In 1921, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)—and the world at large it seemed—was at a turning point. The devastation of World War I had hollowed a generation of artists, of painters and sculptors, poets and musicians. Picasso himself turned forty, a moment when many pause, look at that glass and decide whether it is half-full or on its way to empty. It was that year he painted Three Musicians, a cubist composition featuring characters from the Italian commedia dell-arte who had been an irregular but important feature of his art for the previous twenty years.
Three Musicians
The musicians include portraits of the Jewish painter and writer Max Jacob (1876-1944), the cowled monk at the right, gone from Picasso’s life into a monastery. Jacob had converted to Catholicism in 1915 and in 1918 moved to live as an oblate of unclear commitment to the Benedictine monastery in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, France. On the left is the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) as melancholic Pierrot. Apollinaire had suffered terrible headwounds at the Front; in his fragile state, he succumbed in the flu pandemic of 1918.
Three Musicians
Between the two is Picasso, himself, the flamboyant Harlequin, an alter-ego that was the yin to the minotaur’s yang in his iconography. The dog that sits below Pierrot’s chair is, then both a symbol of friendship (fido) and of death (Cerberus).
In its classicizing structure and traditional subject, the painting is an ode to things past. In particular, it is a celebration of lasting friendship as well as a glance back to Picasso’s youth, apparently irretrievably gone. He was then a married man, an artist of stature, a Parisian bourgeois living a life of social privilege. The art historian Theodore Reff calls this painting an elegy for Picasso’s “lost bohemian youth, for freedom of the Bateau-Lavoir days and the gaiety of Apollinaire and Jacob.” (quoted in Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 314)
In Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) wrote in 1913 how the taste of a cookie returned him to his childhood:
…a shudder ran through me… An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses… The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
For many of us, Emma Willard School—the place, the books we read, the music we danced to, and more—is our madeleine. Our friendships are the ties that bind us not so much to “ye grey walls protecting” on the heights of Mount Ida in Troy, New York, as the sense of possibility we gained there. We did not perhaps feel it at the time, but we were in the eye of a Bergsonian hurricane of becoming.
Fabric Rewoven
through a Kellas window
Friendships sustain themselves—or don’t. The quinquennial gatherings on campus, reunions ending in aughts and fives—are an opportunity to reconnect, measure our lives by the familiar metric of peer accomplishments, miss those absent. Like the ancient Romans, we conduct our own collective and private lustrums, our inventories of gain and loss.
In our arc, the one followed by the Class of 1969, the competition innate in comparison faded as middle-age mounted. Old intimates remained so, but new intimacies emerged. Conversations with women we had barely exchanged words with as teenagers suddenly lasted long after desserts and coffees were cleared from tables, and even after many retreated to the dormitory rooms that we had borrowed for a few nights.
Why? Because now these “new” friends were bringing to us more or our pasts—more of ourselves—than we had known about. What mattered now was not who any of us had been but how our evolution into women of a certain age had begun at Emma, in that hothouse of hormones and emotional and intellectual ferment, in the experience that would always sustain us.
Fabric Frayed
I met Leslie when we had barely settled into our rooms sophomore year. We bonded instantly. She was funny. She played the trombone. She took Latin, as did I, and also Ancient Greek; we spent hours inventing Latinate plurals for common words: Kleenex, kleeneces; climax, climaces; phoenix, phoenices.
the wedding of hearts
Leslie could write and her ear for grammatical faux-pas was already advanced. Every time she heard the tagline “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” she’d grit her teeth. “It’s either ‘Winston tastes good like cigarette’ or ‘Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.” To this day, my issues with split infinitives focus on the Star Trek prologue: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Leslie’s final frontier was ensuring that every text that encountered her editor’s pencil advanced to perfection.
Her last syntactical gift to me was an email correction on a letter drafted by an alumnae committee. She wrote, “…the list of the committee members should have the apostrophes reversed, to show elided numbers.” In other words, not “Ellen Cutler ‘69” but “Ellen Cutler ’69.” I didn’t know that. But now I do.
Today
Leslie is among the most interesting people I have ever known. And the best of friends, gaps in communication and separations in space notwithstanding. It seemed a fairytale when she reconnected with Bobby, the love of her life, almost fifty years after the Prom we both attended at Deerfield Academy. When they married, I was there. She had a line from Catullus engraved in his ring: Vivamus et Amamus. Let us live and love.
He is holding her hand now. I asked him to hold it for me, too. I think I will know when she lets go.