Maatstaf. Jaargang 25
(1977)– [tijdschrift] Maatstaf–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Estelle Reed-Debrot Who was Céline's Elisabeth Craig?Those who open Céline's ‘Journey to the end of the Night’ will read on the title page ‘To Elisabeth Craig’. Scattered through the numerous books and articles about Céline are also to be found references, remarks and rumours about her which, to a friend of her youth form a topsy-turvy, lop-sided image. An image which the friend writing these words is impelled to straighten out for herself, if not for others. (Of course, some others may be interested.) Most of the descriptions of Elisabeth Craig are second hand, coming from people who met her on the stairs, leaving a house, or on the street. With one or two exceptions. From the few times that Céline permits himself to speak of her and from the scattered observations by others, still others have manufactured several different ‘portraits’ of Elisabeth. I will begin with a review of Henri Mahé's souvenirs ‘La Brinquebale avec Céline’ (On the go with Céline) edited by La Table Ronde, Paris 1969, which appeared in the French weekly ‘Minute’, 17th-23rd April, 1969: | |
‘La belle Américaine qui rendit Céline antisemite
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The Atrocious TruthThe ‘temporarily’ was turning into eternity. Céline, still in love, and believing in her, decided, a few months later, to board a ship and go see what had happened to his beloved: He found out the atrocious truth. Elisabeth was married. According to Mahé, she had foolishly and fatuously married the Jewish judge connected | |
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with the paternal inheritance and was playing the role of the pretty farmer's wife, as in the good time of the Trianon, on her recovered ranch. Which brings our author to add: If, in history, a search is always made for the incidental causes of events, the profound reason for ‘Bagatelles pour un Massacre’ could be found in the abduction of Elisabeth by a Jewish judge...’
I would not enter into a dispute with Henri Mahé over his portrait of Elisabeth. He no doubt uses the painter's liberty to modify the traits of character as well as the features of physiognomy in order to achieve the effect he has in mind. I regret that my photos were all lost during the occupation in Holland, when basements in Amsterdam were flooded so that the only one I have of her is poor and in profile, which does not show Elisabeth's mouth, wich I would call curved and sensitive rather than rectangular and sensuous.
Next a quotations from ‘La Mort de Céline’ (The Death of Céline) by Dominique de Roux, edited by Christian Bourgois 1966. Mr. de Roux is the editor-in-chief of the two consummate publications of L'Herne (no. 3, 1963 and no. 5, 1965), devoted to Céline. The following chapter is given to Elisabeth. | |
‘Le corps d'Elisabeth dans sa demonstration
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Rancy is in reality Clichy, where Elisabeth and Dr. Destouches (Céline) lived for a time.
We were both in our early teens when I first met Elisabeth in the beginning of the twenties at the Kosloff ballet studioGa naar eind1 in Los Angeles. ‘Theodore Kosloff of the Imperial Russian Ballet’. He had left the Diaghilev Company in Paris, performed at the Coloseum in London and then come to America where he could ‘earn more money’. After touring the United States, on the vaudeville circuit with a company he had formed, he opened his ballet studio in Los Angeles, and managed to find a place on the staff of C.B. de Mille as one of the artistic advisers and ballet master for the spectacular films such as ‘The Ten Commandments’. We, his pupils, appeared in the ballets he made for these films. Elisabeth and I, with five or six others, belonged to a kind of tacit inner circle: the initiated, to which only those having the strongest emotions about dancing could become a member. Kosloff spun a web of illusions around us, an unreal world, as unreal as ‘Lac des Cygnes’ or ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’ or ‘Shéhérazade’. We looked at reproductions of Gustave Moreau, Rossetti, read the poems of Ernest Dowson, Swinburne and ‘Salomé’ of Oscar Wilde. ‘Comme la lune est pale ce soir...’ We listened to the music of Rimsky Korsakov and Scriabine and our eyes grew tearful as we listened. We would hold a rose and dream of Nyinsky and the name of Karsavina was magic to us. We were adolescents, absorbing the myriad impressions of a lingering wave of what is now called ‘art nouveau’ or symbolism. Perhaps we thought of ourselves as ‘danseuses maudites’. There was an Ivan ‘something-or-other’, who gave us Russian lessons and another Ivan who played the balalaika for our excersises: ‘ras, dva, dri, cheterya...’ Sometimes he dozed off but never lost the beat. The beat... yes, the discipline! Ah, that was no illusion, no dream but sheer physical reality. The torture and joy of sore muscles, of being more and more ‘turned out’; heel pulled a fraction of an inch further in front of the toe for ‘développé à la seconde’, pushing our legs higher and higher for arabesques. And the combinations: we would watch Kosloff's feet tracing a pattern on the floor as he sat in his chair. Then, vying with each other, we would make the pattern bloom into a combination of movement filling space and let it develop into wonderful variations which became phrases; then the concentration that we had used from the beginning of the lesson was no longer needed. We began ‘to dance’ as we would later in performances. We started having the experience that all real dancers know, consciously or unconsciously, stronger with some, weaker with others: when you dance, you enter another world. Not only as in classical ballet, becoming Odille, Giselle or a Sylph, but you move into another dimension in time and space. You are no longer concrete, you become the movement... Soaring, whirling, seeking perfect balance. And then you begin to learn what it is like to ‘come down to earth’ after a performance. A tension remains for hours, sometimes for days, making it a great strain for some dancers to perform nightly. We finished our class as all classical ballet classes did then with changement-de-pied. Perspiring, physically tired and emotionally wound up, disappointed in our personal achievements or excited by praise from Kosloff, we would walk to the dressing room which, - if it exists now, half a century later - might still hold the vibrations of our pent up emotions. There we would discuss what we had done in class and compliment or console each other accordingly. Sometimes we would plunge into fits of laughter, clowning and imitating Kosloff: ‘Var iss yur beeg expressioon’. Elisabeth could, at such times, be very funny. Then we would call her ‘Lady Lisbeth’ and chant ‘Lady Lisbeth made us laugh’. Her natural habitude was pervaded by a kind of serenity and dignity, | |
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with her head always in the air. Not with arrogance, but with a certain abstraction. She had the potential to live ‘on the large scale’. Oscar Wilde said: ‘We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us look up at the stars’. Elisabeth was one of these. Only the most intimate of her friends knew that she had weak lungs, even had hemorrhages from time to time and had to remain home to rest then for some weeks. Her parents were very worried and thought the Kosloff training was too strenuous for her. I can still see the desperate expression she had on her face when I visited her. Part desperation, part determination not to pay any heed to the illness nor to her parents' efforts to take her away from the Kosloff training. Her family lived in genteel poverty. They owned property which was ‘tied up’ as the expression goes. Rich California acres somewhere. Mrs Craig's father had been governor of one of the states in the East and she had been educated at Vassar.Ga naar eind2 She always called her husband ‘Dr.’ Craig, though we never found out what exactly the ‘Dr.’ stood for. Such things did not interest us. It was in the spring of 1926 that I joined Elisabeth and her parents in Paris. Their property had been sold and they had taken Elisabeth first to Switzerland, where she studied Dalcroze and then to Paris. Nearly all the members of the ‘inner circle’ had left Kosloff. Not without a struggle. The difficulty began when we realized that, though he had given us a perfect training, he had not provided us with a forum. There was no Imperial Russian Ballet in Los Angeles. There was no subsidized ballet at all then. We had to look for work on our own. Many of us thought too that he was depersonalizing us. We felt that we had to break loose and find a new world to develop in. Elisabeth's parents had rented a studio at 240 Boulevard Raspail and I stayed there with them for several months. When I arrived, Elisabeth greeted me with the story of her | |
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new friend: Dr. Louis Destouches, a medical officer with the League of Nations, whom she met while in Geneva. ‘A very unusual man’. I could see that she was strongly impressed. They had met, aptly enough, in front of a book shop and she invited him home for tea. Her parents were not so favourably impressed, though later he had found some approbation with them by taking Elisabeth to visit tuberculosis clinics, hoping to frighten her into caring more for her health. During those first weeks after my arrival, Dr. Destouches was away somewhere on a trip for the League of Nations. Elisabeth and I went around, aware only of something wonderful, strange and vibrating called Paris. We met other young Americans and sat with them at the ‘Dome’, talking about art and about Americans in Paris. Paul Whiteman was there that year with his orchestra; everyone was talking about ‘The Sun also Rises’ and trying to discover the original characters at the ‘Select’. We saw the Diaghilev Ballets, but without Nyinsky and Karsavina they did not come up to our expectations. Mrs. Craig, who was a very fine musician, would sit for hours at the piano playing, mostly Chopin, while Elisabeth and I would improvise freely - away from the sharp eyes of Kosloff. Elisabeth was working on DalcrozeGa naar eind3 and I was taking lessons from the sympathetic Alexandre Volinine who arranged a concert for me that summer and advised me about engagements for a group I was planning to bring over the following year. Sometimes Elisabeth and I would sit up the whole night in the studio, where we could hear the metro rumbling past beneath us on the Boulevard Raspail and talk about the Kosloff days. Then again that atmosphere in which we had been steeped, the world of Dowson's poems, of Rossetti's paintings, would hover about us; again we were ‘danseuses maudites’. Perhaps those Kosloff years had prepared her to look for the unusual. ‘The unusual Dr. Destouches?’ | |
