1. According to Elvis Costello, This Year’s Girl
(1977) was an “answer song” to the Rolling Stone’s Stupid Girl. “ "If you want to hear a song
that's actually pretty indefensible, it's The Rolling Stones' 'Stupid Girl’. Read the lyrics of that one and tell me which
one is the misogynist, me or Mick! This year's girl is unashamedly modeled on
'Stupid Girl,' but I wanted to flip it."
Costello was responding to a (male) rock critic chorus that found
Costello’s song misogynist – a form of mishearing which has everything to do
with that old Nobodaddy, the patriarchal subconscious. Whose mass assembled
products we have to deal with every day.
Costello’s song is in the line of a literature stretching
back to 1890s and the twin developments of art and fashion – whose outward
symbols of grace are the stardom of the art model and the fashion model. We could etchasketch the line moving through
the It girl of 20s Hollywood and the Girl of the year – Edie Sedgwick, Baby
Jane Holzer, etc. – a sixties phenomenon. Or so it seemed in the sixties. Tom
Wolfe’s article, less glittering now, at this distance, but even so - a
distinct capture - and with all those
brand mentions - all the italicized bits of Baby Jane’s monologue - a speed
driven thing, electronically enhanced – put it on the stereo. Rock out.
“Then she hangs up and swings around and says, “That makes
me mad. That was ———. He wants to do a story about me and do you know what he
told me? ‘We want to do a story about you,’ he told me, ‘because you’re very
big this year.’ Do you know what that made me feel like? That made me feel
like, All right, Baby Jane, we’ll let you play this year, so get out there and
dance, but next year, well, it’s all over for you next year, Baby Jane. I
mean,—! You know? I mean, I felt like telling him, ‘Well, pussycat, you’re the
Editor of the Minute, and you know what? Your minute’s up.’ ”
There are then, of course, moments in the essay you forget, when
it is suddenly presents a sound like chalk screeching across a blackboard:
Wolfe putting in the sociological markers, all rather bogus. His thesis about the
democratizing of society. His inability to even grok the Civil Rights movement
and its weather. Blah blah. The reader
begins to hum:
“Ah, you've been with the professors and they've all liked
your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read, it's well-known”
2. In the great decades, there are a host of strange
transactions between the demi-monde and the Social Register, between art
and fashion, fashion and youth culture, drugs and sex and clothes and clubs.
“All those promises of satisfaction” – which are also promises of
satisfaction’s melancholy, the aging and overdose to which everything seems to
move in lockstep. This year’s girl is the flip side of melancholy baby in the
long decade’s semiosphere – in the impress of the twenties or the sixties.
3. ”I liked them –
they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if they would suit. But,
somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily believe in them. After all
they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of
the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity – an innate preference
for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was
so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one
was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a
profitless question.” This is the voice of the unnamed narrator of Henry James’
1892 story, The Real Thing. “Them” is the Monarchs – a well turned out, upper
class couple who have lost all their money – their real thing – and are trying
to be taken on as models. The narrator, an artist and illustrator, already has
his models. They are real – that is, they have real talents as models. That
talent – that photogenicity, or representativeness – has been professionalized in
art circles in London and Paris. It is just this odd fraction, this denominator
of the represented subject over the real one, which is the very nub and worry
of this story. A great title, but not one of the great James stories of the
nineties. Yet it shows that James was catching onto … something that was
happening out there in urban culture.
In 1889, Paul Dolfuss, a French journalist, wrote a series
of articles about artist’s models, then put them together in a book. Dolfuss
was writing in the wake of the Goncourt brother’s novel, a twofer of misogyny
and anti-semitism, Manette Salomon; Dolfuss was neither misogynist, as
his book on the artist’s model showed, nor anti-semitic – in the 1890s, his
paper, Cri de Paris, was both Dreyfusard and anti-colonialist.
Dollfus writes, near the end of the book, that “the
prosperity of artist’s models seems to have arrived at its apogee.” By this, he
meant, I think, that their names were somewhat more familiar, and that they
were not confused with prostitutes, or mostly not. Indeed, I would take a wild
guess and say that Dollfus’s articles might have been mulled over by Henry
James for his own story. As it turns out, the professionalization of the model
was, in fact, just the beginning of a slow but sure inversion of the older
bourgeois values. Oh yeah.
One of the signs that the model was accruing a certain
amount of fame apart from the artist was the career of Sarah Brown, a model to
whom Dollfus devoted a whole chapter. Her real name, in the newspapers and in
court, was something like Florentine Royer or Marie-Florentine Rogers.
