Other of Masculinist Modernism,” and Michael F. Davis, “Walter Pater's ‘Latent Intelligence’ and the Conception of Queer “Theory,” in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, 37-54 and 261-85, respectively.

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rejected the notion of eternal suffering in favor of an escape into a dreamy promise of antique poetic bliss. Similarly, in Perséphone, Gide’s Persephone, like the ghostly lost souls at Pompeii, does not die but merely falls asleep, surrounded by affectionate maidens who can wake her to life in an

instant with the touch of their gentle hands. Grief for Gide transforms into spectrality: a lovely daydream of an ancient stone goddess who comes to life and whispers the secrets of a benevolent pédéraste death into the wind at a seaside ruin.

When the Danaides have finished singing, Persephone, the Shadows, and Eumolpus recommence their exchange, deflating the lulling affect of Gide’s archaically styled poetry. In draft 2a Gide wanted Persephone to reply to the Danaides’ verses by telling the Shadows to “rest” (Reposez vous | sic] ombres douloureuses), to which the Danaides would answer “Never, never” (Jamais, Jamais). But although he kept Persephone’s line (Reposez-

vous ombres douloureuses) in draft 2b, he deleted the Danaides’ response and instead called for the Shadows to repeat their chorus “Rien ne s ‘achéve.” This change survived into the published libretto and Stravinsky's score. To Persephone’s thereupon asking what she can do to make them happy (Que puis-je pour votre bonheur) the Danaides respond by singing one last

verse. Gide's drafts show that Stravinsky struggled with this passage. In draft 2a Gide planned to have the Danaides sing of their “desire” (désir) to repeat the “unfinished” (inachevé) gesture of life. As Gide calls for their repeating into infinity the gesture of drawing water, they will fulfill this desire and thus be satisfied in a way that would not have been possible in the original Proserpine. But the passage is confusing. The Danaides should

not be singing anything in this scene, because Persephone has been addressing her questions and comments to the Shadows. Stravinsky was

aware of these contradictions and tried to correct them in draft 2a by switching from the first to the third person (the Shadows instead of we) and

by jotting down replacement lines and words that might smooth out the verse (including destiny for desire and pointless for unfinished). As a result of

his multiple changes, however, the Danaides end up ascribing to the Shadows the actions for which in Greek myth they themselves are known:

La Choeur des Danaides: (draft 2a) The Danaides’ Chorus (draft 2a)

With Stravinsky's corrections translation Noustresommes Les Ombresne We The Shadows are not unhappy sont pas malheureuses

sans maitre | sic] et sans amour, without master and love

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sans peine et sans envie without pain and envy Noustravons Elles nont pas dautre We They don't have any other

desir | sic] destin desire destiny

hand: | hand: | Et sans autre destin And without any other destiny

| or the alternative in Stravinsky’s [or the alternative in Stravinsky’s

Que de recommencer sans fin Than to start again without end

hand: | hand: |

[or the alternative in Stravinsky’s [or the alternative in Stravinsky’s

“Que de reprendre sans fin” Then to take up again without end la geste inachevé de la vie. the unfinished gesture of life. | insensé as an alternate to inachevé| | pointless as an alternate to unfinished |'°

Gide’s original use of the first-person plural (nous) suggests that he may have composed this poem originally for another purpose and was now trying to make it work in the second tableau of Perséphone. His curious suggestion that the Shadows be “without master” in drafts 2a and 2b is further evidence that he imagined them to be subservient. It also indicates that he may have linked psychic disassociation with a relinquishment of parental or master authority. He seemed to be at a loss, though, about what the Danaides should communicate to Persephone. Despite his struggles with the roles of the Shadows and the Danaides, Gide’s drafts indicate that he was primarily interested in the depiction of

Persephone’ compassion, particularly as it could be made visible in Persephone’s relationship with her nymphs. In draft 2b, just as the Shadows repeat their chorus “Rien ne s‘achéve,” he inserted an unmistak-

able gesture of affection in a stage direction indicating that Persephone should touch the nymphs’ foreheads (C est a ce moment que Perséphone touche le front des nymphes).'°> Both Copeau and Stravinsky strenuously resisted this idea. Stravinsky circled the stage direction, and Copeau put a question mark next to it and crossed it out.'** Stravinsky displayed similar 102. Gide, draft 2a; microfilm 226.1, p. 964, PSS (published as example 9 in SSC, vol. 3, 494). Stravinsky continued to struggle with this passage in draft 2b; microfilm 226.1, p. 975, PSS (published as example 20, SSC, vol. 3, p. 499). See Craft's comments in ibid., 486, as well as the published score R93:2-R99:4, and P&P, 98. Without master” (sans maitre) is changed to “without hatred” (sans haine) in the final libretto. 103. Gide, draft 2b; microfilm 226.1, p. 975, PSS (published as example 20, SSC, vol. 3, 499). Gide’s stage indication that Persephone should touch the nymphs’ foreheads is also in P*; see P&P, 97n77. 104. See Copeau’s comments on Gide's typescript in folder 726, p. 11, FJC-BNF; and Stravinsky's corrections on Gide’s draft 2b; microfilm 226.1, p. 975, PSS (published as example 20 in SSC, vol. 3, 499).

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discomfort with Gide’s later request that Persephone, after her first monologue about her mother, touch each of the Danaides’ foreheads individually in a gesture of earthly compassion. In drafts 2a and 2b Gide noted that he needed to “find a gesture” for this moment (mimique a chercher) and that the music in any case should become “more tender, less plaintive, as if gently rendered serenity” (La musique peu a peu se fait plus tendre, moins plaintive, et comme doucement rassérénée). In draft 2b Stravinsky circled Gide’s words and wrote “not bad!” He underlined Gide’s indications for

the music for this moment and scribbled in Russian on this text: “Oh these poets, how they would like to spew all this out in music." Both of Gide’s stage directions are absent from the final libretto, the silencing of pédéraste mourning now complete.'”

Refusal to Mourn: Gide’s Mother Gide's resistance to mourning takes a dark turn in the last extended section of his libretto for the second tableau of Perséphone (R102:1-R184:2). Here he disrupts the lightly nostalgic, melancholic mood that had prevailed up to

that point with the first of Persephone’ extended recollections of her mother and the earth. Gide's writing strategy here resembles that seen in the opening of the first tableau: he again uses a text that he had written decades

earlier—in this case the long section of Goethean melodrama composed first for his 1909 Proserpine and published separately as a fragment in 1912.'"’ Now however he inserts new text, changes the order of poetic lines, and otherwise disrupts the continuity of a text once conceived as an organic whole. A comparison between the original and its reconfiguration in Perséphone demonstrates how arbitrary Gide's reordering of texts could be in his practice of bricolage (only sections, not the entire text, are indicated here): 10S. In draft 2a, Stravinsky had underlined Gide’s words but not commented. Cf. Gide, drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 965 and 977, PSS (published as examples 10 and 22 in SCC, vol. 3, 494 and 500). Craft’s translation is on p. S07. Copeau kept this stage direction in his copy of Gide’s typescript but moved it to occur during the Danaides’ chorus “Attentives sur les rives” (rather than after Persephone’s first monologue on her mother, “Ma mére Démeéter [sic],” as Gide had originally intended). He then wrote “Mimed song” (Chant du mime) next to it and a third party, possibly Rubinstein, added the word “gesture” (geste). These comments indicate that Copeau was trying to realize Gide’s plans for the staging in this instance. Gide had also included the stage direction for Persephone to touch each of the Danaides’ foreheads in P' and P,, PerP, 98-99n9S. 106. See P&P, 98-99, Persephone's gesture would occur at R86:2—R91:4 if Copeau’s stage directions are followed and at approximately R111:1—R116:1 if Gide's are. Curiously, Stravinsky composed music here to match Gide’s request (R111:1-R116:1). Numerous choreographers, including George Balanchine, integrated this gesture into their choreographies for the scene. 107. See Gide, “Proserpine (fragment d’un drame),” 19-21; and PerP, 75n31.

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Proserpine [1913], act 1, Perséphone, final libretto (with indications of

scene 3 where to find the text in the score) [At this point in the scenario Proserpina has | Persephone begins her monologue

received Pluto's gifts from Mercury and bitten _ before receiving Pluto's gifts and biting the the pomegranate. In the stage directions directly pomegranate. | preceding this passage, Gide indicates that Proserpina should kneel down in the middle of the stage and, surrounded by her nymphs, gaze into the narcissus and remember the earth. |

A Je vois ma mére en deuil cherchant sa ‘This section of the original monologue is

Proserpine omitted in Perséphone. | B Les prés vides de fleurs et les champs sans moissons

C J’admire, au cours sans fin de l’unique journée,

The nymphs’ chorus: “Kore [Proserpina], The Shadows: “Tell us about spring, immortal look again, tell us, what do you see? Persephone” (Parle-nous du printemps, (Coré! regarde encor. Raconte. Que vois-tu?) Perséphone immortelle)'** (R100:1-R101:2)

D Ma mére Déméter! Que la terre était D Ma mére Déméter | sic], que la terre était belle

belle | Gide borrows four lines from Proserpina here] (R102:1-R105:4) E La fécondation des puissantes campagnes | Gide replaces E (which was a continuation of D) with five lines from C:] “J’admire au cours sans fin de l’unique journée.” (R106:1-R109:4) F Alternons les accents de nos voix affligées, Nymphes! The nymphs’ chorus: “Alas! Kore [Proserpina]!_ | Chorus: “Tell us, tell us, immortal Persephone”

Look again. Tell us. What do you see? (Parle-nous, parle-nous, Perséphone immortelle) .! (Hélas! Coré! regarde encor, Raconte, Que (R110:1-R111:1, modified)

vois-tu?) | Gide here interjects his description of

Persephone’s touching the Danaides’ foreheads, and the entire scene in which Pluto arrives and Eumolpus describes Mercury's offering Persephone s gifts, which she refuses. She bites the pomegranate, and remembers the taste of the earth. She then gathers the Shadows (originally nymphs) around her and gazes into the narcissus. | (R111:2—R15S6:4)

108. Gide changed his mind several times about who should ask Persephone to talk about spring in Perséphone. In draft 2a Eumolpus utters this line (Parle leur du printemps, Perséphone immortelle), in draft 2b, P' and P’ the nymphs’ chorus utters it (Parlez-nous du printemps, Perséphone immortelle), and in the

final libretto the Shadows sing it. Cf. Gide, drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 964 and 975, PSS (published as examples 9 and 20, SSC, vol. 3, 494 and 499); and PeP, 98n84 and n85. 109. In draft 2a Gide omitted this line and Stravinsky added in pencil: “Chorus or Eumolpus “Tell them again, immortal Persephone” (Choeur ou Eumolpe. Parle leur encore, Perséphone immortelle). In draft

2b Gide types the line “Parle-nous, parle-nous encore Perséphone.” Above the word encore Stravinsky adds the comment “3 syllabes, parle nous.” Cf. drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 965 and 976, PSS (published as examples 10 and 21, SSC, vol. 3, 494 and 500). Stravinsky’s remark on the number of syllables here is explained by the fact that he and Gide quibbled over this line in the summer of 1933. See Stravinsky to Gide, 29 July 1933, and Gide to Stravinsky, 8 August 1933, in Jean Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,” BAAG 15, no. 73 (January 1987): 33-35; and SSC, vol. 3, 190-91.

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Proserpine [1913], act 1, Perséphone, final libretto (with indications of

scene 3 where to find the text in the score)

| Gide adds two new lines for Persephone here, beginning with: ] Ou donc avez-vous fui,

parfums, chansons, escortes (R157:1-2) B Les prés vides de fleurs et les champs san moissons | six lines from Proserpina, modified]

(R157:3-R159:1)! F Perséphone: Alternons les accents de nos voix affligées (R159:3) Chorus: Tell us, what do you see? (Raconte, que vois-tu?) (R159:4)

G Des riviéres figées G Des riviéres figées [Gide borrows all thirteen lines of the original passage from Proserpina) On Stravinsky's suggestion the chorus will echo one of Persephone’s lines. | (R160:1-R163:1).""

The nymphs’ chorus: Alas! Ceres no longer Chorus: No Demeter no longer hears your voice hears your voice, Proserpina (Hélas! Cérés Persephone (Non, Déméter n’entendra plus ta

nentendra plus ta voix, Proserpine...) voix, Perséphone)''? (R163:2-4) [Gide interjects a caveat that the whole scene Eumolpus: “Poor desperate Shadows, winter could be staged with music rather than recited cannot be eternal either” (Pauvres ombres in alexandrines. He then describes a vision of déséspérées / L’hiver non plus ne peut étre éternel).

Demeter raising Demophon. | (R164:1—-R167:3) | Here Gide adds a stage direction that either the music should begin a long crescendo or the light should intensify leading to the end of the scene and ushering in the solemnity of the final tableau. |

Gide then includes a new dialogue between Eumolpus and Persephone. | (R167:4-R172:1)

H Sur la plage, et des flots imitant la H Sur la plage, et des flots imitant la cadence cadence... ending with “Nymphes! Vais-je | Gide adopts all eight lines of the original

revoir se refleurir la terre?” stanza, only modifying the ending to address Triptolemus rather than the nymphs: | “Par toi vais-je revoir se refleurir la terre? Tu sauras aux

humains enseigner le labour / Que d'abord t’enseigna ma mére.”!!* (R:172:2-R174:3)

110. In drafts 2b, P' and P? the nymphs’ chorus interjects with the line “You are spring, ” (Le printemps cest toi ). See Gide, draft 2b; microfilm 226.1, p. 980, PSS (published as example 25, SSC, vol. 3, $02); and PeP, 102n127. Stravinsky included this interjection in the score at R:159:2. 111. In draft 2a Stravinsky writes “repeat by the chorus” next to the line “Asking again everywhere for the lost Persephone” (Redemander partout Perséphone perdue). In drafts 2b and P? Gide intergrated

this change by having the chorus repeat Persephone’ line here. Cf. Gide, drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, p. 980, PSS (published as examples 15 and 25, SSC, vol. 3, 497 and $02); and P&P, 103n134. 112. Gide originally gave the parts for “chorus” here to the nymphs’ chorus in drafts P', 2a, and 2b. Cf. microfilm 226.1, pp. 970 and 980, PSS (published as examples 15 and 25, SSC, vol. 3, pp. 497 and 502); and P&P, 103n140. 113. Gide adopted only two lines from Proserpine in draft 2a. He followed these lines with a long ellipses that ended with the concluding words “humectant sa narine.” “Text to be reviewed” (Texte d revoir) he wrote next to this passage. See microfilm 226.1, p.971, PSS (published as example 16, SSC, vol. 3, 497).

