A Woman of Parts

...Or that the dying Jewish composer Darius Milhaud, nostalgic for his youth, would tell his wife he would like to see his old friend Paul Morand, an arch-collaborationist, even though they had not spoken for years...

...Who could have foretold," they write, "that Misia, who had once been assured that society would never receive her, would now reign as one of the queens of Paris...

...She once amazed some friends with batches of letters from Proust, many of which she had not even bothered to open, and allowed these friends to help themselves to them...

...This is a deeply sympathetic and thoroughly enjoyable popular biography of the remarkable Marie Sophie Ol-ga Zenaide Godebska, nicknamed Misia (1872-1950...

...Yet for all its honesty and quickness, her mind was, I think, also trivial...

...an age wherein the aristocracy, the more enterprising part of the bourgeoisie, the artists, and the demimonde mingled with an eclat and reverberations unmatched before or since...

...Descended from a cello virtuoso grandfather and a father who was a highly successful although pedestrianly academic sculptor, the young, motherless Polish girl grew up, first, with warm relatives in Belgium, then in a cold Paris girls' school poorly run by nuns...

...The authors, who fancy themselves capable of offering verse translations of French poetry, always come to grief with them...

...Thus Natanson disappears from the book after his divorce from Misia, though we want to know a little about his later life (he outlived her by a year...

...Still, she was unsophisticated enough to refuse baring her breasts for Renoir to paint, much as the old painter entreated her...

...She was to have no learning or intellectual bent, but an uncanny feeling for the arts, especially for music and painting...

...M_ laudable piece of work, coming from the hands of virtual amateurs...

...as for the tip of the iceberg (if that tired image must be trotted out yet again), that is precisely what is fully visible to all...

...The written evocations are equally conflicting...

...Or that this peasant girl from the provinces would refuse to marry the Duke of Westminster...

...It was during the Edwards years that even aristocrats who had considered Misia a parvenu opened their doors to her...

...When, years later, Misia announced to her teacher Gabriel Faure that she was giving up her pianistic career to get married, the great master tearfully begged her to persevere...

...The worst is the stance of omniscience, that hallmark of biographical vulgarization, as in: "One eyebrow raised in a circumflex, Thadee screwed his monocle into place, took a closer look—and fell in love...

...A rich, pretentious, yet knowledgeable and enthusiastic Spaniard, this society artist, womanizer and sexual athlete was, though three years younger than Misia, a perfect father image...

...There was such upward and downward mobility in these bustling, brilliant, exhibitionistic worlds, such play of what Fizdale and Gold call "unbelievable coincidence and startling revelation," that our authors rightly wonder whether Proust was imitating life or vice versa...

...As for the many celebrated figures in the theatrical, concert, dance, and social worlds with whom Misia was involved, their number is too great for enumeration...

...Or that Leon Blum, the fin desiecle dandy of Misia's Revue Blanche days, would become the Socialist leader of France...

...To the American heiress Hoytie Wiborg, the only woman to whose insistent advances she admitted yielding (albeit only once), she said after the act, "Is that all you know how to do...

...The account of the declining years, after Sert's death, when everything began to pass Misia by—society, wealth, the new arts, even her eyesight (it started to fail, ironically, at Lourdes, where she had gone to pray for Roussy's recovery)—is both shattering and restrainedly rendered...

...Yet she seems to have had sexual problems...

...In Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, Robert Craft, no doubt basing himself on his co-author, Vera Stravinsky, who knew her well, refers to Misia as a virago, and as the "plain-looking, busy-bodying, insufferably snobbish tyrant of Parisian society," but grants her "an extraordinary gift of musical perceptiveness...

...A passage from Baudelaire's Peintre de la vie moderne about dandyism purports to be an exact translation, though it is in fact an abridgement and oversimplification...

...A crazy triangle evolved, giving rise to, among other things, the aforementioned plays by Cocteau and Savoir...

...But certain errors and omissions could have been avoided...

...The distich actually translates: "Every other flower cannot fail to realize/That Misia did something charming by being born...

...Simone, the actress who portrayed Misia in Savoir's play, was right when she imparted, at the age of 98, a bit of old theatrical gossip to Gold and Fizdale: "Misia was never any good in bed...

...She dared to write Stravinsky that she hated one of his works, and refused to accept any of Picasso's later paintings as a gift, thereby obviously hurting the painter's feelings...

...yet Cyprien also insisted that the nuns give her a weekly bath—something revolutionary for France in those days, though by now it may have become the norm...