Perhaps she took her nom de modèle
to allude to the Pre-Raphaelites. To Ford Madox Brown’s model, Emma, in
particular. We have a few photographs of Sarah Brown, but they don’t do her
justice. Justice was done by French painters still working in a tradition close
to that of the Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics – a tradition that saw the content
and test of painting as the elaboration of a historical, or literary, or
mythological scene. Within this tradition, Sarah Brown had a certain value.
“After I had drawn Mrs Monarch a dozen times I perceived
more clearly than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided
precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with
the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for
imitation. Her usual appearance was like a curtain which she could draw up at
request for a capital performance.” In Sarah Brown’s case, the capital
performance followed a bit more closely the saintly lines of her face, and her
famous skin – never touched with makeup, that skin. This was known to all.
Nudity was her forte, down to the lips and the blush.
And so we can still see her, in paintings by Lefebvre, as
Lady Godiva, or the legendary Clémence Issaure, the supposed 14th
century founder of a poetry contest in Toulouse.
Dollfus either interviewed her or simply concocted a back
story: a country lass, a love of horses, a first approach at age 15 to the big
city (Paris), sorrows, a return to the country, another assault on Paris, a
half-feral beauty who, in the cast down moments, contemplated suicide and even
half-heartedly attempted it. She has her whims – sometimes sitting around in
cafes, smoking; sometimes picking out favorites; sometimes posing nude for the
students of M. Lefebvre; sometimes coming down from the dias to look at the
students work; sometimes throwing paint on the work she didn’t like.
Thus, Dollfus in 1889.
In 1893, something happened. It made Sarah Brown a bit
legendary – as much as Clémence Issaure. It marked the decade in which anarchy was
the great threat to the social order.
It all came about because of the second Quat’z-Arts ball.
The ball was thrown by an organisation of the art students of Paris in their
four divisions – hence the Quatre. The organisers had the brilliant idea of
renting the Moulin Rouge for the dance. Before the dancing began, there was a
pageant, a sort of scene with four models. Four favorites. Later, in Court,
there was some disputing over how undressed these models were. Things were a
bit confused by the fact that a week later, the same cortege of models attended
another Montmartre ball, for the Fin-de-Siecle, a newspaper, and there they
seemed to be more undressed. Sarah Brown, of course, was the leader of the
cortege, dressed as Cleopatra. How much of her bosoms did she display? Another
juridical question – which was posed in a courtroom because the League of
Decency, under a certain Senator Berenger, had officially complained, and the
organizer and three models, including Brown, were accused of indecency.
A much reported trial. What newspaper was going to miss the
chance of a courtroom discussion of bosoms, and their showing, or not?
The judge, President Courot, found the whole matter
ridiculous. Nevertheless, due to the Senatorial rank of the head of the League
of Decency, he sentenced Sarah and her mates to fines and a couple of days in
prison. Same with the organizers.
What happened next was not expected.
The students of the Latin Quarter liked Sarah Brown. And
they disliked the League of Decency. So they decided on the time-honored tactic
of singing satirical songs in the street in front of Berenger’s hotel in Paris.
And then the cops came.
“For eight days,” the Journal reported, “we have been
leafing through the classical manuals on insurrection, in vain; we have been
abused by an uprising without a program or a leader, without guides or a
purpose.”
The cops decided to charge the students. In the melee, a
bystander was killed. That signalled the start of rioting that went on from the
Seine to the Luxembourg. Windows were smashed, drunken students attacked
civilians, and, at the height of battle, while the smoke of police guns floated
in the air, Sarah Brown, who had been haranguing the students, was arrested.
Somehow, she managed to get astride the policeman who arrested her, and like
some odd offspring of Marianne, rode the gendarme to the police station.
Instant Boho legend.
That the It girl declined rapidly afterwards – that in 1896
she was reported dead, either of some disease or by her own hand – that just
fed the memories. The model enters history through the front door. And the “editors of the moment” are subtly
demoted.
4. The woman receives letters which contain sentences like:
“From the day I met you, my life began. Everything before as a march through
the desert.” She lives with the writer of these lines for a while. As well as
another man. She makes love to the other man, but not the man whose life began
when he met her.
Her lover is an English musician. He played for Isidora
Duncan. Their act was so tight that Isadora and he would sometimes experience
Hindu Ecstasy. The musician also has a fraught relationship with Alistair
Crowley. Then war breaks out. Then the musician dies, in Northern France, in
1916.