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Proserpine [1913], act 1, Perséphone, final libretto (with indications of

scene 3 where to find the text in the score)

[Gide ends the scene with the stage Stravinsky inserts a new dialogue between direction that Proserpina’s excitement andthe Eumolpus, Persephone and the chorus. | intensifying light, rather than the crescendoin (R174:4-R178:3) the music, bring about the transition to the second act, the prelude of which evokes the landscape during a change of scenery (with no intermission if possible) |

|Gide ends with a newly composed stanza. | (R178:4-R184:2) I Déméter | sic] tu m’attends et tes bras sont ouverts

Persephone’s melodrama takes up most of Gide’s second tableau, and it is disproportionately long in relation to the other events in the work. It was difficult for Rubinstein to pull off at the premiere, and later productions

have fared little better, not only because there is no incentive for stage

action but also because it is difficult to listen patiently to a lengthy recounting of a well-known story (moreover in antiquated and easily mispronounced alexandrines). Gide’s dissected melodrama is just as confusing when read as literature, and, as critics pointed out at the premiere, Stravinsky's music does nothing to relieve the monotony. Persephone’s melodrama also represents a striking shift in affect from the first part of the tableau. Persephone is suddenly no longer emotionally numb, as she was when the tableau opened. Instead, she is now a subject in her own right who remembers consciously what she has lost, and she

mourns actively. The verses she speaks here appear estranged, or “encrypted, and are couched in a style that contrasts starkly with the rest of Perséphone. Although few people would have noticed similarities with Gide’s published fragment from 1912, and fewer still would have thought to check the 1909 Proserpine as republished in Oeuvres completes in 1932, they nevertheless probably recognized the aura of strangeness around Persephone'ss words that a reader still feels today. The melodrama, especially in its new jumbled order of presentation, sounds dislocated and even to some extent nonsensical. Up to this point Gide had flagrantly disregarded the logic of the Homeric Hymn, but he now seems overly con-

cerned with recounting in exhaustive detail the story of Demeter’s attempts to immortalize Demophon—a part of the original myth that has little to do with Persephone’s compassionate and charitable journey to the underworld. Some critics of the premiere considered the style of this passage to be affected. Persephone’s lines reminded listeners of popular

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song titles: “My earthly husband ... The return of spring... The bitten pomegranate ... A little bit of love.” André Coeuroy complained, “Those sound like titles of chansons by Lucienne Boyer. Oh how we loved Gide when he wrote Les Caves du Vatican!”''* Gide seems to have been unable to speak for himself here, and he even failed to find the energy to revise his youthful Goethean melodrama for more coherence. His hodgepodge sug-

gests that when it came to grieving mothers, Gide, like Abraham and Torok’s melancholic, could not find his voice.

Speaking for the Dead: Eurydice In the second tableau of Perséphone Gide does not show Persephone consistently experiencing a clear sense of loss. Rather, she vacillates between a state of numbness and alert recognition of her fate, at times aware and at other times detached and observing her life as if it were a story from which she herself is estranged. Her loss remains ambiguous because she was, after all, not ravished and thus not separated from her mother except by her own volition. In this ambiguity she resembles Eurydice, whom Gide

had given such a central place in Proserpine and whom he wished to include in Perséphone as well. In Proserpine, Eurydice had not lost Orpheus but, rather, had become lost to him; in that libretto she waited for Orpheus’s song as the narrative articulation of his loss (reminiscent of a patient’s recognition of loss through narrative retelling in Freud’s psychotherapy). In fact, Gide had shown more interest in those who have been lost to somebody than in those who have lost. He perceived loss from the perspective of the ghosts who wait for the living to conjure them.

In his 1909 and 1913 Proserpines, Eurydice represented for Gide the elusive origins of inspiration for art—what Maurice Blanchot later called the “profoundly dark point” toward which art, desire, death, and the night lead. She had embodied the alterity of an unmeasured experience of the abyss that Orpheus brought into the light and to which he gave form, figure, and reality in song.''’ Shane Butler interprets Ovid's description of Orpheus’s “struggling to be grasped and to grasp” (prendique et prendere

114. André Coeuroy, “A l'Opéra,’ Paris-Midi, | May 1934; reprinted as ““Perséphone’ d’André Gide

et Igor Stravinsky,” =1934=, 23 May 1934. From the comments about the popular singer Lucienne Boyer that come up from time to time in journals of the period, we can conclude that critics did not appreciate the quality of the lyrics that Gide gave Persephone. 115. Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 225; translated into English by Geoffrey Hartman in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays (Barrytown, NY: 1981), 99.

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certans) in the moment of glancing backward as pertaining to Eurydice, who becomes a metaphor for the writer's process of revision. The writer, Orpheus, looks back at his own work, Eurydice, the draft, who represents a crucial step in his writing process. Yet in the end, Butler believes, it is not the poet but rather she, Eurydice, who remains: the text that survives after

the death or departure of the author.’*° Gide seemed to understand Ovid in similar terms in 1909, when he reversed the logic of the Orpheus myth by allowing Eurydice to sing and thus herself become an author, one who tells Persephone directly that she desires to be transformed into a memory in Orpheus’s song. She is a self-assured woman who is aware of her purpose and thus awaits the moment when Orpheus will gaze at her with what Blanchot later called the “impatience and carelessness of a desire that forgets the law.’*’’ In scene 2 of the second tableau of his 1909 Proser-

pine Gide had reflected on the function of art by having Eurydice tell Proserpina that she was waiting for Orpheus to “hx” the Shadows’ gestures in song. Eurydice had then returned in the final tableau to inform Proserpine that Orpheus had indeed arrived and turned her into art—a scene Gide omitted from the 1913 scenario. More than thirty years later, in Et nunc manet in te (1938), his literary memorial to Madeleine, Gide identified with Orpheus’s act of glancing backward and evoked his pain and guilt at having turned back and thus condemned Eurydice to death by using a fragment of an alleged Virgilian poem, “Culex” from the Appendix vergiliana, as his title."’* Lacan interprets the phrase Gide borrowed from Virgil—“And now the punishment for the backward glance rests with you, Orpheus” (Poenaque respectus et nunc manet, Orpheus, in te)—in terms of the “eternal pain” Gide felt over how he had treated his Eurydice, Madeleine. Lacan is horrified that Gide decided to renew his vows with Madeleine in his moment of grief over her death, and that he recalled his guilt rather than celebrating Madeleine's life.''” Like Orpheus, Gide had once immortalized Madeleine in works like Le Porte étroite, and he repeated this act after her death by publishing previously suppressed passages about her in a new edition of his journal.

116. Shane Butler, The Matter of the Page (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 13-27. This is passage 10:57-S9 from Ovid's Metamorphoses. 117. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 228. See also Chantal Michel, Maurice Blanchot et le déplacement d'Orphée (Saint Genouph: Nizet, 1997), 19-36. 118. Gide, Et nunc manet in te in Souvenirs et voyages, 937-57. See also Pierre Massons remarkable commentary in ibid., 1389-99. 119. Lacan, “Jeunesse de Gide,” 7S8-S9.

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And yet, like Orpheus, he had also once “glanced backward” at her when he left for Cambridge with Marc Allégret in 1918 and made her aware of his pédérastie. At that time Gide had told Madeleine that with her he had been “rotting” and “dying’—words that later weighed on his conscience and that he regretted for the rest of his life.'*° He had told friends that he thought he had “killed” her with this “criminal” act. Gide’s injurious words resembled Orpheus'’s glance backward in their effect, destroying Madeleine as the source of inspiration for his art. He had treated her as if she were a figment of his literary imagination who would cease to have narrative agency in the world if he withdrew his love from her. But she had

responded by destroying his letters—the equivalent of silencing his voice—and thus usurping his role as author. I would postulate that Eurydice haunts Perséphone as an encrypted memory of Gide’s loss of Madeleine as muse and loss of himself as author because of the effect that

burning his letters had on him. Gide maps other interpretations onto Eurydice as well. By describing

those on earth who grieve her loss, Persephone in the second tableau speaks, like Eurydice, from the perspective of someone who is dead yet able to speak—a ghost or kindred specter who watches the living mourn her and waits in silence for them to conjure her so that she can return to life. In the Homeric Hymn it is the potent sound of Persephone’s cry—a vivid vocal expression of self—that alerts Hekate to her ravishment and ultimately leads to her recovery (lines 22-25). Like a Derridean specter, the Homeric Persephone calls out to the living as she enters death; in the Homeric Hymn her voice, described in the third person, is left as a trace, remembered by all those who tell her story. Gide inverts this: his Persephone's voice is completely inaudible to those living on earth. “No, Deme-

ter no longer hears your voice, Persephone,’ Gide’s nymphs sadly tell Persephone as she tries to call out to the grieving Demeter (sung by a chorus of sopranos, contraltos, and tenors at R163:2-3). Gide’s Persephone thus retains a far greater alterity: she is not a cry imprinted on somebody's memory and subsequently described in verse. Rather, she is a speaking ghost who communicates in her own voice and words the experience of death as a process of mourning life. She does not tell this to Demeter, however, but rather, in Gide’s original drafts, only to her faithful

nymphs, who, having defied death, remain throughout immune to the logic of the living and thus undisturbed by her confessions. She also tells

120. Billard, André Gide and Marc Allégret, 70. Lacan discusses this in “Jeunesse de Gide,” 758-64.

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her story to the audience in the theater, who listen in on her uncanny conversation and thereby serve as additional partners in the project of conversing with the dead. Gide theorized the spectral realm of such “in-between” figures of loss as Eurydice and Persephone by ending 1909 Proserpine with a quote from

canto 28 of Dante's “Purgatorio.” In this canto the character Matelde stands on the other side of the river Lethe as an embodiment of virginal innocence and earthly life and reminds Dante of the instant of loss that occurs when one drinks from Lethe and, traveling on into the underworld, forgets—like Proserpine. Gide jotted down this passage in Italian,

adding his own French translation on a piece of paper he labeled “Epigraph: Tu mi fai remembrar dove et qual era Proserpina nel tempo che perdette La madre lei, ed ella primavera. Gide’s translation read: “Tu me fais repenser ot et quelle était Proserpine, dans le temps que la perdit sa mére et quelle perdit le printemps” (You make me remember where and what Proserpine was, in the time when her mother lost her and she lost spring. )'”"

Persephone remained for Gide the embodiment of the double loss described here by Dante. She stands between life and death, for her grief is not yet old enough for her to have forgotten what it felt like to be alive. Gide does not express this in his own voice, however, but rather through the ghost of Dante, who for his part had expressed his grief through the ghosts of Claudian and Ovid, who echoed the ghosts of Homer, who— the hauntings compiling over the centuries—had echoed the ghost of Eleusinian ritual. It is difficult not to see in this accumulation of ghosts the manifestation of an implicit story of exile and estrangement: Persephone exiled by the establishment of Demeter’s reign in Eleusis, Ovid writing before exile, Dante writing after exile, and Gide writing in Third Republic France from his position of social alienation. In each case there is a double loss similar to Proserpine’s: Ovid, Dante, and Gide each became lost to those who loved them in exile, where they experienced the reciprocal loss. In an eloquent essay on Persephone, Michel Leiris called exile “a

121. P&P, app. 2, 117. This quote is included in the published edition of Proserpine in Gide's Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Martin-Chauffier (Paris: NRF, 1933), vol. 4, 364; the English translation here is by Richard Hollander.

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catastrophe, the death of the world we know and the collapse of our connection to others.”'** But the grief and melancholia of exile differ from

those of death, because exile is a two-way mirror: the exiled person remains alive and thus must go on experiencing the loss. S/he is a lost object who yet has subjectivity and agency.'*? Persephone perfectly encapsulates this state.

In a thoughtful commentary on the Israeli artist Bracha Ettinger’s Eurydice series, Judith Butler describes Eurydice as an image from “a past which was said to be unrepresentable,’ the memory of which is fractured,

present yet absent, fading into oblivion, resulting from the stuttering mnemonics of trauma. “The loss is neither prior to representation nor redeemed and canceled through representation,’ Butler writes. It cannot be established beyond a shadow of a doubt but rather can only be pieced together by considering other historical losses and linking together fragments in a process that precedes identity formation.'* Bracha calls this space of primary psychic relation the feminine or “matrixial’—a transsubjective border space in which partial subjects coemerge through preindi-

viduated, oblivious encounters with each other.'* In Proserpine Gide evokes this prerepresentational symbolic space—the unspoken realm of desire and loss—by arranging for Proserpina to encounter Eurydice, her spiritual sister and mythical fellow traveler in the symbolic path of death and desire. By embracing the ghost of Eurydice and Dante's spectral realm, Gide suggests an alternative both to the visible world of desire represented by Demeter and spring and to the Christian hell of unrepentant sinners and eternal punishment. His Hades welcomes sleeping goddesses, the sexually dispossessed, and nymphs who do not know the boundaries between life and death or good and evil. It offers a compassionate home to the undead and socially dead, giving voice to those who are usually not heard. By establishing this liminal realm, Gide achieved what Christopher Peter-

son describes as “the ultimate queer act ... to deconstruct rather than

122. Michel Leiris, La Reégle du jeu I: Biffares (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 79. 123. In this sense she resembles the racial subjects Cheng considers in The Melancholy of Race, 3-30. 124. Judith Butler, “Bracha’s Eurydice [2002],” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 1 (2004): 95-97. 125. Bracha Ettinger, “Metamorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace,” in Rethinking Borders,

ed. John Welchman (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 125-26; and “Matrix and Metramorphosis,” differences 4, no. 3 (1992): 176. See also Griselda Pollock, “Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis. Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha,’ Theory Culture Society 21, no. 5 (2004): 5-65.

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reinscribe the binary between life and death, to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of finitude.”!”° It is not enough to bring the socially undead to life by making them visible or acknowledging familial relations for them (for example through gay marriage), Peterson claims, because this merely reverses the binary between life and death but without obliterating it. The only truly queer hermeneutic act, he argues, consists of maintaining a state of Derridean spectrality by denying full absence and presence and thus the illusion of kinship. In Perséphone Gide realizes that aim by spectralizing kinship, resisting the assimilation of the other by engaging in resistant mourning and conjuring the encrypted presence of

the ghost of Eurydice, who whispers her anticipation of recognition between the lines of Persephone’s sorrowful song.'*’ Resistant mourning, Gide teaches us here, consists of allowing the dead to speak from beyond the grave. He also realized that goal when he collected suicide notes, thus enabling people of later times to grieve the loss of those who had penned them. An eclectic image of Gide’s relationship to the dead emerges in the sec-

ond tableau. Gide clearly wanted to speak from the perspective of the dead and the undead, to give voice to those who are socially dead and not usually heard. To this end, he created a spectral realm populated by incongruous mythical creatures, allowed the nymphs to survive in the underworld, evoked the ghosts who live in ancient sculpture, created a mood of

pervasive melancholia, and defamiliarized a monologue he had once written with conviction for his 1909 Proserpine. Those he chose to be partners in his dialogue with the dead—the nymphs—defy narrative logic, perspective, and temporality by remaining resolutely the same throughout, like fixed pitches in a twelve-tone string quartet by Schoenberg. Gide’s maneuvers resulted in a tableau that presents a varied collection of memories, which do not flow consciously to the surface, as they might in a process of mourning, but rather burst forth unexpectedly, like the “encrypted” objects that hold court in the mind of a melancholic. Persephone fuses with the lost object in her crypt—her mother—and

then acts out that lost object's grief at having lost her. Memories are estranged in Persephone’s melodrama, willfully separated and detached from the coherent meaning and affects with which they were associated.

126. Peterson, Kindred Specters, 7.

127. Ibid., 10, 32. Although this is an intriguing proposition in terms of the representation of kindred specters in art, | would argue that it is problematic as a framework for LGBTQ politics, given real concerns about equality and rights in that context.

