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CAFÉ SOCIETY
Phil Scott and the beau monde wonder: is that all there is?
It was the morning of May 30, 1913. All over the city, in the cafés where artists and deep thinkers gathered, the subject du jour was the scandalous performance of the night before.
The new ballet The Rite of Spring had premiered at the Théatre de Champs Elysées, and the flamboyant homosexual impresario Sergei Diaghilev had outdone himself! Nijinsky’s choreography! Above all, the shocking, ear-shattering music of Igor Stravinsky! Why, the man had thrown out harmony, distorted metre, and reinvented the term forte (loud). Not that people could hear the music clearly over the booing from offended members of the audience.
Diaghilev had flashed the house lights on and off to avert a riot. The valiant conductor, Pierre Monteux, had copped several gobs of phlegm on the back of his tailcoat. Mon dieu, there was much to talk about!
At their favourite café, Claude Debussy and Pablo Picasso were joined by the elderly Marcel Proust. All had been in attendance. At another table, young Jean Cocteau chatted earnestly to a sailor. He was hoping to seduce the handsome mariner – naturally! – and to sketch him au naturel. Cocteau was another whose muse had been fired by the revelation of Le Sacre.
“Your coffee, messieurs,” murmured the waiter, setting three steaming cups before his regular customers.
“Where to begin?” cried Debussy. “The harmonies were deliberately ugly …”
“It is primitivism in music,” Picasso enthused, in his thick Catalan accent. “Reflecting current developments in painting.”
“Your own, you mean? It was more earthy than that! Not glaring Iberian colours and angular whores, but something visceral … radical … I don’t know that I liked it.”
“I loathed it,” Proust drawled, “but it will change Art forever.”
“No!” Debussy protested. “It cannot. It must not! Are we to throw out the baby with the bathwater?”
Proust shuddered. “That repulsive English expression!”
“Monsieur, where do you see music heading if not back to basics?” inquired Picasso. “Isn’t it time to discard Wagner and his Teutonic melodramas?”
At the same moment, four mothers wheeling perambulators entered the café, accompanied by their children. They seated themselves noisily, taking up all the remaining space, and continued to chatter. Sans supervision, the children ran amok from one end of the room to the other.
“Pardon, mon ami,” replied Debussy, “what did you just ask me?”
A screaming three-year old boy in a sailor suit careered into Proust’s leg, causing the asthmatic writer to gasp and spill coffee across his manuscript.
“Merde!” Proust exclaimed. “What is this? A café or a crèche? I hate going out.”
Two of the babies began to bawl their heads off. Their mothers rocked the prams without turning away from their shouted conversation, the subject of which appeared to be the bowel movements of their offspring.
Disconcerted by the chaos, Cocteau gave up all hope of sketching or bedding the handsome sailor, and left in a huff.
“Sorry? You were saying … ?” hollered Picasso to Proust.
“I said: this is the last time we have coffee in fucking Newtown!"
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