She was called the “Queen of Café Central.” She came out of
a working class district in Vienna, established herself, firstly, as an artists
model. There she is in Klimt, in the Wasserschlangen painting. The glorious red
hair. The glorious thin body. She was twenty then. At some point she changes
her first name, dropping the two “m”s in the middle of it. “Ea.” Like an
Indogermanic divinity. Like a water goddess. A name like no other.
After the musician she moves to the Riviera. Then she moves
to Berlin. She falls in with a crowd of people she knew from Vienna. Robert
Musil. His girlfriend, Martha Marcovaldi, his best friend, Johannes von A. She
studies psychology. She studies graphology. She writes for the papers. She goes
back and forth between Berlin and Vienna. Egon Schiele paints her portrait, in
1911. The same year he famously painted the self-portrait in which, while
wearing a black cape, he masturbates. An artist must know how the body looks.
Everybody knows that, has known it since Leonardo.
Three years later, in the autumn, the soldiers begin to die.
They die in Gallipoli. They die in Galicia. In Vienna, she marries Musil’s friend
Johanne, at the Stephan cathedral. Robert Musil is the best man. Rainer Maria
Rilke is among the wedding party. Her
husband returns to the war. He collapses, on some front, with battle shock. In
the apartment they bought on Salesianergasse, she holds court among her
admirers, the Vienna wits, who are watching the world fall down just as
everybody expected. Why is it such a surprise?
Peter Altenberg, a wit, a naif, and a fetischist collects
photos and pictures of her, and covers a wall in his apartment with them. Each
is neatly captioned.
The war ends. The empire is dissolved.
Her admirer, the man she lived with along with the musician,
is now a fifty-somethin year old famous essayist. He brings a friend with him
to her table at the Café Central. She is
now forty, no twenty year old artist’s model. Still: the magnificent hair. The magically
commanding presence. Her admirer’s friend
is the son of a wealthy factory owner. His name is Hermann Broch. Broch is in
his thirties. He’s lived under his father’s thumb, which is why he manages the
family factory. He is married. He becomes her lover. Does his wife know? Or
care?
She works at a new journal, Modernen Welt. A journal of
fashion and culture. Someone has seen the convergence. It is the twenties.
Everyone suddenly sees that culture is fashion, and fashion, culture. The
magazine is located on Paracelsusstrasse. Sometimes, Broch visits her, and
sometimes, they make love there.
Martha, now Musil’s wife, visits her with a portfolio of
drawings. She send Martha away. She has a staff of artists already, she tells
Martha.
She moves to Prague, works at the Prag Press, publishes
Musil. Publishes her admirers. Perhaps she meets Milena Jesenská
there. This was after Milena and Franz Kafka has broken up.
Broch knew Milena too. Had a brief fling with her.
Broch wants to write. She tells him to write a journal for
her. She tells him to write about daily things, not vast abstractions. Write
about her. Later, she will read it.
In 1927, Broch sells the factory. He goes into
psychoanalysis. He finds a new lover. She still allows Broch to come to her
place. Canetti, that walking evil eye, is introduced to her by Broch in the 30s.
Later, in his memoirs, Canetti writes: “She
was beautiful, and it appalled me to think how beautiful she must have been.” He
sees her humiliate Broch, insult his writing. Broch takes it. Canetti,
obviously, lives for scenes like this one.
She writes, in 1920, about fashion: “The maxim that ruled
over fashion the last few years – the clothes people wear on the street are not
modern – has lost its validity.” She
writes in an essay, Fashion and its Models (1923) “Never before were models
envied. They were hardly given a glance, as their predecessors, manniquens,
were hardly given a glance. Now, however, it has become a well regarded job,
and it must be learned, how to parade in a dress with the necessary dancer’s
elegance.” She writes about the New
Youth. She writes: “it is no accident that flirting and sports grow out of one
root.”
Armand Broch, Hermann’s son, 19 years old, at lose ends – as
he will remain - goes to stay with “Tante” Ea. Broch is now living with another
lover, Anja Herzog, and has begun the novel trilogy, the Sleepwalker.
She rages. Yet she can’t go back to her invalid husband. She
is, as it were, trapped in the apartment Broch has bought for her. Or bought. Where
he stores his library of 2000 books. “Just once,” she writes, “I would like to
have the feeling of my importance that he has every day of his life.”
