A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young
shut myself into the lavatory, and was sick. How could my lovely Hermione stand there, so calmly appraising? How could she, how could she? Then I shook myself. ‘Fool! Puritan! They’ll guess how you feel if you’re not careful. Go back this moment and copy Hermione’s nonchalance, you vulgar little thing!’
To begin with Kathleen painted. Though there were classes for men and women together, she started out with the dames seules. It didn’t last. ‘What are these folks?’ she found herself thinking. ‘Middle-aged women eating their hearts out year in year out, and for what? In order that on some day of an impossible future she may have a picture in the Salon. In ten years I shall be like that. Exactly like that.’ The nickname for the dames seules was the ‘damned souls’. Enough! she felt, and packed up to leave.
As she was walking out of the building she heard the cheerful sound of Norwegians singing from another studio, and looked in to see what was going on. It turned out to be the sculpture class, and she thought it looked rather fun. So it was, once she had overcome the initiatory trauma of ‘tous les nouveaux payent un ponche’. This mysterious rule had been chalked up on the wall; there was also laughter (not entirely friendly) and looks (knowing, in her direction). ‘All the news pay a ponch,’ she thought. What on earth was a ponch?
Presently a courteous Norwegian approached me and said, ‘It is a custom that any new student stands punch to the others,’ and returned to his place. What an unexpectedly grim affair! How on earth was it to be done? Was I to take them to a café? Oh dear, this was terrible; and how much would it cost? Would I have the money? What a well-thought-out torture for a terrified puritan! There was only one other girl in the class, a German with lank hair. I was not going to consult her. While I hesitated, an ill-bred little Italian started in a half-singing drone ‘tous les nouveaux payent un ponche’. One by one took it up until a great chorus of it filled the room. Suddenly, nearly crying with uncertainty and my heart in my mouth, I too joined in the chorus. ‘Tous les nouveaux payent un ponche, je suis nouveau, je paye.’ [I am new, I pay.] A general bravo, and much good-humoured laughter.
The kind Norwegian arranged for the punch to be sent in from a café, and lent her the money to pay—six francs.
At a quarter to eleven someone called ‘c’est l’heure’ (It’s time). The model, an Italian youth, got down from the throne, stretched, yawned, and went over to the stove. The door opened, and a large bowl of steaming alcohol was brought in, and sixteen glasses. Thank goodness, there was enough to go round and some left for the model. Hoping so much I was looking quite normal and at my ease, I took my glass and tasted it. It was the first time in my life except at Communion that I had tasted alcohol, and rum was rather a stiff beginning. How it burnt! At Communion one had to take such a tiny sip of the horrid stuff, but this I must drink to the dregs. But no! As with my mutton fat, so with my rum. I found a way.
She seems to have forgotten, writing in 1932, ‘drinking champagne and being amusing while seeing Millicent off to Capri’ in 1901, but that one lapse with Millicent does seem to be the only time in her life that she found alcohol at all amusing.
Sculpture proved a success. Within three months she had a statue of a woman and child accepted for the Salon. Though in later life her portraits and larger-than-life public monuments were well known, it was her naked mothers and children, or fathers and children, which were the most beautiful and most touching of her work, the result of what she called ‘a tender quality’ which made them ‘personal and lovely’.
That early mother and child won her a medal and the desirable post of massier. The massier would select the model for the class, pose him (or her), stoke the fire and open the windows at lunchtime, and call ‘C’est l’heure!’ a quarter before every hour, for the model to rest. In exchange for these duties, the massier was relieved of class fees. To Kathleen this made a big difference. A reasonable estimate of expense for an unextravagant art student at the time was £95 per annum; she had but her £72. Her daily expenditure on food was:
| Breakfast: | a croissant–5 centimes |
| Lunch: | two sardines and butter–15 centimes gâteau de riz–15 centimes (20 with apricot jam) bread–15 centimes |
| Dinner: | a demi-ragoût (stew)–25 centimes mendiants (nuts and raisins)–15 centimes |
| Tip: | 10 centimes |
| Total: | 1 franc, or 1 franc 5 centimes with jam |
Six francs on punch was nearly a week’s food allowance.
Once acclimatised, Kathleen and Eileen ‘made so bold as to emancipate ourselves, and took a tiny flat together’. Taking a flat was a symbol of freedom; the first step away from being one of the protected group of foreigners; an escape from the art student ghetto. Kathleen and Eileen had two rooms and a kitchen.
It was unfurnished, and so it really remained until the end of our tenure. The front room was small and light and looked on to a court; the back room was larger and dark. By common consent I was to have the small room and Jocelyn the dark room; but my room must serve as a sitting room and be kept neat. Very resourceful was I. A second-hand box mattress on the ground served for bed by night and seat for ourselves and our guests on the very rare occasions when we entertained. With a pot of blue paint I stained the floor and round the drab wall I hung posters. It sufficed. For several months we two lived together, but our friendship in no way developed.
Eileen used to visit Jessie in her rather grander quarters; Kathleen used to work, either at home or taking the evening classes at the studio. Most evenings she would eat quickly, cheaply and alone. ‘I almost always had my meals in the same restaurant. I took a book. I always sat at the same table. Opposite me, two tables away, sat a romantic-looking, upstanding, dark, very wavy-haired American artist, Edward Steichen, a photographer. He also brought a book.’
Steichen was the same age as Kathleen, the son of Lithuanians who had emigrated to Michigan. He was living in Montparnasse, studying, painting and photographing. At the time that Kathleen first met him he was doing a series of portraits for Alfred Steiglitz’s magazine Camera Work; and had photographed the artists Mucha and G.F. Watts, the symbolist poet Maeterlinck and the sculptor Rodin. His portraits are as far removed from the average turn-of-the century photograph as Robert Mapplethorpe’s are from a bulb catalogue. ‘There are certain things that can be done by photography that cannot be accomplished by any other medium, a wide range of finest tones that cannot be reached in painting,’ he wrote, and his photographs achieved them.
The question for Steichen was whether or not photography was art; Rodin and Maeterlinck believed that Steichen’s work proved that it was. Rodin wrote, ‘I consider Steichen a very great artist and the leading, the greatest photographer of the time,’ and Steichen wrote proudly to Steiglitz in 1901 that Rodin had described one of his pictures (Self-portrait with brush and palette) as ‘a remarkable photograph and a remarkable work of art—a chef d’oeuvre’. In 1906 Maeterlinck wrote an introduction to a volume of Steichen’s work, which he called ‘une admirable, une incomparable realisation d’art. Vous avez discipliné directement les rayons de soleil comme un peintre discipline ses pinceaux.’ [An admirable, incomparable work of art. You have exercised the same direct control over the rays of the sun as a painter exercises over his brushes.] In later years Steichen burnt all his paintings (all he could find) and became the highest-paid fashion photographer of his age, working with the US publisher Condé Nast and photographing society ladies such as Rita de Acosta Lydig, who used to tip her dressmaker with loose emeralds.
But in 1902 Steichen, with his ‘grey linen shirt with loose kimono sleeves, short turnover collar and black ribbon scarf at the throat’ and ‘hair of a significant length and degree of unkemptness’, as a press notice of the time described him, ate at the same cheap restaurant as Kathleen.
Day after day, [she wrote] lunch after lunch, dinner after dinner, for five months, we two sat opposite each other, scarcely ever looking up save to catch each other’s eye and look down again. Never once did we speak. Yet each knew when the other was gay or worried, had toothache or was happy. Even in those early days in Paris any student could talk to anybody he or she pleased, yet we two deliberately refrained. I knew his work. It was well known.