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Then Dr. Destouches himself appeared on the scene. He came to visit the family, holding his small daughter Colette by the hand. At this first meeting, he made on me a very strange and foreign impression with his pale eyes that seemed literally to drink in everything he looked at. He was very devoted to the child, though afterwards I thought that perhaps he also used her as a kind of buffer between himself and Elisabeth's parents. For, in spite of her mother's efforts to overcome it, there was a tension between them and Dr. Destouches. Though ‘Dr.’ Craig was a rather quiet man, he could at once make a surprising and unexpected statement. I remember once he confided to me that he was afraid Elisabeth had broken loose from the Kosloff obsession only to start a Destouches obsession. When I reported this to Elisabeth, I think we laughed it off with one of her funny remarks. She had become older, or perhaps more sophisticated and playful. Was it Paris and an easier life with the improved financial situation of the family, or was it Dr. Destouches, or a combination of both that had affected her? In the years that followed I thought that her playful moods were stimulated by Destouches, to act as a contrast to his pessimistic elan. It was this pessimism of his that went so against the grain with her parents. They thought it unhealthy ‘so different from our American mentality’. And I'm sure that deep within her Elisabeth felt this too. It was the beginning of a conflict which she was, in her characteristic way, disregarding, as if problems should be tossed away, without minding the consequences. This phase of Elisabeth's history reminds me again of Henry James' ‘Daisy Miller’ who, I believe, is the archetype of American women coming to Europe. The conflict between a certain kind of innocence and a certain kind of sophistication. Soon after the arrival of Destouches, Elisabeth went off with him to Geneva, where they rented an apartment. I was trusted with the task of keeping her parents from worrying too much. She called her relationship with Louis ‘an experiment, a trial’. There would be no marriage then. Her parents did their best to accept the situation from her standpoint. Her mother, who was half artist and a great admirer of Isadora Duncan, came nearest to understanding her daughter, though her puritan blood made it very difficult. So began the years when Elisabeth was to travel back and forth between Europe and America, visiting her parents (who returned to America the following year) and coming back to Louis for, in her way, she always remained a dutiful daughter. I was to meet her then, sometimes in California, sometimes in Paris for I also travelled back and forth between engagements in America and Europe where I had met my future husband, who became a friend of Louis. The four of us would sometimes go together up to St. Germain-en-Laye, to a theatre, or would sit on a café terrace where Elisabeth and I would mostly listen to the two men holding a discussion, half in English for our benefit and half in French, which they preferred. In the summer of 1927, when I returned to Paris with my group, after having been back to California, I found Elisabeth and Louis living in a flat in Clichy where he had begun a medical practice.
Let me quote here from Jeanne Carayon, a neighbour who later became Destouches-Céliné's proofreader, and who's souvenirs ‘Le Docteur écrit un Roman’ were published in L'Herne no. 3, 1963:
‘A young woman who smiles when you meet her - tall, very slender, strong legs, having an elegance quite different than the chic of Parisian women. “A superb carriage of the head” the neighbour thought, for whom the stranger became “the Empress”.’
Next from ‘Voyeur Voyant - A portrait of | |
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline’ by Erica Ostrovsky published by Random House N.Y.:
‘He [Céline] had named her the Empress... she had that removed elegance which elicits conjectures of the most varied kind. Some thought her an exiled countess who dwelt incognito among them in the shabby suburb of Paris; others held that she was a queen among call-girls in some great American city... the butcher's wife was certain that the stranger had come to perform orgiastic dances in the doctor's flat... She paused hardly long enough on the stairs for anyone to get a glimpse of her face...’