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But as a result of this ruptured style and elliptical layering of meaning, most readers and listeners find that Gide’s tableau is difficult to understand. It also presented a considerable challenge to Stravinsky, who had a very different notion of how one should speak to the dead. M™ STRAVINSKY’S PURGATORY Stravinsky seems to have been far less annoyed with Gide’s second tableau

than with the first, and he made only a few comments on the typescript. This may be in part because he did not begin composing this tableau until months after Gide sent it and perhaps some time after their relationship had collapsed into almost complete silence. But despite his personal feelings about Gide at this point, Stravinsky appeared intensely interested in this tableau. The subject appealed to his melancholic tastes. Stravinsky, Heinrich Lindlar wrote in 1957, was obsessed with thoughts of “rituals of death.”'** This preoccupation is reflected in his Chroniques de

ma vie of 1936 (ghostwritten by Walter Nouvel), which is filled with somber memorials to the dead, and in works as varied as Le Sacre (1913), Les Symphonies d’instruments a vent (1920), In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), and the Requiem Canticles (1966). Stravinsky prided himself on

expressing little emotion, and he stated as much through Nouvel in the closing pages of his autobiography, but this was not the case when it came to death. Throughout the Chroniques he describes experiencing the deaths of people he has loved and depicts his grief in honest, sincere terms (a rare narrative perspective for him). The ease with which he speaks there about

death stands in marked contrast to his extreme reticence in speaking about desire. He devotes an inordinate amount of attention to document-

ing how he first learned of somebody's death and whether he was surprised by it. He depicts the deaths of his German nanny, Bertha Essert, and his brother Guriy in 1917, and that of Sergei Diaghilev in 1929 as having been his most overwhelmingly painful experiences of loss.'”” This 128. Heinrich Lindlar, Igor Strawinskys sakraler Gesang: Geist und Form der Christ-kultischen Kompo-

sitionen (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1957), 18-19. 129. Théodore Stravinsky describes that he saw his parents cry for the first time when his father's nanny, Bertha, who had come to live with them in Switzerland and was also his nanny, died in 1917, In this moment Théodore understood for the first time the “mysterious reality of death”; Théodore and Denise Stravinsky, Au coeur du foyer: Catherine et Igor Strawinsky, 1906-1940 (Bourg-la-Reine: Zurfluh, 1998), 57-58. When André Schaeffner interviewed Stravinsky for his monograph on the composer in 1929, he singled out Stravinsky’s remarks on the death of family members, and especially of his beloved nanny, Bertha, “whom he loved like a mother” (que Stravinsky aimait comme une mére); see Schaeffner, “Entretiens avec Strawinsky (juin, septembre, octobre 1929),’ FAS-MMM.

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preoccupation is evident in his music as well. Stravinsky composed music about “death as a point of entryway into life,’ Lindlar concludes, “whether in the pre-Christian idea of sacrifice of the ‘natural mass’ of Le Sacre, or in the redemptive death of Stravinsky's Christian Mass—death as a renewal of the spirit, and of style’’’°

Stravinsky's relationship to the dead was surely shaped profoundly by his parents’ traumatic grief over the death of their son Roman and by the rituals of death in his family.'’' The way Stravinsky, in an interview with Robert Craft later in life, described the death of his father in 1902 conveys important information about how he grieved for the dead in his music: For me, father's one moment of reality was his death, and that moment is all

that remains with me now. We anticipate the deaths of our parents many times, but the event itself is always unlike what we have imagined, and it is

always a shock. I realized that my father would die after an official—a deathbed—visit by the director of the Imperial Theaters, Vsévolojsky | sic; Ivan Vsevolozhsky]. As soon as Vsévolojsky [sic] appeared, I saw in him an emissary of death, and I began to accept the idea of death. ... My father died on November 21 (Old Style-December 4-New Style), 1902. After death, the

body was frozen like a piece of meat, dressed in evening clothes, and photographed; this was done at night, of course. But as soon as I was aware of the death, I felt profoundly disturbed by the dummy of the beloved one in the next room. What are we to think about corpses? (Musil’s description of this same feeling in Ulrich at the death of his father is one of the most brilliant things in the whole of The Man without Qualities | Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften |,

incidentally.) The funeral procession started from our house on an unseasonably humid day. The grave was in the Volkov Cemetery. (My father was reburied later in the New Nun’s Cemetery.) ‘The artists and directors of

the Mariinsky ‘Theater were present, and Rimsky stood by my mother. A short litany was pronounced, after which holy water and dirt were sprinkled in the grave. Mournings were solemn and strict in Russia, and Gaelic-type wakes were unknown. We went home, each of us to his own room, to cry alone.'**

This quote describes the initial step in Stravinsky's work of mourning. Freud defined this first stage as “reality testing,’ acknowledging the reality

130. Heinrich Lindlar, Igor Strawinskys sakraler Gesang, 19. 131. See SPRK, vol. 1.

132. E&D, 55-56; reprinted with some variation in MeC, 8-9.

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of the death that has occurred.'*’ Derrida spoke about it as a process of “ontologizing remains,” or gaining knowledge about the dead by “identifying” the bodily remains and “localizing the dead.”'** Freud thought this stage in the work of mourning could be painful and protracted, because it is difficult for mourners to release libido from the loved objects, despite knowing the loss is a reality. The mourner reviews all the “memories and

expectations in which the libido is bound to the object,’ which are then “suspended, translated, and through them the detachment of the libido accomplished.”'* Maria Lucila Pelento breaks this down into a threefold process of “gathering ‘what was seen—if the person witnessed the loved one’s illness and/or death—‘what was heard —if the death was also communicated, or only communicated—and ‘what was ratified—through the various practices that are usual in society at certain points in time.’ She also notes the importance of “strongly cathecting each and every one of the memories that form a link with the object,’ which is exactly what we see Stravinsky doing in his interview with Craft, sixty years after his father’s death.'*°

Vamik D. Volkan argues that mourners deal with the mental images of lost objects by burying them, identifying with them, or depositing them into “suitable reservoirs.’ A reservoir can be a person or thing in the external world that is capable of keeping the mourner’s externalization of the images of what is lost in a secure and constant fashion, so that the lost objects do not return and induce conflict within the mourner’s psyche. Mourners who fail to form healthy identifications with mental representations of the lost person or thing may be unable to find “suitable” reservoirs and may choose instead “unstable and maladaptive reservoirs” such as fanatical religious cults. “Perennial mourners,’ by contrast, associate introjects of lost persons or things with what he calls “linking objects” or “linking phenomena’ in the external world. These “inanimate or animate objects ... symbolize a meeting ground between the mental representa-

tion of a lost person or thing and the mourner’s corresponding selfrepresentation. A perennial mourner might see clouds or hear music at a funeral, for instance, and from then on emotionally link to the object

representation of the dead person whenever they see clouds or hear 133. Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” 198; “Mourning and Melancholia,’ 244. 134. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 30; Specters of Marx, 9. 135. Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie,” 199; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244—45. Strachey’s translation of this passage is misleading.

136. Maria Lucila Pelento, “Mourning for ‘Missing’ People,’ in On Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia,” 56.

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the same music. By creating these highly symbolic linking objects, the perennial mourner makes the mourning process “unending, and thus avoids the need to confront his or her conflicted relationship with the object representation of the deceased or lost thing.'*’ In the Craft interview quoted above, Stravinsky, like Volkan’s perennial mourner, cathects

not the memory of his father but rather the ritual he experienced at the moment of feeling his loss. This ritual becomes the symbolic linking object that holds for him the introjected mental representation of what he has lost, and thereafter such rituals haunted his compositional memory. What is immediately noticeable in Stravinsky's description of his father’s death is its theatricality. The director of the Imperial Theaters, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, appears in Stravinsky's house like the “emissary of death” in an opera, conveying the symbolic information that somebody is about to die. Stravinsky observes these events as if they were taking place on a stage; nobody explains them to him or engages him in a dialogue that

would allow him to understand without having to read the theatrical clues. The adults in the story are utterly estranged from him, separated from his subjective world as if by the same fourth wall of theater that had separated him from his father, who had been a workaholic bass. Stravinsky

hears a litany at the grave of his father (after the procession from his home) and then goes home to mourn alone. The Church ritual is all that binds him in collective grief with his noncommunicative family. This narrative suggests that Stravinsky internalized the lesson of grieving alone, consoling oneself in solitude only with the lingering sound of funerary ritual, the litany. When his beloved brother Guriy died in 1917, Stravinsky remembered a similar experience of solitude: “His death made me very lonely. We had been together constantly as children, and we felt that as long as we were together, all was well with the world. We found in each other the love and understanding denied us by our parents, who favored neither of us, though Guriy was in some respects the Benjamin of the family.’'°* Stravinsky, rather than expressing grief, sorrow, or any other emotion directly or remembering the deceased through recognizable musical quotations associated with them, recreated the alienated theatrical experience of death in a wide range of stage and instrumental works by composing operatic scenarios or parts of Russian orthodox rituals for the dead. Again and again he returned to his favorite form: the litany. 137. Vamik D. Volkan, “Not Letting Go: From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies,’ in On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” 94-96, 101-3. This is also known in psychoanalysis as “projective identification.” 138. M&C, 10.

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This practice is strikingly evident in Les Symphonies d‘instruments a vent

in memory of Claude Debussy—a fragment of which Stravinsky first wrote for a collection or memorial pieces published as Le Tombeau de Debussy in December 1920.'*’ Such tombeaux appeared frequently as supplements in La Revue musicale, where they served as a laboratory for the working out of musical grief in the sorrowful years immediately following World War I."*° In his autobiography, Stravinsky described how crushed he was by the death of Debussy, the news of which took him by surprise, just as the death of other loved ones (his father, brother, and nanny) had in the past. He designed his contribution to La Revue musicale as a piano reduction of a chorale that would conclude what he was already envisioning as a much larger instrumental work (the Symphonies). He did not want to remember his friend by writing music that sounded like his, as was the honorary custom in his time. Rather, he imagined what it would be like to play his new work together with Debussy, as he had, a decade earlier, performed with him his Le Roi des étoiles in a four-hand reduction. “I asked

myself what impression my music would have made on him, what his reactions would have been,” Stravinsky (or Walter Nouvel) wrote in Chroniques de ma vie. He thought his new compositional style would not have pleased his friend, but that did not discourage him, because, like Gide, he

did not want to remember the dead by appeasing them (quoting their music or writing in their style). Rather, he wanted to speak to them and hear what they had to say from beyond the grave, even if they disagreed

with him."*’ Such forms of mourning should be impossible, Derrida argues, because friends cannot live on in our memory or be fully remembered. “When a friend dies,’ Penelope Deutscher explains, “we can no

longer dialogue with them, but rather speak about them. The friend is reduced to ‘our interiorization of him; his voice, his imagined possible response. ’'** Stravinsky defied this reasoning by conjuring the ghost of his friend to sit with him as he composed—not as a memory but as the man himself, a corporeal incarnation of the living person he remembered. In his mind's eye, Stravinsky imagined how this ghost might react, 139. See Igor Stravinsky's contribution to Le Tombeau de Debussy, published as a musical supplement in La Revue musicale 1, no. 2 (1 December 1920). 140. See the Hommage a Gabriel Fauré, published as a musical supplement in La Revue musicale 4, no. 11 (October 1922). See also Le Tombeau de Ronsard, published as a musical supplement in La Revue musicale 5, no. 7 (1 May 1924). 141. Igor Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie [1935] (Paris: Denoél, 1962), 100; Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography [1936] (New York: Norton, 1962), 90. 142. Penelope Deutscher, “Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray),” differences 10, no. 3 (1998): 162-63.

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perhaps gesturally and through facial expressions, to his music, disagreeing, critiquing, and allowing it to stand if Stravinsky could convince him. Stravinsky may have incorporated these imagined responses into the Symphonies, correcting himself to respond to what he imagined as Debussy’s criticism, and thus he would have retained the alterity of his friend even in death, fulfilling Derrida’s promise of doing justice to the dead. Stravinsky composed for Debussy a somber work that in his own words totally lacked “passionate impulse”: “It is an austere ceremony that unfolds

in short litanies between different families of heterogeneous instruments.”'* In Taruskin’s view the piece exudes “a sense of impersonal hieratic calm.”'** “It’s enough for the listener to hear this music knowing it’s a

funeral homage,’ Ernest Ansermet wrote, “for him to understand the meaning of this succession of cries, plaintive phrases, and different chants for one and two voices, which all lead up to this colonnade of harmonies or to a sort of chorale, depending on how you see it.” Ansermet compared

the composition to the play of nature at a seaside tomb like the one depicted on the cover of the supplement to La Revue musicale in which it was published.'* Taruskin offers a moving interpretation of the liturgical nature of this work, which he identifies as “chant” or, more specifically, the Russian Orthodox office of the dead, or panikhida. This office begins with Psalm 118 intoned by the reader, followed by choral responses, or

litanies. The chorale Stravinsky wrote for Debussy emulates the concluding chorale, or Vechnaya pamyat’, of the Orthodox office. Stravinsky often remembered the dead through musical rites of the Russian Orthodox Church. “Not for | Stravinsky] a spontaneous lament from the ephemeral heart,’ Taruskin remarks with stinging accuracy; “he could be counted on to make his beloved friend and mentor a properly liturgical obsequy.”°

Stravinsky does not mourn here. Rather, he becomes overwhelmed by an encrypted memory of a (different) ritual he had witnessed at the moment when his experience of mourning was suppressed by his stern family’s refusing the comforts of affect. The memory of Debussy conjures

the theatrical, religious funeral rite—or linking object—with which he

143. Chroniques de ma vie, 105; Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography, 9S. 144. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), vol. 1, 1487. 145. Ernest Ansermet, Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine [1960], in Les Fonde-

ments de la musique dans la conscience humaine et autres écrits, ed. Jean-Jacques Rapin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), 739. 146. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, vol. 1, 1487-89. Taruskin notes that Stravinsky wrote such a panikhida service a dozen years earlier, in his Pogrebal’naya pesn’ for Rimsky-Korsakov.

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had cathected at that time. Stravinsky does not quote the music of a specific ritual here. That would have indicated that he wanted his listeners to

play the semiotic game of drawing intellectual connections between Debussy and the Russian Church or that he himself resisted mourning by grieving in the third person, quoting others who knew better than he how to grieve (as Gide tended to do). Instead, Stravinsky composed music that revives in the present the corporeal and affective experience of the ritual he had heard at the moment of his original loss in the past. The austere, piercing harmonies, “wrong notes, spiky and unusual instrumentation, and counterintuitive voice leading create rawness that hints at the imperfect delivery of live performance. Stravinsky had created a similar effect a

few years earlier in the third movement of his Three Pieces for String Quartet, which also recreates a ritual of death. These are not actual rituals but messy, jarring, ghostly ones—phantoms emerging from Stravinsky's past, vague approximations that communicate all the corporeal feeling and affect of a death ritual as performed in the Russian Orthodox Church of Stravinsky's nostalgic childhood memory. They retain their immediacy, and yet seem jarringly not of this time, torn from their historical moment by Stravinsky's disfiguring parodic techniques and by his “revoicing,” or translation of the ritual from the vocal medium into a new timbral register

that hints at the blurred sonoric transmutations characteristic of longterm memory. The fantastic ritual of the Symphonies happens right now, as

well as back then, defying the progress of time. Stravinsky honors his deceased friend by reliving in a disjunctive present the somber affect and kinesthetic response to music he had heard at the painful moment of previous loss. Stravinsky's ghostly rituals relate temporally to the dead in a quite different way than Gide’s poetic verse does. Gide evoked an undead or living dead object through quotation and pictorial evocation, bringing the past into the present as a literary trace, and he remained firmly rooted in the present even when “feeling backward.’ But Stravinsky traveled right back into the heart of his past by recreating the affect, sounds, and corporeal sensations he associated with rituals of death he had witnessed in his life. André Schaeftner came away with the impression that the composer had

an “instinctual,” “animal” memory of the past, and that above all he remembered “sounds.”'*’ Because for him music had this capacity to bring past experience aesthetically and sensually into the present, it functioned 147. “Mémoire avant tout des sons, mémoire de l’instinct, toute animale.” See André Schaeffner’s notes in “Entretiens avec Strawinsky (juin, septembre, octobre 1929),” FAS-MMM.