...By that time she had absorbed much artistic talk at the house of her unloving father, Cyprien Godebski, and lived for a while in London, either alone or, more likely, as the mistress of Feli-cien Rops, the artist and illustrator specializing in sadism and diabolism, who must have taught her the ropes...

...She was astute about painting, too, except about that of Sert, where closeness blinded her...

...The child Misia is shown listening to the conversation of the Goncourt brothers even though one of them, Jules, had died two years before she was born...

...There are whole sentences (e.g., the last one on page 37, the first on 47) that do not parse, and remain inscrutable...

...Certainly she allowed most of the gift fans that he inscribed with poems to her to disappear...

...When Edwards finally abandoned her to pursue and eventually marry the bisexual prostitute-turned-actress Genevieve Lantelme (this stunning young creature was mysteriously drowned a couple of years later...

...Despite highly commendable research—both in perusing written materials and in interviewing every conceivable surviving informant—there are factual errors...

...When, at 32, Roussy, whom Sert had married, was dying of tuberculosis, it was Misia who lovingly sat up with her night after night while Sert slept next door...

...That the biography is not fully documented (the sources are not always clearly indicated, and their trustworthiness is often not evaluated) is of small importance in a popular treatment...

...Verdurin of A la Recherche), Cocteau, Octave Mirbeau, and Alfred Savoir...

...She did come around to loving Sert passionately, but only after she began to lose him to the very young and pretty Roussy Mdi-vani—with whom she fell in love, too...

...Like Diaghilev, Sert was to become an international figure, painting murals in rich people's houses all over the world...

...Or that Picasso, so courageous in his art, would not have the courage to help his dear friend Max Jacob when Jacob was on his way to certain death in a Nazi concentration camp...

...then compound the faux pas by citing her opinion that Edwards' infatuation with Lantelme "was all merde...

...The countless paintings and photographs offer contradictory evidence: In some she appears alluring or at least appealing...

...This, in a sense, is the subject of Proust's masterpiece, and Misia and her circle were indeed a large part of Proust's source material...

...w ? ? hat exactly were her endowments...

...Colette's affection may have had passionate lesbian overtones...

...accordingly, Mme...

...Perhaps Mme...

...But no one watched with the same concern as Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, the well-known duo pianists and until now authors only of a few articles on cookery, who have just come out with their first book, Misia (Knopf, 337 pp., $16.95...

...What makes Misia so compelling is the way her life acts as the focal point or objective correlative of an era...

...Or that Proust himself, the amateur who dabbled in literature, would write the greatest French novel of the 20th century...

...We cannot tell how good her literary taste was—whether, for example, she appreciated Mallarme for his poetry or merely for his attentions to her...

...Sen's social sphere was extended even farther...

...The literary figures in her life included over the years Verlaine, Mallarme, Apollinaire, Valery, Gide, Proust, Claudel, Cocteau, Colette, Jarry, St.-John Perse, Morand, Max Jacob, Reverdy, and a host of lesser lights...

...This brings together the three biggest bores in the world: Claudel, Hon-egger, and Joan of Arc...

...Yet, when she and Sert proved unable to save Max Jacob from the Nazis, every year, on the anniversary of Jacob's death, she reread his poems to her...

...she described the Nazis marching into Paris as "overgrown homosexual boyscouts," and commented on the first performance of Jeanne d'Arc au bucher...

...And she would not even consider posing for Maillol in the nude...

...More important, the great despot recognized that her taste in music was better than his and actually took her advice on musical matters...

...Mallarme and St.-John Perse probably...

...Proust, in his last letter to Misia (when he was too close to death for flattery), refers to her "cruel and beautiful face...

...Nevertheless, amateurishness will out...

...the hygienic bath (to be taken modestly in one's petticoat), exposure to orgies— contrary demons watched over Misia's development...

...Even so, Gold and Fizdale have written a hugely diverting, variously informative and ultimately moving book...

...surely Misia herself would not have wished it to be more scholarly and less readable...

...She was never in love with Natanson, and though she affirmed that Edwards was a great lover, she confessed to planning the next day's menu while he made lover to her...

...There is redundancy, as in "a quiet peace...

...Or: " In his imploring eyes there was an unexpressed question...

...or they may simply mistranslate, as they do the couplet from Mallarme concluding their tale: "Each other flower cannot help but [sic] know/That Misia has been born, and sweetly so...

...There are grave problems of style...

...She was particularly good, though, at recognizing the best new musical works...

...In music, she was close to Faure, Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Milhaud, Auric, and more, many of whom dedicated works to her...

...Simple English grammar is often beyond our authors (and their copy editors), resulting in such things as "two men whom she imagined would give her" and "large amounts of roses...