She rages, she wants to leave Vienna. She needs money to
leave Vienna. She needs money for her health problems. Luckily, she has enough
to have an eye operation - she was going
blind. She thinks maybe graphology is the ticket, but she lacks a college
degree. Maybe she will establish a client base. She has rich friends, they
invite her for summer vacations. She rages in that apartment.
The Anschluss comes. Broch is arrested as a communist. A big
misunderstanding. The Nazis don’t have the list of Jews yet, don’t know he is a
Jew. She confers with him on the plan. He has long ago decided on his escape
route. His eighty year old mother
doesn’t want to escape. She takes her
in, Johanna. She takes in, as well, the
Klimts he bought. The Klimt drawings of her.
She and the Johanna
fight. A true hell, one onlooker calls it. The Nazis begin “fining” Jews –
Johanna soon owes more in fines than she possesses. Ration cards are only
issued to Aryans – she divides her
rations with Johanna.
What to do about age. What to do about food. What to do when
they come for the Jews. Johanna, eventually, is taken in 1941. She can’t do
anything to prevent them coming for Johanna, but, as she wrote Broch in 1946,
“I asked Prof. Jolles to see to Johanna and
she promised to do so.” It is the kind of thing one can’t imagine. Conditions
in the camps. Broch’s mother is murdered at Theresianstadt in 1942. She sells
the art, one piece after another. She is going to survive the war. Although
why? Sometimes she must wonder why. You
can still go to concerts and cafes in Vienna. You can still go to movies. The
Nazi regime does its best to shield the civilian population from the reality of
war. This works when the Third Reich is winning. 1939, 1940. In 1941, it all
begins to invert. Luise Täubele, her niece, testified that in 1942, when they
were close, she saw how she couldn’t repress her contempt for the Nazis. She
was “a revelation to me, how a woman could be so intelligent.”
In 1944, an observer of daily life in Vienna wrote:
“"You couldn’t get heating, gas and electricity were
rare. The trams were on an irregular schedule. In the city, in one direction,
one bumped into groups of refugees from the Hungarian territory freed by the
Red Army, and in the other direction, German soldiers marching unhappily to the
front. They marched through unlit streets where the rubbis lay meters high, by
houses and businesses whose windows were covered with paper and bars, and in
which long queues of people stood in front of the few open shops.” (Reinhard
Pohanka)
On 10 September, 1944 a 300 plane bomber squad (without
doubt, decorated with cover girl pictures – the It girl of 1944 was Rita
Hayworth) dropped their bombs and killed around 800 people. That was the
annunciation. Bombers then came to wipe out the suburbs (October 17) and to strike
the inner city (November 5 and 6, and January 15, 1945). Her windows were blown out. Her doorframe was
destroyed. But her apartment never suffered the annihilating direct hit.
Half of the animals in the zoo perished.
The Red army comes. Vienna and Austria are split into zones.
There is a Soviet Zone that is only dissolved in 1954. She learns Russian. She spends
a lot of time on her couch, in pain. Accounts of her differ – according to the gender
of the reporter. The women who know her are impressed by the culture, by an old
woman who still has It, by the time capsule stories. The few men who write
about her are impressed that she is old, a hag, an underworld witch.
Broch, however, is not among that male crowd. We are surprised
– in the United States, under financial pressure himself, he writes to her, he
tries to arrange her affairs, to straighten out the ownership of the apartment.
He is going to see her, at last, once again, in 1951. After all the year zeros
that have rained on Vienna, he is coming home.
He doesn’t, though. He dies of a heart attack in 1951. And
she – losing her vision, worn by hunger and stress – she perseveres in her
apartment, on her sofa, among her things (which were his things, too) until she
cannot. Taken to the Lainzer Versorgungsspital
(“this,” she say, “is hell”) she dies, in all her iron, in all her golden
fragility, on July 30, 1953.
See re Elvis Costello: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgb298kwof4... and
re Stupid Girl by the Rolling Stones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siBkCDbI8OM... and
Garbage Stupid Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdw-e9UXW50... On
Sarah Brown, see Gallica, Paul Dolfoss: https://gallica.bnf.fr/.../f130.item.r=dollfus%20modeles...;
On Ea, see Frauke SeveritEa von Allesch: Wenn aus Frauen Menschen werden. For
Broch's journal for Ea, see: https://openlibrary.org/.../Das_Teesdorfer_Tagebuch_f%C3....
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