This is probably Miss Ostrovsky's variation of what Jeanne Carayon writes in her souvenirs mentioned above. Later that year (1927) Elisabeth followed her parents to America for a visit. She was back in Paris again in 1928, when she performed in a solo dance at one of the cinema theatres, the Paramount Opera, I think it was. This was the only time she did any professional dancing in Europe. She was too preoccupied with other things. Of course, she and I continued to confide in one another during these years so that I was not unaware of certain aspects of her life with Destouches. However, she still lived, as always, on ‘the large scale’ and on that scale, overlooked much. Only once did I ever see her distressed to the point of crying, something she never did, even in the Kosloff days. It had to do with a request of Louis which she refused to fulfil. Here follows a quotation from ‘Céline’ - A Critical Biography by Patrick Mc Carthy (published by Allen Lane, Londen 1975):
‘Temperamentally Elisabeth was highspirited, an independant American girl enjoying Paris life. She was often away on tour and, when she returned there were uproarious evenings... the neighbours asked shocked questions... Elisabeth was sexually uninhibited and generous with her favours and, according to Mahé was willing to oblige “old male friends and young girl friends if it amuses Louis... it amuses him often”... Nor was she jealous for she introduced him to her dancer friends. She flattered his sexual needs.’
At the end of 1928 and in 1929 Elisabeth was in America again. We met in Paris in the autumn of 1930. She and Louis had moved to 98 rue Lepic, from where there was a beautiful view over Paris which Elisabeth loved. After a concert I gave with my group at the Theatre des Champs Elysées, I went home with them. Louis gave me a lecture on taking care of my body, ‘a dancer's most precious possession’. When talking about dancing, the black pessimism which often oppressed and depressed me in his presence fell away and he became light. Elisabeth told me then that he was working on a novel, writing day and night. Another quotation from ‘Voyeur Voyant’ (by Erica Ostrovsky):
‘She picked up the sheets of paper and hung them on the clotheslines around him (at his request) like laundry put out to dry, with the docile air of a servant... She felt herself receding in the background. Sorcery and fairies' spells had no power over him now. Her embraces remained unanswered while he laboured. Like limbs that are lopped off in midair but continue the gesture intended... Magnificent and futile, she roamed the streets of Montmartre, drank nightly in the bars, let them caress her in his stead. In his presence even... When the huge manuscript was finished, it bore her name in dedication... She shook her blond fauve's mane and fled. For the first time.’
And from ‘Céline’ (by Patrick Mc Carthy): | |
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‘What then of Elisabeth? As Céline worked she sat in the other room alone. Not surprisingly she could not stand the neglect. She went off to America for a long stay. The love-affair began to break up. This was the price of “Voyage”. Yet she was playing an important part in its creation. The beauty that she displayed so generously was a spur to Céline.’
Elisabeth and I met next in Los Angeles in 1932, where she was looking after her mother, who was becoming an invalid. She told me then that she was not sure she could return to Louis and Paris. The tension he created when writing was nearly unbearable and it had exhausted her. A long rest was needed. She did, however, return once more at the end of 1932 or the beginning of 1933 and was back in America again at the end of that year. After just missing the Goncourt prize, Céline, in his restlessness, travelled around Europe. Another quotation from ‘Voyeur Voyant’ (by Erica Ostrovsky):
‘... Elisabeth accompanied him most of the time... Geneva. And the lakefront in the dusk... A friend had joined them and while talking, enlaced Elisabeth's waist... “She needs pleasure” he [Céline] drawled, “Why not perform that little service for her?” The woman raised her proud head, as if to snarl a response. Then, in weary resignation, leaned back upon the shoulders of the other man... Added to it all was a rumour that malicious tongues had spread - that the new literary technique he had lately developed (in which series of three dots created pauses, blanks between phrases) was really nothing but a reflection of his growing impotence; a trick which sprung from the dry sexual heaves; the painful trickle of seamen wrung out drop by drop. She was horror-struck. Fearing her body would be diminished until it shrank into oblivion. She almost ran to the sea. Vanished without a clue...’ And from ‘Céline’ (by Patrick Mc Carthy):
‘No claim should be made that Céline was physically impotent... But the sexual urge went into creating characters.’