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like the “involuntary memories” that Proust introduced in A la recherche du temps perdu, which shaped private cultures of mourning in interwar France. Proust had interpreted Henri Bergson’s involuntary memories— theorized about a decade earlier—in terms of their relationship to sensual experience. He called such moments of sensual recall “happy moments” (moments bienheureux) and used them as central narrative points to guide his novel’s protagonists and readers into the essence of things.’** In the famous “petite madeleine” scene Proust investigated phenomenologically why a mouthful of petite madeleine (a French baked good) dipped in a teaspoon of tea could awaken in him such “delicious pleasure’ and “intense joy. He discovered that the taste of the madeleine was linked to an unconscious visual memory available to him at first only through the emotions aroused by his taste buds. “After the death of people and the destruction of things,’ he concluded, “only smell and taste—more fragile yet more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful—remain lingering, like souls on the ruins of all the rest, making us remember, wait and hope for, unflinchingly carrying on their almost impalpable droplet

the immense edifice of memory.’ Alessia Ricciardi called the petite madeleine episode a “fictive experiment of involuntary memory” in which Proust attempted “to redefine a more vital relationship to temporality and

memory as opposed to the objectified historicism of the previous century.’'°° As Ricciardi notes, Proust is not “nostalgic,” as is often thought, but rather both inconsolable about and coolly detached from the past. Pierre Nora associates the shaping of memory in Proust, Bergson, and Freud with a decisive shift that occurred in France “from the historical to the psychological, from the social to the individual, from the objective message to its subjective reception, from repetition to rememoration.’

According to him, the psychologization of contemporary memory “entail[ed] a complete new economy of the identity of the self, the mechanics of memory, and the relevance of the past.”'*' This corresponded

148. See Roger Shattuck, “Proust's Binoculars: Memory and Recognition,” in Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (New York: Norton, 2000), 99-136. 149. Marcel Proust, Du coté de chez Swann [1913], in A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Galli-

mard/Quartro, 1987/1999), 44-47. 150. Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford, CA: Stan-

ford University Press, 2003), 7; see also Ricciardi’s extended analysis of Proust in the chapter “Cool Memories, 69-119. 151. See Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, “La République,”

ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); translated by Marc Roudebush as “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire,’ Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 15.

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with a turn in French literature toward exploring the interiorization of loss and the private, subjective, and psychic aspects of mourning. I believe that the mention of death operated for Stravinsky like Proust's madeleine.'** Death seems to have evoked for Stravinsky the music, affect,

and immediacy of sensual experience he associated either with the deceased person or the act of grieving itself. He did not meditate on his memory of the deceased in a conscious process of mourning but rather got thrown back into the powerful feelings that had overwhelmed him at some original moment of loss, reliving them each time he was newly confronted by death. He then recreated what he had originally heard, bringing the experience alive in the same way for his listeners. In this way his music

recovered the “auratic, the “aura” of that past moment in the present, as Gide’s verse did not always do.**’ Stravinsky strongly believed in this live

aura and distrusted recordings and radio broadcasts for this reason.*™* Jonathan Flatley associates such a reliving of past experience in the present with transference in psychotherapy, in which the patient relives the affect s/he experienced in the past and works with the therapist toward articulating it in speech. ‘The affect is experienced as if at its moment of birth. In Affective mappings Flatley demonstrated Henry James's creating such situ-

ations of transference, or directly experienced past affects, for readers in The Turn of the Screw.*>* | believe similarly related experiences may be discerned in Stravinsky’s music.

Stravinsky's compositional process also reveals that he did not think of music as a “dead sound, a corpse, but as a living and vital phantomic presence. He believed in ghosts. This is evident in his description of conjuring Debussy, and when he talked of his father’s death he remembered recoiling in horror at the sight of the stuffed and frozen corpse; that image never

left him, but he also dialectically rejected it.° Perhaps he would have

152. Stravinsky told Andrés Révész in 1924 that among French writers he liked to read Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau, “the latter for his aesthetic theory and admirable versification.” See Andrés Révész, “Un gran compositor: Igor Strawinsky y la musica moderna,” ABC (Madrid), 25 March 1926. 153. Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning, 10S, 111. 154. Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie, 163-65. Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography, 152-54. Stravin-

sky trusted recordings, however, when he thought they were communicating the soul or aura of the music, as we saw in chapter 2. 15S. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 54-60. 156. This has not stopped critics from consistently associating Stravinsky's music with corpses, both during his lifetime and afterward. See, for example, Leonid Sabaneyey, “Igor Stravinsky (vpechatleniya, vstrechi)” [Igor Stravinsky (Impressions, Meetings) ], Rabis 22 (14 June 1927); reprinted in SPRK, vol. 3, 786-87; and Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Strawinsky und die Nekrophilie,’ in Igor Strawinsky, ed. Heinz-

Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, Musik-Konzepte nos. 34-35 (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 1984), 99-106.

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identified with Ulrich, the main protagonist in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, when Musil says of him: “Involuntarily shaken at the root of his being, where there are no feelings and no thoughts, but nowhere else.”!*” When he did gaze at a corpse, for example, at Rimsky-Korsakov's funeral, he saw it as being radiant with life and spirit rather than as cold physical remains. “I will remember Rimsky in his coffin as long as memory is,’ he later told Craft, “He looked so beautiful I could not help crying.”** Many of Stravinsky’s contemporaries, on the other hand, used the word corpse or cadaver to refer to those who they felt lacked spirituality, morals, creativity, or other qualities judged vital to human life. It was also an insult

frequently directed at those in same-sex relationships. Paul Claudel referred to Gide, for example, as “a living cadaver, who, in a deathly style, shakes cadavers with the help of his galvanizing scheming. Leave the dead to bury their dead and leave this ghoul to his vampiric exercises! This is

what Protestantism has finally led to!”'’ Music critics, too, adopted these terms in their derogatory meaning. Neither Stravinsky nor his friends wanted to think of the dead as cold, petrified, brutally physical remains. That idea emerged only in the traumatized post-World War II period associated with Theodor Adorno's Die Philosophie der neuen Musik and the positivist turn in musicological studies. But Stravinsky, like Mahler, thought of the dead in terms of their living spirit, vitality, and soul—a quality that music could recreate through the

kinesthetic impulse of its rhythms and the immediacy of its sensual impact. Echoing Cingria’s argument in Pétrarque about the relationship between the Dionysian element in Petrarch’s poetry and the poet's passionate love for Laura, Stravinsky argued in the early 1930s that love is what binds the living to the dead. “I remake Pergolesi’s music not because I want to repeat it or correct it but because | feel that I am the composer's spiritual brother,’ Stravinsky told Vittorio Tranquilli in 1931. “It is a phenomenon of love | amore]. There’s a love affair [un incontro damore]|, the union of two spirits between Pergolesi and myself. Just as a man physically needs a specific woman whose qualities arouse the flame of passion in him, I too need Pergolesi or another musician of that time in order to

157. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Rowohlt, 1978), bk. 1, pt. 3, chap. 2, “Vertrauen, 677. Musil is describing a scene in which a family mourns the deceased father in a room in which his dead body is exposed, very much as in Stravinsky's memory of his own father. 158. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 46.

159. Paul Claudel to René Schwob, 12 December 1932, in Pierre Angel, ed., Lettres inédites sur l'inquiétude moderne, with a preface by Maurice Mignon (Paris: Les Editions Universelles, 1951).,157.

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create music.” Those who ignored this life force misinterpreted the dead, Stravinsky argued. In his autobiography he admonished his friend Ansermet for studying music of the past without recognizing its vitality. To empathize with the dead, Stravinsky argued, one needed to immerse oneself fully in life: It is impossible for a man to understand completely the art of an era anterior to his own, and to penetrate its meaning beneath outmoded appearances, and behind a language that one no longer speaks, without having a comprehensive and living feeling of the time, and without participating consciously in the life

that surrounded it. Because those who are essentially alive know how to discover real life in those who are “dead.”"®!

The scare quotes Stravinsky places around the word dead hint at his reluctance to admit any final closure to life on earth, and to his desire to think

of music and people in the past as neither dead nor cut off temporally from himself but surviving spiritually into his immanent present. He similarly describes in his autobiography how he wanted to “revive the latent life” of what he thought was Pergolesi's music for Pulcinella in 1921, thus deliberately countering the “curators and archivists of music” who jeal-

ously guard intangible treasures in their precious libraries but never engage with them as people, treating them rather like “dead and sacred things.” It was an act of love to seek the spark of life in music of the past, Stravinsky wrote, the impulse for all musical creation.'” Stravinsky's investment in the lived immediacy of his experience, even in relation to the dead or music of the past, led him to mistrust memories. On many occasions he remarked that he was troubled by the notion that his memories might be distorted, or have translated an experience falsely. Memories can never capture lived experience in the split second of its most perfect presence, before it shifts into the past tense. This is particularly true of emotional memory, and Stravinsky so mistrusted such mem-

ories that he preferred to bracket out emotions rather than remember them falsely. Stravinsky’s response to emotions might be interpreted as symptomatic of the melancholic, for his emotions function like a lost object about which he feels ambivalence. They have become introjected into his ego like foreign bodies against which his “conscience” directs

160. Stravinsky, quoted in Vittorio Tranquilli, “Avvenimenti della vita teatrale cittadina: Strawinsky in prosa,” II Piccolo di Trieste, 23 April 1931. 161. Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie, 85; Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography, 75-76.

162. Ibid., 91.

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resentment, hate, and ambivalence. Anne Anlin Cheng argues that the ego may even go beyond this, however, by denying and excluding the lost object on multiple levels “in order to maintain the elaborate structure of loss-but-not-loss.” She argues that it is this active exclusion, rather than the loss itself, that operates in melancholic retention, or incorporation.’” Stravinsky’s remarks on emotions in the 1930s convey a profound sense of such denial and are filled with exclusionary gestures. In his autobiography, for example, he explained his ambivalence about remembering emo-

tions in connection with his memories of composing Le Sacre. His use here of the exclamation “alas” (hélas), a frequent occurrence in his writing, hints at his desire to insert his corporeal presence into the detached narra-

tive of his ghostwritten autobiography:' I feel absolutely incapable of remembering after twenty years the feelings that motivated me when I composed the score of Le Sacre. One can more or less

precisely remember facts and incidents. But how does one reconstruct the

feelings one felt in the past, without risking to distort them under the influence of the whole evolution that took place in oneself since then? My current interpretation of my feelings of that time could be as inexact and arbitrary as if somebody else had given it. It would have the same character as an interview with me to which somebody had falsely attributed my name, as has happened to me, alas! all too many times.'®

Stravinsky developed two intertwined compositional approaches in the second tableau of Perséphone to circumvent memories of loss, both of which I invoked in chapter 5 yet interpret here from a new angle. At times he composed passages in which music that had once served for him as a linking object in painful moments of loss spilled out of his psychic crypt and onto the page. In such moments he resisted mourning by allowing the ghosts of music past to speak through him. At other times he composed music that was adamantly fixed in the present and thus resisted the passing of time and possibility of death. This was true of much of his dance music, and of the orchestral passages that depicted characters journeying through

two states or in temporal transition, who were thus not yet fixed in the symbolic realm of memory.

163. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 9-10. 164. Dana Luciano discusses the corporeality of such exclamations in Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 69-70. 165. Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie, S8—S9; Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography, 48-49.

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Stravinsky's two approaches to resisting mourning are evident in his 1947 setting of Orpheus—a work that also provides insight into Stravinsky’s interpretation of the story of Eurydice. Unlike Gide, who in Proserpine insisted on Eurydice’s agency in the creative process, Stravinsky in this ballet interprets Eurydice as Orpheus’s muse. Stravinsky’s approach to the myth may have to do with the fact that he followed the model of Roger Ducasse’s Orphée; like Ducasse’s, Stravinsky’s Orpheus neither performs on his lyre nor sings.'®° Orpheus weeps for Eurydice in a musical number that opens and closes the ballet (opening—R3:6; and R143:1-R149:6). This number is detached from the dancer Orpheus and appears in the score as an absolute musical object, an “apotheosis.” It is intended to communicate his grief in some way, however, for it is prefaced by the stage directive “Orpheus weeps for Eurydice / He stands motionless, with his back to the audience.” Stravinsky draws on an archaic Catholic Church style with a time signature of 4/2 and Phrygian mode to create an aural image of spiritual numbness or abstinence. The bare, reduced sonic texture created by an orchestration for strings and solo harp, minimalistic pitch content, and eerie, floating melodic lines suggests that Stravinsky the melancholic has abandoned himself here to the ghostly Renaissance sounds that bubbled over into his consciousness from the crypt.

Stravinsky's Symphony in C provides a second good example of this compositional approach. It is modeled on Bizet’s Symphony in C, and the

first movement is written in the spirit of Haydn, the second in that of Bach. Stravinsky wrote this cool exercise in neoclassical stylistic imitation as a triple work of mourning for his recently deceased wife, daughter, and mother; he frequently cried, even in later life, when he heard it performed live. I suggest that, following Abraham, Torok, and Derrida, the quoted

styles here, which are so distant from yet part of the present, are “encrypted” lost objects that exert their influence from beyond the grave in spite of Stravinsky’s denial of their affect. Like Derrida’s ghosts, they retain their alterity and agency, appearing as quotations that disrupt the temporal flow and cause time to be “out of joint.’ Stravinsky's second compositional approach to resisting mourning— that of remaining in the present—is revealed in the pas de deux he created to describe Orpheus’s backward glance in Orpheus (R101-R121:5).

166. On Stravinsky's inspiration for Orpheus, see Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks, 236-48. Stephen Walsh argues that Stravinsky had Perséphone on his mind when composing this work; see Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America, 1934-1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 195.

