Finding His Way to Paris. By JED PERL

Finding His Way to Paris

By JED PERL

James Lord

MY QUEER  WAR

By James Lord

344 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27

     James Lord, who died last year at the age of 86, is a tremendous storyteller. He brings dramatic intricacies to his encounters with Picasso, Gertrude Syein, Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, Peggy Guggenheim and a host of other characters in the memoirs and recollections he published over the course of nearly half a century, from “A Giacometti Portrait” in 1965 to “My Queer War,” completed before his death. Sometimes I have the sneaking suspicion that Lord enjoys exaggerating his own role as the guileless young man, so as to push some hero or villain into higher relief. And he certainly knows how to grab a reader, beginning his portrait of another one of his friends, the Viscountess of ­Noailles, with this wealthy patron of the arts on her deathbed, shrieking, “I don’t want to die,” a tragic figure in a Parisian mansion hung with her peerless collection of work by Goya, Degas and Picasso. There is a fable like power and a sensuous, seductive rhythm about the narratives as Lord unfurls them, a quality almost of myth­making that can feel a little old-­fashioned, but beautifully old-fashioned.

     “My Queer War” is about a young man’s discovery that he is, like so many of the men and women with whom he will become friends, both a hedonist and a moralist. The “queer” in his title encompasses not only Lord’s earliest homo­sexual adventures but also the queerness of war in the old sense of its strangeness, of all the ruptures, dislocations and horrors that turn normal life inside out. As the book begins, in 1942, Lord is 19, just entering the Army, in some sense first leaving home. And by the time it ends, three years later, he has with almost comically alarming speed found his way to the heart of Paris, the city of Gide, whom some still regard as the great moralist of modern hedonism. Gide does not appear to have become one of Lord’s friends, but somehow this Yankee, not yet a quarter-century old, was having conversations with Pi­casso and Stein, and beginning to grasp the subtleties of their already ­decades-old rivalries and disputes.

     Lord published two novels in his younger years, and although he later emphatically rejected them, “My Queer War” reflects the skills of a practiced fiction writer who can track a young man’s shifting consciousness and knows what is best left unsaid. There is sweetness and humor in Lord’s description of the quietly triumphant Boston morning after a rapturous, transforming sexual experience: “I realized that the future had nothing to fear from my inexperience as to what was to be done about what was inside of what was inside of my pants. I could take care of it, and it would take an immensity of care of me.” He is walking through the “violet air of Indian summer” as he contemplates his erotic future, waiting for his unit to be sent to Europe, and he brings a watercolor brightness to descriptions of Boston’s easygoing and sometimes rather luxurious gay ­underworld.

     Human conduct is Lord’s abiding subject. And wartime, by shattering so many of life’s predictable patterns, is continually posing fresh challenges to his moral sense, whether he is negotiating a pastoral, platonic friendship with a married Englishwoman and her two little boys in the summer of 1944 or surveying the squalor of displaced-person and P.O.W. camps, with their “bureaucracy of mud,” and the blank-eyed prisoners, whose “mortal indifference seemed to demand my own as rightful consideration due to the hapless.” This portrait of the artist as a young man — “a dreamer pretending to have his wits about him,” as he describes himself — reveals a steeliness amid all the uncertainties. When the extraordinarily attractive Capt. Winfield Jones practically drags him to bed, Lord turns him down flat, instinctively repulsed by the power politics.

     Without that steeliness Lord would probably never have found the courage to write to one of his literary heroes, Thomas Mann,  railing about the horrors of the war. And then, “one morning at mail call,” he receives a response from Mann, expressing understanding at “the sorrow you feel about the damage inflicted upon your own people by the war,” but insisting on the war’s necessity, “addressing with sober wisdom,” Lord writes, “the boyish outburst of a brash and anonymous soldier, one among millions.” “My Queer War”closes, 85 pages later, with Mann, whom Lord never actually met, attempting to help the young author find a publisher for his first novel.

     Although democratic spirits would prefer to believe otherwise, many writers, from Shakespeare onward, have concluded that the human condition is best studied among the lives of the wealthy, the privileged and the supernaturally gifted. Lord is surely of this opinion. When, in one of his earlier memoirs, he turns his attention to Peter Watson — the millionaire who financed Cyril Connolly’s magazine, Horizon, and had a series of exceedingly handsome and improbable boyfriends — the man’s wealth and élan serve only to magnify the extent to which constructive and destructive impulses exist in the same person, perhaps in any person.

     If there is a weakness in Lord’s writing, it is a tendency to turn his friends into emblematic figures, with a concomitant exaggeration of both their strengths and their weaknesses. In his 1985 biography of Giacometti, he indulges in a certain amount of magical thinking as he labors to demonstrate how quotidian experience can precipitate superhuman creation. What rescues his finest work from hagiography is the acuteness and immediacy of the detail. You cannot help believing his account, in “My Queer War,” of tagging along with Stein as she shops in her Parisian neighborhood, “stopping occasionally to make purchases for the string bag I carried. . . . She talked well. One of the sources of her charm, I thought, was her plain, almost childlike absorption and pleasure in her own being, her assumption that the whole world was just as she believed it to be, a comforting conviction, and she communicated that sense of comfort to others.”

     I knew James Lord a little over the years, sharing dinners in Paris and New York from time to time. As well as I could make out from our admittedly slight acquaintance, he was a happy man, at home in the high-bohemian world where he passed his life, a world where art and literature and talent and money were all mixed together. That such a world can be corrupt, and can even perhaps be the enemy of true art, is an old argument, going back at least to the 1920s, when Wyndham Lewis labeled Dia­ghilev’s Ballets Russes the pinnacle of high-bohemian self-­indulgence, with its “glittering, highly intellectualist surface” and “deep, sagacious, rich though bleak sensuality.” Such criticisms have been leveled against many of the artists Lord most admired, including even Giacometti, who in the 1930s, let us not forget, did furniture designs for Jean-Michel Frank, a legendary interior decorator. Those who live in a world where art and money and talent are treated as bargaining chips will more likely than not come out losers, and the waste and delusion and cruelty of high bohemia were in fact one of Lord’s subjects. He was unsparing about the weaknesses of Coc­teau, a friend he in some respects found impressive. And he was cleareyed about the calamities, sometimes self-inflicted, that had befallen others, among them Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar and the great actress Arletty, who had paid the price for having an affair with a German officer.

     At the very beginning of “My Queer War,” Lord sees himself as “unremarkable in that ragtag rabble of G.I.’s, all attired exactly alike.” He is a bundle of confusions, as most of us are at 19. “I ran no risk,” he observes, “of betraying my lurid, shaming, guilty secret. Never mind that by a blatant lie I’d already betrayed civic decency by putting on the U. S. Army’s uniform. But I could chalk that up to poetic license. Writing was already my good excuse for almost anything that needed excusing. Much did.” For this young writer, high bohemia proved to be anything but a disguise, and after a lifetime of writing he leaves us in no doubt as to what was at stake in the Paris where he made his home. In the world he discovered there, poetic license could be licensed. Conduct unbecoming became him.

     Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic. His books include “New Art City,” “Antoine’s Alphabet” and ­“Eyewitness.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Perlt.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print