...Or take this sentence: "The music's abstract power, like the tip of an iceberg, was barely visible to the general public...

...Her three marriages (of which none gave her lasting happiness and only the third turned gradually into a strange, perverse, stubbornly enduring love) were ideally suited to establish in the circles that made her one of the great salonnieres of all time—if not the most important hostess, at least a most desired guest, most prized contact, most diversely inspiring muse, and most awesome puller of strings in the world of the arts...

...Chanel was suspected of having an affair with Misia...

...it was through Edwards, too, that she got to know the dicier layers of bohemia...

...The gentle Faure, the satanic Rops...

...This led to her becoming wildly sought after by those who wanted to be produced by the supreme impresario...

...according to one rumor, killed by Edwards himself), Misia married the grandiose and mediocre painter and stage designer Jose-Maria Sert...

...Beauty...

...They will record the coprophiliac Edwards' "penchant for excrement," and inadvertently begin the next sentence with "[Misia] gushed...

...cliche, as in Edwards' being "a diamond in the rough...

...the pianist-composer exclaimed: "If I could only play like that...

...when she was advised not to reprint Renoir's love letters in her autobiography, these too got lost...

...We must assume that she had an indefinable sexual appeal as well as a swiftness of perception and saltiness of expression that anecdotes and recollections only partly convey, and that photographs do not capture at all...

...They vanished as well...

...Married first to the comfortably-off dilettante Thadee Natanson, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the leading avant-garde publication, La Revue Blanche, she became the friend, protectress, platonic beloved, inspiration of numerous outstanding writers, poets, painters, composers, and other artists who published in or gravitated toward the periodical...

...As Misia becomes lonelier and weaker, the writing turns purer and stronger, and the authors' love for their heroine shines forth with compassion and dignity...

...Even as a tyke, she may have spied on the meetings in Cyprien's house of the League of the Rose, a group that acted out sexual fantasies...

...It was certainly not her intellect that charmed people...

...Even to the most enlightened public, music and its abstract power are only audible (or perhaps sensible...

...Misia herself boasted of not reading books, merely leafing through them to get their gist...

...For the sake of rhyme, they will stoop to something like "Toulouse Lautreek" (a low trick...

...So it is not surprising to find them unattuned to connotations, which leads them to grotesque gaffes...

...Gustave Kahn is identified as the inventor of the prose poem—which existed for a good half century before Kahn invented vers libre...

...Misia's outspokenness was certainly in her favor...

...Or that the Catholic Rightist Sert would save Colette's Jewish husband Maurice Goudeket from the same fate...

...She could, however, write vividly on occasion, as certain passages from her memoirs attest...

...Thus Misia was instrumental in the rise to world fame of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, with whom she remained in a lifelong mixture of intimacy, competition and enmity...

...When still quite small, she once sat in Liszt's lap and played Beethoven for him on the piano...

...inept imagery, as when newspapers "lick their tabloid jaws" (not even lips...

...One wonders how Gold and Fizdale wrote the book: on one typewriter keyboard with four hands, or on facing typewriters in close harmony...

...Apollinaire is said to have coined the term "surrealism" for the program notes of Cocteau and Satie's ballet Parade, although he had used it a couple of months earlier in conjunction with his own play, Les Mamelles de Tiresias (see his letter to Paul Dermee of March 1917...

...She grasped (not immediately) the greatness of Pelleas et Melisande, and (immediately) of Boris Godunov, Le Sacre du printemps, Les Noces, and various works by Satie and Ravel, while she also enjoyed the charm of Poulenc and certain others of talent...

...Or that Chanel, whom Misia had not been permitted to bring to the Beaumonts' a few years earlier, would soon employ [Count de] Beaumont to design jewelry for her...

...Many artists were in love with her: Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Bonnard, Reverdy certainly...

...After Roussy's death, Misia and Sert drifted back into an uneasy, quasi-marital relationship, but maintained separate domiciles...

...She appears prominently in plays and novels by Proust (as both the noble Princess Yourbeletieff and the pushy Mme...

...Then and later, she was repeatedly painted by Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Bonnard, Valloton (to name only the most significant), and was the friend of many other artists, notably Picasso, who was apparently more than a little smitten with her...

...in others one sees merely a healthy Slavic peasant...

...It was the crass Anglo-Turkish millionaire Alfred Edwards, however, who after bombarding her with passion, expensive gifts and relentless persistence until she first lived with and then married him, made it possible for Misia to become a maecenas...

...She was to be the only woman whom Dia-ghilev could envision as his wife, but, of course, preferred to consider his sister...