Voices fromthe Crypt m 531

This pas de deux is in Stravinsky’s favored ABA form, and his B section

here (R109-R118) provides a lighthearted contrast. Stravinsky suggests through the tortured counterpoint, Mahleresque expressions of pain, and tonal dissonance of the A sections of this pas de deux that he, at least at times, associated the late nineteenth-century expressive means of tonality, forward movement created by dissonance and its resolution, and the gestural aspect of dance music with the psychological feeling of presence. It also suggests that he understood the work of resistant mourning as an active, unending process of living life in the company of the dead. The music displays intense affect in this moment of the character's direct communion with the dead, which is occurring in the vital present that the composer so loved rather than in the past he

mistrusted. When Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, however, the music stops (R120:5), and when it resumes it is with a tortuous, disso-

nant, and unresolved return to a painful fragment of A (R121:1-S). Death, or the disappearance of the deceased, Stravinsky seems to be saying, destroys the creative relationship, which can only survive in constant dialogue with ghosts of the past—as when Eurydice is still walking silently behind Orpheus. If she disappears entirely, the author dies with her, leaving behind a melancholic allegorist to assemble the ruins that remain. Stravinsky resists mourning in the second tableau of Perséphone in both of the interrelated ways outlined here. In “Sur ce lit” he becomes overwhelmed by the affects and sounds associated with music to which he had cathected at previous moments of loss. In the choreographed sequence of seduction that follows, dance serves as a vitalist escape from death, just as did the sarabande | examined in chapter 5. Stravinsky care-

fully distances himself from souvenirs or hollow memories of the deceased at such moments and instead attempts to recreate the auratic presence, or the Erlebnis, of their ghosts. Finally, he sets Persephone’s memory of home in her concluding monologue to a sentimental passage that suggests interminable mourning in the company of the dead and foreshadows Orpheus’s journey to the earth with Eurydice. As a result of

these strategies, Stravinsky’s music appears discontinuous. There are sudden temporal shifts, evidence of pain masked with nostalgic pleasure,

neoclassical borrowings, and outbursts of sentimental memories. The pastiche nature of the music and the shock of the brief disruption when Stravinsky inserts a moment of spontaneous grieving suggest the affinity between his compositional affect and the melancholia of Walter Benjamins allegories.

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Stravinsky’s Ghostly Lullaby Stravinsky's attitude toward the dead is immediately evident in his setting of Gide’s nostalgic epigraph, “Sur ce lit.” He had raised no objection to the

bizarre fact that Persephone arrived in the underworld asleep. On the contrary, the idea seemed to inspire him. But he objected to Gide’s suggestion that the nymphs should accompany her and sing this poem. Also, in spite of Gide’s elaborate stage directions, Stravinsky planned only “a few measures of music before the [“Sur ce lit” chorus.” Stravinsky’s first impulse was to unify Gide’s multidirectional text into a closed musical number. “The beginning [of the second tableau] must be established by

the musical form so that the music is not enslaved by the dialogue, he wrote in Russian on the first page of Gide's draft 2a. “It is impossible for me to create a succession of musical pieces (forming a musical ensemble that will be logical and useful and have a reason for existence on its own) while accepting the dialogue form.’’®’ This is an astonishing admission, indicating that he realized that dialogue and relations to alterity were incompatible with his allegorical compositional forms. Musically he neutralized Gide's stylistically eclectic, dialogical text by shaping the first part

of the complex scene, including “Sur ce lit,’ the dialogue among the Shadows, Eumolpus, and Persephone, and the Danaides’ “Attentives sur les rives” into a large-scale ABA'B' structure with coda-like ending, in

which A and B are strongly related (A = “Sur ce Lit,” R74:1-R80:1; B = dialogue between Persephone and the chorus's “Ici rien ne s'achéve,’ R80:2-R86:1; A' = “Attentives sur les rives,’ R86:2—R91:4; B'= the choruss “Rien ne s acheéve” and Persephone, R92:1—R93:1; coda = Danaides last verse, R93:2-R99:4). His musical organization disrupted Gide’s idea of a heterophonic literary bricolage in the scene. Stravinsky set “Sur ce lit” as a strophic song with each line sung to the same five measures (twelve quarter notes) of static music, repeating words as necessary to fill out the number of beats and repeat the five measures five times (see musical example 7.1). He maintained some of the ostinati from “Sur ce lit” as a foundation for the exchanges among Persephone, Eumolpus, and the Shadows (“Ici rien ne s'achéve’) that follow (R80:2—R86:1 ).!°° When, to complete the

167. See Stravinsky's remarks on Gide’s draft 2a; microfilm 226.1, p. 962, PSS (published as example 7, SSC, vol. 3, 493). Craft’s translations are on 486 and 507. 168. See the facsimile of Stravinsky's sketches of “Sur ce lit” and “Ici rien ne s‘achéve” reprinted in Carr, Multiple Masks, 184-185.

. [4

Musical Example 7.1: Perséphone, R74:1—R80:1 [74] Tempo! J=00

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Musical Example 7.2: (continued)

—fo ———. 133 ,le maw | [tty 133] carat WP rae = ~~ rte x + 2|can ES EE ES Ee ES Oe eS De caer oh ee eee ian = SS ESS . — = ss a ee re eee ae ee aes ) * o wy by bay e Let _| Ce ee Se SSS ee ———————————————————————————————————————————————

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Voices fromthe Crypt m 549

Musicologists recognize that Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin is a key exemplar of the melancholia, or resistant mourning, of musical modernism. Martha Hyde and Carolyn Abbate both examined the work from this perspective and evoked mechanized versions of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” to do so. They understand Ravel's Forlane in its relationship to the historical musical text on which it was based, Francois Couperins forlane from the Quatriéme concert in E minor of his Concerts royaux (1714).’” Both refer to Couperin’s forlane as a musical corpse— the term driven by their modernist interpretations of historical time as inexorably pushing forward and leaving discarded musical bodies in its wake. Hyde argues that the imitation of past music in Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin is “anachronistic” in the sense that it brings something from the past into a present in which it doesn't quite belong. In her view the modernist composer Ravel cannibalistically devoured the past in his pursuit of the goal of producing a progressive contemporary product.” Hyde’s view is concordant with Abbate’s description of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin as a machine—a reproduction mechanism or phonograph that plays back “lifeless works” from the past. The Tombeau, she argues, “reproduces dead sound-objects even as they are the inverse: dead objects animated from within by dead sounds.” This is Hyde's cannibalistic modernist composer

transformed into automaton and gone wild.” Abbate and Hyde both depart from the premise that Ravel's contemporary rewrite of a forlane can be compared detail by detail with the score on which it was based. Hyde interprets Ravel's recomposition as a “reverential imitation” of Couperin’s model conducted with a “religious fidelity

or fastidiousness” according to “a sacramental version of history.” Abbate, by contrast, describes Couperin’s forlane as a “real antique,’ which she rejects in favor of the seductive “nebulous objects” it invokes for her. There is a dead forlane within Ravel's Forlane, she admits. “Its hand moves

from within, but it is not Couperin’s.” Abbate remains evasive on the

202. Couperin’s forlane was published in Jean Ecorcheville, “La Forlane,” La Revue musicale S.ILM.

10 (1 April 1914): 27-28. Arbie Orenstein published Ravel's transcription of this piece in “Some Unpublished Music and Letters by Maurice Ravel,” Music Forum 3 (1973): 330-31. A fuller account of the circumstances of Ravel's transcription and his likely use of Couperin’s forlane as a model appears in Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky

Polemic, Studies in Musicology 101 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 50-52. 203. Martha Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music,’ Music Theory Spectrum 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 203-6, 211. 204. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 190, 191, 193, 243. 205. See Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music,” 206, 210-11.

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source of this spectral energy, never telling readers whose hand might be in play. She hints at the reason for her evasiveness when she compares Ravel's grotesque rewrite of Couperin’s forlane to “an elegant dinner party at which a man across from us chats with his neighbors, unaware that a womans lips are painted large and red on his forehead.” Ravel's parodistic gestures expose a heterosexual transgression, perhaps an affair, that now rises spastically to the surface—a deadly embarrassment that all listeners can hear. But who is guilty of this transgression? Ravel, by having an affair with Couperin? Or is it somebody else in a tryst with a third party? Who is the marked man in Ravel’s Forlane?*” In studying Pluto's march in Perséphone I thought often about Hyde's and Abbate’s comments on Ravel's Forlane, but I concluded that their postwar metaphor of the corpse does not apply to the ways Stravinsky

and Ravel related to the dead as ghosts that haunt the present. Ravel's model may not have been Couperin’s score, I thought, but rather a live dance—a vivid, kinetic, emotional expression of human feeling through movement, corporeal practice restored through theater. Jean Ecorcheville suggests as much in her 1914 article on the forlane that inspired Ravel's recomposition of Couperin. The forlane had been defunct for two centuries, Ecorcheville explains, but was just being revived in the salons—a “ghost” (revenant, his word) accepted by the contemporary public in spite of its ambivalent relationship to the original dance that had inspired it.’

The pope had conjured this ghost, Ecorcheville reminds his informed

readers, when he forbade the tango—an act of provocation for the youthful and pleasure-oriented French leisure class on the lookout for a new dance to satisfy their thirst for erotic social diversion. They started the next new craze by inventing a dance movement, calling it the “furlana’ and slipping into its folkish folds all the lasciviousness once imagined behind the Argentine tango. Scholars than gathered facts to prove the forlane's historical legitimacy, or what Ecorcheville calls “its identity papers,’ and this led to the pope's accepting the dance.”® If Ecorcheville’s article is any indication, the forlane heard in Ravel's Tombeau had more to do with the present than the distant past, whether the dance'’s generic past or Couperin’s version. One could say that Ravel fled from that past into the direct physicality of the present, for he created

206. Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel's Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 3

(Autumn 1999): 498. 207. Ecorcheville, “La Forlane,’ 11. 208. Ibid., 13.

Voices fromthe Crypt m 551

a dance based on those he had come to know in the social salons of his time. Ravel gave his Forlane musicological legitimacy by faking an illustrious lineage through an arbitrary connection to Couperin. He used the forlane included in Ecorcheville’s article as a cover, to legitimize his dance in the public’s—and the pope’s—eyes and avoid a papal prohibition. (In

doing so he inadvertently also sent overzealous musicologists on a wild goose chase.) I believe Ravel’s choice of the forlane was motivated by his wish to express by means of an exuberant partner dance his love for the

person to whom he dedicated the Forlane, Gabriel Dustec. Like Ida Rubinstein, he escaped papal edict by performing rather than speaking or representing physical attraction. He also resisted mourning by composing in an art form in which he could keep alive the corporeal memory of a lover or loved friend. I believe that Stravinsky, too, used a popular dance to communicate emotional content. He alludes to a grotesque, raunchy, boogie-woogie march in the second tableau of Perséphone to mask terror at the thought of the devil by transforming that fear into physical joy. By bringing his music extravagantly into the grotesque exaggeration of a blearing present, he refuses the finality of death and makes a mockery of historical memory. The rhythm in this march contains the roots of the boogie-woogie we can hear Stravinsky echoing to himself in the afterworld. What better way to deny death than to invent one’s own history? Stravinsky's eclectic memorial practices in the chorus “Sur ce lit” and Pluto's march result in a musical collage that resembles the landscape of ruins characteristic of Benjamins allegory. ‘The narrative of Freudian mel-

ancholia is evident in the music’s disrupted and discontinuous nature, made up of sudden temporal shifts, explosions of encrypted sonic memories, annulling of pain with nostalgic pleasure, and neoclassical borrowing. © The different parts float around,’ the writer Julien Green noticed at the time, “they are only loosely and negligibly linked to each other.’*”” “His music is dry, gloomy, voluntarily poor and bare, void of any individ-

uality or expansion of feeling,” Jean Chantavoine opined, recognizing Stravinsky's musical melancholia. “It is the sonorous symbol of a concept

that—through the rigor of its theoretical abstraction—amputates in people everything that makes them people: love, joy, the whimsical, and individual preference.’*'® Listeners might want to hear Perséphone like a “mosaic of the most lovely pastiches,’ but they would be wrong, Domenico 209. Julien Green, entry for 20 May 1934, in Journal: 1928-1958 (Paris: Plon, 1961), 181-82. 210. Jean Chantavoine, “Opéra: Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein,’ Le Ménestrel, 11 May 1934

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de Paoli countered, in a striking commentary that demonstrated his affinity for Stravinsky's melancholic art. De Paoli argued that Stravinsky’s powerful “personality” (personnalité; Stravinsky’s favorite word) had absorbed his spiritual models more or less consciously and “assured the admirable unity and homogeneity of the work.’ That personality had allowed “the spiritual attachments that bound | Stravinsky] to the past to shine through his unique compositional style’*"’

There’s No Place Like Home Persephone does not, however, drink from the river Lethe. She does not forget, and within minutes the macabre nightmare of her seduction is over. It is followed by a passage of narration in which Eumolpus describes how Persephone has refused Pluto’s gifts and how Mercury offers her the pome-

granate, which reminds her of the light of the earth and desire (R139:4R150:4). Gide had originally envisioned a lively staging and programmatic musical accompaniment to accompany Eumolpus'’s solo here: | Note] the accelerated rhythm of the music, which is ironic and strident at the moment when, according to Eumolpus’s chant, Mercury leaps in to take the pomegranate. He reaches it to Persephone who wants to grab it. The chorus of nymphs intervenes until Mercury breaks the circle they have closed. Persephone has taken the pomegranate and bitten it. Burst of laughter in the orchestra. During Eumolpus's last words, the procession of the Hours begins.

Mercury and Pluto have withdrawn. One sees only Persephone and the nymphs.***

Stravinsky, true to form, ignored most of Gide’s suggestions. In draft 2b he

underlined the phrases “the accelerated rhythm of the music, which is ironic and strident” and “burst of laughter in the orchestra” and wrote next to them in Russian: “What a mentality!” Gide had strangely usurped Persephone’s voice here by allowing Eumolpus to describe her actions and thus speak for her—a fact Stravinsky noted on draft 2b with the wry comment in Russian, “Everything that occurs during Eumolpus’s aria.”*'° 211. Domenico de Paoli, “Perséphone,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 28 April 1934.

212. Gide, drafts 2a and 2b; microfilm 226.1, pp. 967 and 978, PSS (published as examples 12 and 23, SSC 495 and 501); and PeP, 100-1. In the published libretto Gide removes the line “The chorus of nymphs intervenes until Mercury breaks the circle they have closed,” and replaces the word nymphs at the end of the stage description with Shadows. 213. See Stravinsky’s comments on Gide’s draft 2b, microfilm 226.1, p. 978, PSS (published as example 23, SSC, vol. 3, 501); Craft’s translation is on p. $07.

a

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Musical Example 7.3: Perséphone, R144:4-R148:4

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Musical Example 7.3: (continued)

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Pozen tfatce cantubale hha “3 ee 8e eee oS i hn 2 ionbian-deane ie —. eeau adé In Perséphone Gide merges Demophonss story with that of Triptolemus so as to create a symbolic pédéraste who has been raised outside the laws of traditional kinship and eventually serves humankind (by teaching it agriculture). In his 1909 and 1913 Proserpines Gide solidified Triptolemus’s symbolic position as a pédéraste by describing him in terms that evoke Winckelmannss ideal of neoclassic male beauty. He had imagined Triptolemus as a mute figure who rhythmically, in methodically repeated gestures, plows the fields—a scene he had hoped to see animated by dancers in a tableau vivant or “bas relief’’* Patrick Pollard suggests that Gide may have had a specific image in mind of Persephone’s union with Triptolemus: the Great Eleusinian Relief from the fifth century B.c., which had been uncovered in

the 1890s and was a familiar cultural icon to Gide and his generation. Similarly, Gide may have included Mercury at the end of the third tableau because of another familiar relief, this one from 4 B.c., depicting Mercury

guiding Persephone back to the underworld after Orpheus had turned around. The Great Eleusinian Frieze represents Triptolemus as what Gide might have understood to be an ideal pédéraste—a man raised by goddesses, without a father, and living outside the family structures imposed by French law. By allowing his 1909 and 1913 Proserpinas to desire this character from an ancient Greek relief, Gide oriented their and his own gaze toward the adolescent male nude as the epitome of beauty, thereby perpetuating the dynamics of desire characteristic of Winckelmann’s neoclassicism. In Corydon Gide had hinted at his strong affinity for Winckelmann’s

aesthetics, but without mentioning his name. Corydon challenged the assumption that beauty has to be associated with the female body, suggest-

ing instead that Greek sculpture proved that the opposite is true. Given that the Greeks usually sculpted naked adolescent men and left their women veiled, Corydon argued, the former must have represented their ideal of beauty. Corydon associated the “glorious and healthy epochs” of 3. Lucey, Gide'’s Bent, 211.

4. CE. Gide's 1909 and 1913 Proserpines, P&P, 80-81. Gide used the term “bas relief” in his 1913 Proserpine.

5. I discuss this image in my article “In the Footsteps of Eurydice: Gluck’s Orpheus und Eurydice in Hellerau, 1913,’ Echo 3, no. 2. Available at www.echo.ucla.edu/volume3-issue2 /table-of-contents. html (accessed 5 May 2012).

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Greek art with open “uranism.” “Decadent” periods, in contrast, were characterized by pictorial representations of naked women, as in Giorgione’s Fiesta campestre.° Here Corydon, and with him perhaps Gide, reflects a strong affinity for Winckelmann’s aesthetics and echoes his aesthetic judgments.

In his youth Gide had been inspired in his love of Greek sculpture both by his readings of Pater (see chapter 7), visits to Rome (a tradition he carried on from Winckelmann’s time), Pierre Paris’s La Sculpture antique, and the writings of Hippolyte Taine, who argued that extant Greek statues best communicated the calm and beauty of the “young men around Plato.’ Throughout his life Gide associated his aesthetic enjoyment of ancient sculpture explicitly with homoerotic pleasure. “Whether it be loving, adoring, or passionate 1am obsessed with ‘touch,’

he wrote after viewing ancient sculpture in Rome in 1891. “I want an enfolding, absorbing embrace—or else self-forgetfulness, rendering ecstasy extreme. This is why I suffer so greatly when I behold a statue's beauty—because my deepest self does not melt into it but reacts against it.... This marble is so diaphanous that some flesh still seems to be there. Desire to possess it torments me, and I suffer intensely in my body and my soul at the feeling of the impossible; the Spinario, |Praxiteles’s] Apollo Sauroctonus, the damaged torso of the Diana Reclining—looking upon them does not quench my thirst: it awakens it.”* Decades later he drew a direct connection between his Greekophilia and his homoerotic desire in his description of an encounter with a young Greek boy who

kissed his hand because he was French, and whose hand he kissed in return. “In my whole life, that was the day, I think, when I felt closest to the true spirit of Antiquity. I returned the child’s kiss. I kissed his hand! What a mistake! I could tell when I saw how disappointed he was, the poor lad. What he had expected me to do was bless him. And I acted like

a friend!” Gide’s interest in ancient sculpture had also been sparked in his youth by Friedrich Creuzer’s visual etymologies in Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker. In the tradition of Winckelmann’s neoclassicist interpretation

6. Gide, Corydon (Paris: Gallimard, 1925), 99-101. 7. Hippolyte Taine, “Les Jeunes Gens de Plato” [1855], in Essais de critique et d’histoire, 14th ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1923), 81-83. 8. Gide, Les Cahiers d'André Walter [1891], quoted in Patrick Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 408-9. 9. Gide, quoted in Claude Mauriac, Conversations avec André Gide [1951] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 240.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 569

of Greek sculpture, Creuzer had explored the symbolic meaning of myth by examining the latter’s three-dimensional plastic representation in Bildwerken ranging from reliefs to coins, cameos, and vases.'” Reproductions and line drawings of these visual sources fill the appendices of the Symbolik, providing a primary source of evidence for Creuzer’s

symbolic interpretations. Creuzer believed that anthropologists were best equipped to trace the source of the Seelenspiegel (mirrors of the soul) that he saw revealed in these key examples of sculptural representation. Walter Benjamin later singled out Creuzer as the one who had developed this hermeneutic approach to what he referred to as “plas-

tic’ symbols in art, which unite form and meaning, or content, into momentary “totalities.”'' Benjamin emphasized the importance of the “instantaneous in such plastic symbols, which retain an aura of vivid presence, even in reproduction, rather than, like allegories, implicating a historical past. In Perséphone Gide destroys the aura around Triptolemus as a plastic symbol of classical art and deconstructs Winckelmann’s aesthetics by replacing his originally planned tableau vivant of Triptolemus toiling the earth with a mere evocation of Triptolemus’s name. In his opening narration for the scene, in the space of one line, Eumolpus states that Triptolemus is standing next to Demeter in front of the temple named for her (R203:2-4). Later, Persephone briefly evokes Triptolemus’s name a second time (R251:1—4). On the basis of these sparse textual clues André Bar-

sacq designed a historical costume for the English dancer, Keith Lester, who realized the part of Triptolemus (see figure 3.10 in insert). Jooss invented a single, still pose consisting of Lester's kneeling on one knee “with the big toe turned under in good Greek style” to symbolize Triptolemus’s marriage to Persephone.” (He may have devised this pose to appease Rubinstein, who insisted in every choreography that she remain the center of attention.) In this immobile posture Triptolemus gave the impression of

10. Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der Griechen [1811]; facsimile reprint of the 1819-23 edition in six volumes (New York: Arno Press, 1978), vol. 4, 138-S0. 11. The German word plastisch—which has recurred frequently in this book—implies a threedimensionality or figural ontology somewhat lost in the English translation. See Walter Benjamin, Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [1928], in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), vol. 1, pt. 1, 341; translated into English by John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1977), 164. 12. Lester had to hold the post for such a long time that he later remembered experiencing discomfort in performing it; Keith Lester, “Rubinstein Revisited,’ Dance Research 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1983): 27.

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being a symbolic figure from a Greek relief—a sculpted work of art with no character depth or psychology. The disjuncture created when Triptolemus suddenly appeared in relief

next to the vividly three-dimensional dramatic character of Persephone transformed him from a character in a melodrama into a Benjaminian allegory of the beautiful in art—indeed, into an allegory of pédérastie itself.

Leo Bersani has written that “a sexual desire for men can't be merely a kind of culturally neutral attraction to a Platonic ideal of a male body, the object of that desire necessarily includes a socially determined and socially pervasive definition of what it means to be a man.” And yet it is precisely a neutral Platonic ideal of men that Gide celebrates here—a symbol void of aesthetic aura and so two-dimensional and superficial in its appearance as to function more like a souvenir than as a representation of the desire of neoclassical pédéraste aesthetics. In Persephone’s final monologue—which Gide wrote last and on different paper than the rest of the typescript for the third tableau— Gide presents Persephone’s marriage to Triptolemus only fleetingly and in passing, as if to suggest the futility of utopian dreams, which quickly collapse back into the reality of moral duty. Gide could not borrow any verses from his 1909 and 1913 Proserpines to create this final monologue because Proserpine had not spoken in those previous versions; the verses he wrote here are thus new, and offer insight into his interpretation of the myth in 1934.'* “You will never be able to hold me so tightly, charming Demophon,’ Gide has Persephone warn her dual-named husband Triptolemus in her monologue, “that I wouldn't be able to escape from the intertwining” (R252:1—-R253:1). Rather than using Persephone’s rebirth to open a

vista toward a utopian future, Gide insists on a much messier human reality. He ends the scene with a bricolage, in which he recycles a second commonly understood symbol of the future as a Benjaminian souvenir: the ubiquitous fin de siécle image of the naked boy leading the way with a golden torch. This image he maps onto the figure of Mercury, who emerges

13. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 208-9. 14. P' and P* originally did not include this monologue as [ have noted in note | above. Gide’s draft 3a ends with the nymphs asking Persephone what she saw in the underworld (“Dis, qu’as-tu vu dans les Enfers?,” R248:1-R249:2). Gide wrote in hand here: “I am awaiting Stravinsky’s advice on the first two tableaux before continuing” (Jattends lavis de Strawinsky sur les deux premiers tableaux avant de pousser plus loin). See microfilm 226.1, pp. 986-87, PSS (published as examples 31 and 32, SSC, vol. 3, 505). A handwritten copy of Persephone’s final monologue is included in Gide’s sketches for Perséphone; folder 1554, pp. 1-5, AG-BL]D. A second typed and varied version of this monologue is in microfilm 226.1, p. 988-89, PSS. One page only (p. 989) of this original is published as example 33, SSC, vol. 3, p. 506. As mentioned above, Craft omitted the first page of it (p. 988).

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 571

with the relit torch to guide Persephone back to the underworld. Persephone mentions Mercury in her monologue, and he then appears briefly on stage, evoking the relief of Orpheus and Eurydice that initially inspired his invention, as well as the ending of Gide’s 1909 Proserpine, where Gide evokes Orpheus. Persephoness fickle pursuit of two men and Mercury's vivid evocation of Orpheus’s “glance backward” through his sudden appearance at the end of the tableau deconstruct the possibility—even the desirability—of a happy end. Gide concludes Perséphone with a final word of wisdom from the priest

Eumolpus, who summarizes in a short sermon the lessons of the Persephone myth. Gide wrote these last lines, along with Persephone'’s final monologue, on separate sheets of paper and then attached a typed version of them as a second addition to his already completed typescript of the third tableau (draft 3a). After over four decades of contemplating the myth of Persephone, he had come to clear conclusions about what he understood to be the moral of his story. Now, he parted ways with his beloved sister goddess by ending Perséphone with Eumolpus’s final reminder to audiences of her symbolic value as an embodiment of the parable ofthe seed, the symbol ofboth change and permanence, self-fulfillment and self-renunciation: “For spring to be reborn the grain must consent to

die, beneath the earth so that it can reappear as a golden harvest for the future” (II faut, pour qu’un printemps renaisse / Que le grain consente a mourir / Sous terre, afin qu'il reparaisse / En moisson d'or pour lavenir)."°

M RESURRECTIONS Not surprisingly, Jacques Copeau read the moment of Persephone’ return differently. He ignored Gide’s suggestion of a pédéraste utopia modeled on ancient Greece and a bricolage of affect in favor of a Christian interpretation of the myth. For him, as well as for Rubinstein and Stravinsky, this

was solely a tale of Christian redemption. As we saw in chapter 3, he planned a detailed group choreography for the children’s chorus, nymphs’ chorus, and soloists to celebrate Persephone'’s return from the grave. In 15. Gide struggled with Eumolpus’s final lines. After “Porteuse de la torche et reine” in the first verse he writes and crosses out in his first draft : “EpousectePinton;sereirre Des vastes pays somnolents / Parmttoutinrpeuptettotent: / Aimsttorramre-partagée / Auxenterstmrpemdepitie: / Eesombres.” He also made several corrections to Eumolpus’s final verse: “I] faut, pour que le printemps renaisse / Que le grain daborcdemtm consente a mourir / Quihmenureenfirqueteparaisse / Sous terre, afin qu'il reparaisse / Lespotrcestmoissons / Que-Perséphonecisparatsse /En moisson dor pour l'avenir.’ See Gide's handwritten draft in folder 1554, p. 6, AG-BLJD.

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his notes he emphasized the moment when Triptolemus (or the nymphs) removed Demeter’s mantle of grief in a “ceremony analogous to that in the first tableau between Persephone and Demeter.’ He also added the figure of the Angel of Death, who accompanies Mercury and Persephone on their return to the underworld."° By investing Persephone’s rebirth with the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Copeau, Rubinstein, and Stravinsky participated in

a timely contemporaneous debate on Christian eschatology. Theologians in this period emphasized the importance of the resurrection both as a distinct historical event (the actual, proven, and witnessed death and rebirth of Christ) and as a divine event that brings about new life (through the resurrection and transfiguration of the bodies of all Christians).!’ The resurrection, like the creation, incarnation, and crucifixion of the Christian bible, fits neither into the paradigm of causality characteristic of a Hegelian understanding of history nor into the teleological, progress-driven narratives of modernism. In John Manoussakis’s words, eschatology was the opposite of chronos or chronological

time and reversed “naturalistic, essentialist, and historical models by claiming that I am who ‘I will be?’'* Paul Mendes-Flohr has also noted how popular theologies of redemption were in Germany in the interwar years, when “disaffection with modernist progress” led many Jewish thinkers and Marxists, including Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch, to reject historicism and Hegel's philosophy of history in favor of theologies of redemption and belief in the promise of salvation through grace.'’ But, as Mendes-Flohr also notes, impulses toward redemption clashed with the historicist aesthetics that motivated much modernist art. In designing Persephone’s rebirth as a Christian resurrection rather than the cyclic closure Gide had envisioned, Copeau nonetheless drew for

16. See Copeau’s notes in Gide's typescript; folder 726, pp. 21-23; and folder 730, subfolder 1, p. 6, FJC-BNE. 17. See Jean Daniélou, La Résurrection (Paris: Seuil, 1968); and Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, eds., introduction to Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 1-5. DeRoo and Manoussakis note the importance of Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) and Karl Barth’s Der Rémerbrief (1921) for theological discussions of escha-

tology in the early twentieth century. 18. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, “The Promise of the New and the Tyranny of the Same,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology, 70-71. 19. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “To Brush History against the Grain’: The Eschatology of the Frankfurt School and Ernst Bloch,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51, no. 4 (December 1983): 631-S0.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 573

inspiration on the same classical sculpture that had inspired Gide: the late fifth-century Grand Eleusis Relief depicting, in Copeau'’s words, “Demeter entrusting Triptolemus with the first glory of wheat in the presence of Kore [Persephone].’”° The ubiquity of this classical source indicates its

cultural importance in the early 1930s and therefore provides a useful point of comparison for considering Gide’s and Copeau's divergent plans.

Rather than interpret the frieze as a symbol of pédérastie, as Gide had done, Copeau treated it as a cult object and source of contemplation. Most of the statues and objects he planned to display in Perséphone functioned as relics or totems in this way. Perhaps he wanted Kurt Jooss's dancers to recreate the Relief on stage as a still pose, thereby transforming it into a living icon with the power to inspire audiences’ awe for its archetype and draw them into participating in the ritual of Perséphone. Copeau, then, did not transform the relief into a Benjaminian souvenir, as Gide had done, but insisted on attempting to recreate its original aura as a cult object, re-

lying on a form of Creuzerian symbolic truth in which Stravinsky and Rubinstein but few other of his modernist contemporaries believed. Rubinstein embraced Copeau's vision of Persephone’ rebirth as a res-

urrection and anticipated that her performance of it would be a high point in her life. “I dream with acute and heartbreaking joy of that dance of the song of the world of Persephone reborn,’ she wrote Stravinsky in August 1933.*' Rubinstein was imagining that she would dance during the chorus’s extended description of her awakening (R224:1-R242:3).” Critics did not single out her dance at this point in the performance, however; it must have been unremarkable. Rubinstein left a second trace of how she interpreted the final scene in the lines from Gide's libretto that

20. Copeau identified this relief several times in his notes and remarks that it was found in Eleusis but was housed at the National Archeological Museum in Athens. It remains there to this day; folder 730, subfolder 2, pp. 10-11, FJC-BNF. 21. Rubinstein to Stravinsky, 18 August 1933, in Claude, “Autour de Perséphone,’ 36. 22. Stravinsky had inititually labeled the chorus “Ivresse matinale” in the first tableau as the “danse du ler matin du monde” in draft 1c. He was following Gide’s text, in which this chorus responds here to Persephone’s lines: “I listen to you with all my heart, song of the world’s first morning” (Je tcoute de tout mon coeur / Chant du premier matin du monde). On draft 3a, he writes the following comment next to

Gide's text for the chorus in which the nymphs describe Persephone’s awakening in the third tableau (“Encore mal réveillée,” R220:3-R223:4): “The dance of the “Blackbird’s Song” for all in front of the choruses” (La danse du “Chant du Merle” par tout le monde avant les choeurs). He then crosses this out and adds: “She advances toward Triptolemus; pure music that finishs the dance” (Elle selance | sic] vers Triptolemus. Musique pure qui finit la danse). I believe Stravinsky saw a connection between the nymphs’ song of the world’s first morning in the first tableau and Persephone’s rebirth, and that Rubinstein was aware

of this and thinking of this moment when she wrote Stravinsky that August. Cf. Stravinsky's comments on Gide drafts 1c and 3a; microfilm 226.1, 953 and 986, PSS (published as examples 2 and 31, SSC, vol. 3, 490 and S05).

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she reproduced in the official program. Gide ended the melodrama with Eumolpus solemnly invoking the parable of the grain that dies and is reborn, but Rubinstein fixed on two earlier, nonconsecutive lines from Eumolpusss narration, in which he emphasizes Persephone'’s role as a compassionate Christian missionary. Rubinstein quoted these lines in the wrong order in the official program, thereby creating a unified message of Christian charity that was not present in Gide’s original: “A bit of

love for their distress / And queen, from that moment on, of the vast sleepy countries” (A leur détresse un peu d'amour / Et reine des vastes pays somnolents).** Rubinstein further demonstrated her sensitivity to her role as a Christian queen of the dead by again donning her black cloak at this

moment in her performance of her final monologue before descending into the underground. Presumably she donned the coat to indicate that she could not think about the past without the future, or death without rebirth, or crucifixion without resurrection. As in the narcissus-plucking moment, she performed these dialectics on her very body. By gazing upward to the sky, seeking deliverance, while at the same time clasping a memory-laden black cloak that is known to be identified with her private person (see figure 6.16), she created a clash between eschatological and Hegelian understandings of history, bringing to a climax the contradiction between tragedy and Trauerspiel, myth and history, that had characterized her performances as a tragédienne-dancer throughout her career. By making this final redemptive gesture in Perséphone she acknowledged

her faith in the capacity of theater to recreate the simultaneity of past, present, and future characteristic of eschatological time.” Stravinsky shared Copeau’s and Rubinstein’s vision of Persephone’s rebirth as a resurrection and joined Rubinstein in imbuing the moment with the heartbreaking nostalgia of a Russian émigré utopically returned home. He temporarily fulfilled the promise of the music of transition between life and death, which is associated with his setting of Petrarch’s dialogue at the end of the second tableau, by composing a majestic arrival

for the “conjuration scene’ in the third tableau. He composed for the scene what Robert Craft describes as “an Easter hymn that evokes the

23. See Les Ballets de Mme Ida Rubinstein: Programme Perséphone Diane de Poitiers. As | indicated before, Copeau may have helped Rubinstein with these program notes or, indeed, written them himself.

Rubinstein cites lines 358 followed by the end of line 353 and then line 354 of Gide’s libretto (see PeP,111). These lines appear in the score at R260:1—-2 and R258:1-3. 24. DeRoo and Manoussakis, introduction to Phenomenology and Eschatology, 5-7; and Manoussakis, “The Promise of the New and the Tyranny of the Same,’ 79. DeRoo and Manoussakis demonstrate how eschatological notions of time influenced such French phenomenologists as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 575

Russian Church, something that [he] had refused to do in spectacle form for Diaghilev.” Craft claims that, Stravinsky acknowledged the Russian character of the music here and even jokingly referred to the whole work as “Persefona Ivanovna.”*> The choral sound he creates here (R207:1R220:2)— inspired by the choral concert Stravinsky heard at the majestic church of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides in Paris in the summer of 1933— invokes the divine by suggesting the voices of angels imitated or echoed in Russian Easter hymns.” Marie de Heredia admired the “themes of resurrection’ that Stravinsky composed here, and that the composer had “wanted as pure and religious as those of the celebration of Easter” (see musical example 8.1).”’ Musically this scene creates the spiritual effect of an “incantation” ina brief set piece that follows Stravinsky's favored ABA form. The conjuration begins after a long processional opening (R184:3-R197:2), Eumolpus’s narration (R197:3-R205:1), and a short yet convincing transition from Eumolpus’s emphasized pitch of E in which Stravinsky divides Gide’s lines dramatically between the sopranos, contraltos, tenors and basses (R205:2—R206:4). A full, mixed chorus begins the conjuration by singing of the flowers they are offering at the grave of the goddess Persephone so that she will awaken from the dead (R207:1—R210:2). This section is in the key signature of E-flat, but the choruses’ modal melody and the accompaniment emphasize A-flat. The first cell of the choral melody is six quarter notes long and appears in a bar of 4/4 followed by a bar of

3/4 (R207:1-2). This is followed by the disruption of a second cell, which departs from the circling confines of the first and is three quarter notes long (R207:2-3). In its second reiteration Stravinsky extends the first cell to seventeen quarter-note beats (R207:4—209:1). He allows it to circle in on itself before reintroducing the second cell (R209:1-2). Finally, in its third reiteration, the first cell is reduced to six notes, and the second to four (R209:2-4; followed by R210 for the second cell). This stretching and contracting of melodic cells creates an incantory effect that is further accentuated by the timpani’s steady repetition of an A-flat chord that interlocks with the choral melody. It is a classic Stravinskyian

25. SSC, vol. 3, 475.

26. Tatiana Vladyshevskaia, “On the Links between Music and Icon Painting in Medieval Rus,’ translated from the Russian by Glenn E. Curtis in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, ed. William C. Brumfield and Milos M. Velimorovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),16, 18. Note how this idea converges with Jacques Maritain’s notion of divine revelation (discussed in chapter 2). 27. Gérard d’Houville (pseudonym for Marie de Heredia), “Spectacles: Deux ballets nouveaux de Madame Ida Rubinstein,” La Revue des deux mondes 104 (15 May 1934): 432-35.

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compositional move. After a contrasting B section in a rather startling A

minor and 2/4 key signature (R210:3-R212:2), in which the nymphs alone appeal to Demeter in a reduced melody that has risen a half step to circle around a triad on A, the incantory melody returns to A-flat, now

with increased force, as the choruses sing “O return to us Persephone, break down the doors of your tomb, the archangel of death, reignite your flame, Demeter awaits you” (R212:3—R214:2). The first cell of the melody

is presented as in its first iteration but modified in its continuation (R212:3-R213:2). The addition of octaves in the double basses and a reinforced string section give the impression of luminous sonic thickening and satisfying arrival. ‘This reiteration of the first cell is interrupted, however, by an emphatic and startling return of the second cell, now reinforced by the addition of brass, which creates the effect of a performative invocation of the gods (R213:3). This is followed by a quick reiteration of four quarter notes of the first cell followed by three and a half quarter notes of

the second cell (R213:4—R214:2). The affect then shifts as the chorus describes Triptolemus removing Demeter’s mantle of grief. The structure breaks down as the sopranos, altos, tenors and basses successively sing individual notes outlining a shift from A-flat to A-natural accompanied by screeching sforzando octave leaps in the strings (R214:3-R215:1). This leads to the whole chorus’s pleading for Persephone’s return over an ob-

sessively repeated diminished chord on A (R216:2-217:4). Stravinsky ends the scene with a dramatic call for “spring” (printemps), a last attempt to awaken the dead through a declarative act, which he underlines with a startling evocation of C major (R220:2).

Stravinsky conjures Persephone from the dead with music of radical presence. He thought only music could express such presence, which human beings could otherwise not experience directly because of the way in which they were by their very nature subjugated by the passing of time. The absence of the chiming “grandfather clock” motive of “Sur ce lit” in 28. See Stravinsky’s comments in Philippe Diolé, “Leurs raisons de vivre: Igor Strawinsky,’ Beauxarts, 28 February 1936. In an interview in 1926, Stravinsky had told a reporter that he endeavored in his Concerto for Piano to “catch the note of our marvelous present, not the remote past. We do not live in the past, we live in the present. We must realize the necessity for feeling the inspiration of the tremendous things that are going on about us all the time. I feel this modernity very deeply.” (See Stravinsky’s typed notes for the article “Chronological Progress in Musical Art: An Interview secured for The Etude with the noted composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky,” kept in microfilm 118.1, p. 32, PSS.) In an inter-

view in 1938, Stravinsky remarked that “the pass-ists [passéistes] and the futurists [futuristes] don’t interest me at all. I live in the present. Saint Augustin wrote a lovely masterpiece about this. I never eat leftovers. Those who've heard Petrushka and Le Sacre want to taste them again. But that’s different than recreating.” See Serge, “Igor Strawinsky qui prend chaque jour dix centigrammes de quinine prépare en secret un concerto,’ Paris-Soir, 4 March 1938.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 583

this scene prevents the listener from receiving the false impression of the passing of ontological time; it also prevents the establishment of the sense of presence that enabled “Sur ce lit” to become a prime site for resistant mourning. Rather than remembering the deceased (or sleeping) Persephone and describing her in the third person, as they had in “Sur ce lit,’ the singers here summon her. Gestic rhythms reveal a divine presence through which Persephone’s (Christ’s) transfiguration will occur, creating the kind of temporal sphere of past, present, and future that is characteristic of eschatological time. This is the simultaneity of time that Bergson spoke about as durée pure and that might, in Stravinsky's case, be related to Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of

opposites).”? In a letter to Stravinsky from 1958, Pyotr Suvchinsky explained how he understood the type of temporal frame opened up by Stravinsky in this passage in Perséphone (although he does not refer to Perséphone or to any specific example in his discussion): Past, present and future are related to each other not only in a relationship of cause and consequence but also in the order of ontological reality. In the structure of that reality, the future defines the present and the past and perspective is turned upside down. ... The future destroys the past and at the same time causes it to be reborn with a different quality. Remember the example of the gospel in which we learn about the genealogy of Christ. ‘Ihe genealogy that regains all its importance because of the future, and because

of the fact that that future renounced the past. ... I’ve always had the impression that this example offers the obvious discovery of the ontological method of reality.*°

Stravinsky drew the musical consequences of his investment in eschatolog-

ical time by composing for the conjuration scene several static architectural blocks that can be interpreted as an aural impression of a material present that is animated by inner, vital energy from the past and at the same time also intimates future energies. By the third tableau this has become a characteristic compositional approach in Perséphone. And yet the sound blocks here have a different allure and take on the vital qualities 29. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in Oeuvres, ed. André Robinet,

introduction by Henri Gouhier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959/2001), 68. On Nicholas of Cusa's influence on Stravinsky, see Robert Craft, “Appendix L: Roland-Manuel and La Poétique Musicale,” in SSC, vol. 2, 503. Suvchinsky also mentions of Cusa on numerous occasions. 30. Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 3 March 1958; microfilm 103.1, p. 1344, PSS; quoted in Akimova, “Pierre Souvtchinsky (1892-1985): Etude de l’émergence d’une personnalité, son époque, ses travaux et sa pensée a la lumiére de sa correspondance et de ses écrits,’ PhD diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV, 2007-8, 142.

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of antique sculpture. Stravinsky and his critics spoke frequently about the sculptural nature of the music he wrote in these years. Stravinsky noted in 1936, for example, that he thought that music evokes the same sensation as that of contemplating a game of architectural forms, which (he reminded his readers) Goethe had once called “petrified music.”*' Stravinsky’s imposing musical blocks led Herbert Fleischer, foreshadowing Suvchinsky, to conclude that Stravinsky's compositional style has nothing to do with Hanslickian formalism as a “law-like rigid, evenly formed Apollo” but rather could be better described as “a transfigured, self fulfilled, and self-shaping

God—the eternal paradigm of Apollonian beauty, the unfathomable riddle ofall art.”** “Mr. Stravinsky,” Robert Dézarnaux commented, “whose sensual and expressive music in the past streamed ‘like water from a sponge’

has retreated into a sort of Tanezrouft of art—sand and jib. But his blocks have nicely cut stops! They are imposing! I was quite ‘taken, I have to say that.”** Samuel Ramos spoke of “an era of deprivation [in Stravinsky’s music] in which with the return to melody a style emerges drawn with incisive strokes and with almost plastic reliefs and precision.”** Paul Bekker

put his finger on this effect when he wrote that “we witness in Stravinsky the vivacity of that extreme tension of intensity that we find in reliefs and sculptural works of archaic times, in which a veiled and intact force—one that has not been expended or exhausted—vibrates beneath the apparent stifiness of the figures. Stravinsky's great, prophetic performance can be found in this bound tension, in this repression of sonorous developments that push toward exteriorization.”*° Stravinsky felt an afhnity for the spirits that haunt antique sculpture, which he, like Gide, thought of not as representations of people who had

lived in the past but as carved or hardened expressions of their living souls. It was no coincidence that Stravinsky in his statement about Perséphone for Excelsior spoke of the “lava’ that was made into brooches at 31. Stravinsky, quoting his Poétique musicale in Diolé, “Leurs raisons de vivre: Igor Strawinsky.’ 32. Herbert Fleischer, Strawinsky (Berlin: Russischer Musikverlag, 1931), 286.

33. Robert Dézarnaux, “A Opéra,’ Liberté, 2 May 1934. 34. Samuel Ramos, El caso Strawinsky (Mexico City: Ediciones de la revista Contempordneos, 1929), 35. 35. Paul Bekker, “Strawinskys ‘Perséphone’: Uraufftihrung an der Pariser Oper,’ Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 6 May 1934; quoted in French in Domenico de Paoli, Igor Strawinsky (Da I’“Oiseau de Feu” a “Perse-

fone” (Turin: G. B. Paravia, 1934), 149. Bekker traveled to Paris to write this review. There he asked Stravinsky to borrow a score for two days and to speak to him about the music, which “interested him a lot” (“m’intéresse ausserordentlich—extraordinaire”). He reminded Stravinsky that they had met once before at the premiere of Chaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty in Wiesbaden. It appears Stravinsky did not send him a score or meet him. See Paul Bekker to Igor Stravinsky, 23 April (two letters), 24 April, 2S April 1934, and a copy of his review; microfilm 126.1, pp. 1837-45, PSS.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 585

Pompeii—an oblique reference to Giuseppe Fiorelli’s plaster casts and the vitalist archeological aesthetics to which those casts had given rise.

There is no evidence that Stravinsky knew either about the British Demeter of Cnidus that captivated Walter Pater or about the Greek sculptures that inspired Gide. But a few years before composing Perséphone he had come to know of the Thronende Géttin (Goddess on the throne) unveiled in 1930 at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. His son Théodore had captured the image of this ancient statue in line drawings that may have been intended for the premiere of Perséphone; one of his drawings was reproduced in Domenico de Paoli's 1934 monograph and in several programs when Perséphone was later performed in Italy (figures 8.1 and 8.2).°° The mature queen of the dead whom Théodore depicts is both cruel (a tyrant) and calm, embodying the dichotomy of life and death, power and sacrifice, that lies at the heart of the Persephone story. Her delicate curls hint at youthful innocence but her firm posture reminds of the finitude of death. Like Rubinstein’s coat, the Thronende Gottin carries the promise of death into the present and future through her material presence alone. The sublime horror of Persephone's spectral realm is etched into the lines of her stern stony contours, the force of death present in her chiseled surfaces. The trace the Thronende Gottin left in the Stravinsky literature through reproductions of Théodore’s drawing resembles a phantom trail leading symbolically back to the primal fear of God that had caused Stravinsky to shudder when confronted with death in the Perséphone story. The “vitalist” interpretation of antique sculpture evident in Stravinsky's compositional approach to the conjuration scene found one of its most influential theoretical expressions in these years in the work of German art historian Aby Warburg, whose writings provide a last reminder of the “strange” Winckelmannian tradition that is at the root of

modernist neoclassicism and central to this book. Around the same time that Gide was conceiving Proserpine Warburg published his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera of 1478, in which he laid the foundations for a Nietzschean inflected, anthropological reinterpretation of the European Renaissance and a revolution in the field of art 36. Théodore's drawing is reproduced in de Paoli, Igor Strawinsky, between pages 144 and 145, and

in Giorgio Graziosi’s program notes for an Italian production by Veniero Colasanti and John Moore, directed by Gabriele Santini with choreography by Margherita Wallman; microfilm 126.1, p. 1231, PSS.

See also the program on p. 1506, where the image is reprinted again. One of Théodore’s drawings of Stravinsky also accompanied André George's “Le Premier Spectacle de Mme Rubinstein,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 5 May 1934. There is no original of the Gottin drawing in the Fondation Théodore Stravinsky.

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= anOMuseen zu Berlin. Permission: a ae Bildarchiv Preufsischer KulturbeLee sitz/Art Resource.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 587

history. Warburg’s new orientation resulted from his dissatisfaction with the formalist pretensions of nineteenth-century art criticism, which sequestered the aesthetic into a realm unto itself, favored the ‘beautiful,’ and suggested an art history based on styles, imitation, and models. Warburg struggled throughout his life to establish an interpreta-

tion of Western art that could maintain its intimate relationship with vital forces and collective human experience. Like Rubinstein, his interest in pictorial animism was motivated by an exoticized encounter in a foreign country, in Warburg's case by an experience of the Hopi Indians of New Mexico, whom he visited during a trip to the United States in 1896. Warburg's anthropological reading of Renaissance art coincided with Gide’s sensual discovery of myth as tourist attraction in Syracuse, reminding again of the experiential, spiritual, and sensual encounters with alterity that motivated twentieth-century neoclassicism. Botticellis Primavera is a direct link connecting Renaissance neoclassicism, Pater, Warburg, and Gide. Gide, who based the first tableau of his 1913 version of Proserpine on Botticelli's Primavera, may have been attracted to this image as an allegory of spring that juxtaposed several mythical figures

of interest to him, including the Graces, Mercury (or Hermes), and Flora, who could be promiscuously reinterpreted as Persephone.’ Botticelli’s revival of ancient mythology in the moving forms and garments of the Italian Renaissance served as a standard cultural reference for Pater, Warburg, and other modernists, inspiring generations of gesturally oriented twentiethcentury artists and leaving its mark most particularly on Isadora Duncan's dance revolution. In his dissertation Warburg focused on the energy he perceived in Primaveras forward-moving figure. The breezy wisps of her hair and undulating hem of her festive dress constituted what he called “outwardly moved accessories” (dufserlich bewegtes Beiwerk), which hinted at an agitation, movement, or dynamism behind the noble simplicity of Winckelmannss classicism, or at what Nietzsche had confirmed as the Dionysian basis of Hellenistic culture.”**

Botticelli had informed himself of such “heightened mime,’ he argued, by 37. Pollard, introduction to PeP, 18-19. 38. Aby Warburg, Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus’ und “Friihling”: Eine Untersuchung iiber die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frithrenaissance | 1893]; reprinted in Aby Warburg, Werke

in einem Band, ed. Susanne Hetzer, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink and Christina Oberstebrink (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 29-123. See also Matthew Rampley, “Mimesis and Allegory: On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin,’ in Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield

(Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association/G+B Arts International, 2001), 121-50; and Cornelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern: Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), 41-42.

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reading texts by Alberti, Virgil, Ovid, and Poliziano. Such “accessories” as hair and dress played a key role in expressing ancient Greek vitality.”

Years later Warburg invented the term Pathosformeln (formulas of pathos) to describe such instances of animated pictorial movement connected with primordial moments of ecstasy or exalted emotion.*” He believed that violent and immediate impressions had at one time overwhelmed memory and the mediated process of symbolic representation, leaving vital traces in visual culture.*! Shaping his rhetoric anthropologically in light of his readings of Edward Burnett Tylor, Warburg spoke of these tormented moments as having “survived” (nachleben) through time, remaining part of collective memory and appearing symptomatically in Western art in the form of deconstructive gestures.** Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis, Warburg further spoke of digging through the layers of constructed meanings in historic or contemporary images as a means of

unveiling or recovering the hidden, repressed, or unconscious primal gestures below.* Such instantaneous outbursts of feeling evince an extreme polarity—an explosive combination of the Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian revealing “moments of profound passion, when life is in movement.’** Warburg identified as well with the ecstatic state he had experienced in the ceremonies of the Hopi Indians. In formulating his notion of the Pathosformel, Warburg drew not only on anthropological and psychological texts but also on a Romantic notion of literary pathos, and on the writings of Goethe, Jacob Burckhardt, and Nietzsche—some of the very authors who most influenced Gide. All these authors appealed to a performative, vitalist tradition that destabilized traditional views of Winckelmann’s neoclassicism. Warburg was drawn to Goethe's subtle critique of Winckelmann, as well as to his recognition of the emphatic movement and “transitory” nature of Laoco6n’s

39. Warburg, Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus,’ in Werke in einem Band, 107. 40. See Martin Warnke, “Vier Stichworte,” in Die Menschenrechte des Auges: Uber Aby Warburg, ed.

Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken, and Martin Warnke (Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1980), 61-68. 41. Claudia Vieri Via, “Aby Warburg: Il Concetto di Pathosformel fra religione, arte e scienza,’ in Aby

Warburg e le metamorfosi degli antichi dei, ed. Marco Bertozzi (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2002), 115-20. See also Martin Warnke, “Vier Stichworte,’ 64; and Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, 74. 42. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (London: J. Murray, 1871). 43. Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, 5S.

44, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “La Teoria dell’immagine proposta da Aby Warburg: Le Testimonianze visive del Bilderatlas,’ in Aby Warburg e le metamorfosi degli antichi dei, 39. See also Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, 42.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 589

state of pathos.* For Goethe, the “petrified wave” of Laocoén’s movement hinted at a disruptive and vital force beyond classicism’s apparent symmetries.*° Warburg revised the standard view on Winckelmann’s classicism and reassessed its place in German art criticism by recognizing Laoco6én’s survival in a Hopi serpent ritual he experienced in New Mexico, arguing

not that one formally copied the other but rather that both referenced a common anthropological source to human gesture.” He saw such movement as a phenomenological sign of life, “a real experience.’* Subtle hair movements and gestures, his disciple Ernst Cassirer concluded, capture “certain inner excitations, certain tensions and solutions, which are “exor-

cised in them.” Stravinsky may well have become aware of Warburg's Pathosformel through his friend Charles-Albert Cingria, whose theory of the Dionysian somewhat

resembles it. In Pétrarque Cingria described the Dionysian in terms of the general moods, movement, or energy he perceived in art. He came closest to developing a formalist theory of the Dionysian when describing Renaissance painting, in which he discovered pictorial movement that he interpreted in a manner reminiscent of Warburg’s notion of the Pathosformel. He compared the thirteenth poem from Petrarch’s IT Canzoniere, “Giovane donna sotto un verde lauro,’ with Matteo Giovanetti’s fresco of animals in the papal palace in Avignon, for example, concluding that Petrarch captured in verse the darker, mysterious energies of the age in which he lived. Dionysian classicism, or what Cingria quotes Walter Pater in French as having called “that green and crazy flame of old paganism itself” (cette flamme verte et folle du vieux paganisme lui-méme), emanates as well, Cingria declared, from Domenico di Pace

Beccafumi's pavement for the Sienna cathedral and the art of Agostino di Duccio and Donatello. Cingria proved the difference between this dynamic painterly energy and art reduced to concept or allegory by juxtaposing a relief by Agostino di Duccio with a painting by Nicola Pisano, praising the

45. Goethe, “Uber Laokoon,” in Sdmtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens Miinchner Ausgabe,

ed. Karl Richter with Herbert G. Gopfert, Norbert Miller, and Gerhard Sauder (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), vol. 4, pt. 2, 73-88. See also Georges Didi-Huberman. L’Image survivante: Histoire de l'art et temps

des fantémes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002), 203-23. 46. Goethe, “Uber Laokoon,’ 81. 47. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (NewYork: Zone, 2004), 171-228. See also Aby Warburg, “Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord Amerika [1923],” in Werke in einem Band, 524-66. 48. Aby Warburg, Diirer und die italienische Antike [1906], in Werke in einem Band, 176-86. 49, Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences [1942], trans. S. G. Lofts, with a foreword by Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 117.

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pagan vitality of the former and rejecting the latter for its Christian transformation of the virgin into an idea.”° Warburg's notion of the Pathosformel offers a final layer of insight into how Stravinsky's sonorous sculptures in the third tableau of Perséphone simultaneously evoke past, present, and future. When Stravinsky mirrors the nymphs’ ritualistic offering of flowers to Persephone with gestic rhythms, this musical Pathosformel introduces temporal confusion into the staid ABA form of the passage, for it carries the kinesthetic energy of performative action into the aesthetic present and suggests the simultaneity of time within a classical formal structure. Georges Didi-Hubermann argues that art historians such as Erwin Panofsky blinded themselves to the disruptive temporal potential of the Pathosformel as a pictorial performative act by reinterpreting it strictly as a visual motive, that is, archived text that artists copy, borrow, trade, and reinvent across the centuries. Similarly, one can be blinded to the temporal, and thus experiential, dimension of the nymphs’ gestures if viewing them as melodic formulas alone. By emphasizing written or textual appearances, art (and music) historians neglect the anthropological and performative dimensions of such moments. Didi- Huberman suggests that we correct this imbalance by thinking of Pathosformeln as “surviving” organically, like spirits or ghosts, and transforming art or music history into what Warburg called Gespenstergeschichten fiir ganz Erwachsene (ghost stories for mature adults).*! By redefining the artwork in terms of collective human memory taking place within what Didi-Huberman calls “a time for phantoms,’ Warburg resolved one of the quintessential philosophical paradoxes of art (and music) history, namely, that of mediating between the passing time of history and the ideal moment of aesthetic contemplation.” The vitality of Stravinsky’s Pathosformel draw his neoclassicism away from the hermetic world of aesthetic formalism toward the nascent disciplines of anthropology and psychology, exposing its roots in experiences of alterity, performative action, and ecstatic ritual. And yet once Stravinsky had so powerfully conjured Persephone, the past, and the dead, he—following Gide—abruptly moved on. The third tableau, as happens frequently in Perséphone, takes a disruptive and jarring narrative course. This may be because Gide wrote this part of the libretto after finishing

50. Charles-Albert Cingria, Pétrarque, in Oeuvres completes, vol. 5, 74-75. Cingria proves his point in his captions for the reproduction of an unidentified relief by Nicola Pisano between pp. 72-73, and for a second poorly identified relief by Agostino di Duccio (misspelled as “Agostino di Antonio Ducci”) between pp. 76-77. $1. Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante, 88. He quotes here from Aby Warburg, “Mnemosyne: Grundbegriffe, 1929,” Aby Warburg Institute Archive, London. §2. Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante, 25-26.

The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 591

the rest. After a transition in which the mixed chorus describes Persephone awakening (“Encore mal réveillée,” R220:3-R223:4), the children’s chorus sings a beautiful, lyric ABA' chorus in B-flat in celebration of her return (A = R224:1-R230:4; B = R231:1-R236:1; and A! = 236:2-242:3). This chorus, during which Rubinstein planned her glorious dance of rebirth, reminds of the nymphs’ lyric passages in the first tableau (“Viens avec nous”) and reasserts the nostalgic tone of the borrowed passages from Stravinsky's Petrarch setting heard at the end of the second tableau. The full chorus then asks Persephone to speak (R242:4-R249:3). This is followed by Persephone’s own

melodramatic and sentimental description of her experience in G-flat (R249:4-R255:4), which includes her abrupt decision to return to the grave. The scene ends in Gide’s libretto with Eumolpus, who narrates Perse-

phone’s returning to the underworld (R257:1-R262:4). Stravinsky gave this section to Eumolpus and a grand vocal ensemble of mixed and children's chorus and set it to the music of “Sur ce lit.’ But the static reiterating

ostinato with shifting accents in the strings is this time emptied of the rhythmic cycles that had characterized it in the second tableau. This variant of a familiar motive allows the work to return to the area of E (here E minor) contradicted with a strong emphasis on D, which reflects the key in which the piece had begun (see musical example 8.2). The “Sur ce lit” lullaby echoed here resembles the music Stravinsky composed for the conjuration scene. Yet the two passages have different goals and affects as well as divergent temporal positions. In the first passage Stravinsky conjures the dead in music of absolute presence, forcing

the past into the sonic future. In the second he quotes music he had composed to depict the sleeping Persephone in the second tableau, which is distinctly recognizable on its reappearance and remembered as already heard in the piece. In both passages Stravinsky allows the past,

present, and future to coexist. And yet in their differences they also point toward a problem that is central to Perséphone: the conflict between

53. As noted in n14, Gide's draft 3a ends with the nymphs asking Persephone what she saw in the underworld (“Dis, qu’as-tu vu dans les Enfers?,” R248:1-R249:2). When Gide returned to this section

he added eighteen lines (301-18) of the chorus describing Persephone’s awakening (“Encore mal réveillée” ), but did not indicate who should sing them. See microfilm 226.1, pp. 986-87, PSS (published

as examples 31 and 32, SSC, vol. 3, 50S). Copeau had clearly not received these new lines, which he added by hand to Gide’s typescript in his possession; folder 726, p. 21 (reverse side), FJC-BNE. This section of text is also not included in P' and P* (see P&P, 109n196). Stravinsky parsed these lines differently than Gide by giving the original six lines of “Encore mal réveillée” (295-300) to the mixed chorus to sing in a transitional passage. (Gide would subsequently give these lines to Eumolpus in the published libretto; ibid., 108.) Stravinsky then created an ABA chorus for the children with the last eighteen lines (301-18). See microfilm 226.1, p. 987, PSS (published as example 32, SSC, vol. 3, 505).

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The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 593

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The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference m 597

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