Perhaps one could remind these writers that the sexual urge of a dancer goes too, for a great part, into the creation and performance of her dances. I saw Elisabeth for the last time in 1934, when my train stopped for a few minutes in Los Angeles. She told me then that she was not going back. I recognized the determination and knew it was true. Another quotation from ‘Céline’ (by Patrick Mc Carthy):
‘The 1934 trip to the United States [Céline's] had a deeply personal motive. The previous year Elisabeth's father had died and she had to return home. There she discovered the worst... (in his souvenirs, Mahé quotes the following from a letter to him from Céline: “Her father has behaved as usual like a real swine”. He had disinherited his errant daughter). The impatient Céline could wait no longer and he set out for the United States. At New York he heard rumours... that all was not well with Elisabeth. He rushed off to California... When he arrived in Los Angeles he found her (again in a letter to Mahé from Céline: “living in a cloud of alcohol, tobacco, police and cheap gangsters”). He tried to persuade her to change her mind. He pleaded - to no avail. He refused to see that she had rejected him... One more ingredient was needed to make the conspiracy complete. Elisabeth had been seduced by the Jews...’
And here follows a quotation from Jeanne Carayon's souvenirs: ‘“A Jewish judge has swiped her from him”. One was not told more and dit not dare push | |
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the barrier of his privacy.’ And again from ‘Voyeur Voyant’ (by Erica Ostrovsky):
‘When he came seeking it was in vain... Fragments of truth, half-truths, and blatant lies combined to create a shadowy picture of an underworld existance into which she had plunged.’
The above is certainly one of Miss Ostrovsky's most apt conclusions. Once more a quotation from ‘Céline’ (by Patrick Mc Carthy):
‘What happend seemed to Mahé to be simple enough. Elisabeth had decided to marry one of her lawyers and settle in Los Angeles. The bohemian days in Paris were over. A French doctor with a taste for low life could not, however great his literary talents, compete with an American lawyer. As Mahé puts it, it was a case of “cash and weddingring on finger”. He is certainly being too cynical. His explanation ignores the complicated relationship between Céline and Elisabeth and the almost impossible situation he had put her in, while he was finishing “Voyage”. She doubtless felt she had to escape. She had to leave him and begin a new life. Once she had made up her mind she was adamant; she was not going back to him.’
Mr. Mc Carthy's intuition has shown him the truth here. It was the same determination that caused Elisabeth to leave the Kosloff studio to look for a new life. After my last brief encounter with Elisabeth, I have no more facts. I remember the exchange of some letters, telling of many problems. Curiously enough, I do not remember any mention of her father's death. I also had letters from a former Kosloff dancer and mutual friend, Burt Harger,Ga naar eind4 who wrote that Elisabeth was having some kind of trouble. I had left for Europe in 1935 for good. Then, cut off by the war years we lost sight of one another and I have never heard directly from her since. Though there have been efforts on my part to trace her, I have only received letters that tell of finding her only to loose her again. After reading the above mentioned books and articles, I have again inquired from old friends if they knew something about her. Here follows a quotation from a letter written to me by a member of our former group at Kosloff's, Viola Heggyi Swisher who is now the West Coast editor of ‘Dance Magazine’:
‘Elisabeth, who used to live in the vast San Fernando Valley, is another who has disappeared somewhere beyond my horizon, though my husband and I used to see her and her husband at very wide spaced intervals. I think of her in my memory's room as lovely looking, with finely contoured features, intelligent, humourous, kind and sensitive. She danced well, carefully, never quite letting all stops out. She had wavy red hair. As for her ever having had a life among gangsters, that sounds like utter nonsense to me. She may have kindled gentle fires, but of this I know nothing... Los Angeles June 3, 1976’
And, from a letter written to me by Lisa Charonatt, former member of my dance group who also met Elisabeth and Louis while in Paris in 1927:
‘I last met Elisabeth sometime in 1943 of 1944 in San Francisco. I remember that I thought she looked very beautiful, healthy, gentle and quite a lady. She hardly used any make-up. She spoke of you with affection. The war, no word, and hoped you were allright. She told me about Louis coming to Los Angeles after her and stated she could not return with him and all the neuroses - she had had all she could | |
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stand. And further he was too pessimistic and depressing. San Francisco July 10, 1976
And further, excerpts from a letter written to me by Mrs. Helene Sheldon Bergman, whose address I have recently discovered, dated August 1976, another member of the original Kosloff group. After a successful dancing career in New York, she opened a ballet school in Las Vegas, Nevada: ‘I saw a lot of Elisabeth and her husband Ben Jankel, in the late 1930's... Ben was in the real estate business. He was very successful, he and Elisabeth lived well and seemed well suited for each other. He certainly was never a “Jewish judge” - in fact I don't know that Ben was Jewish. He could be very charming and likeable. As to Elisabeth and the “gangsters bit” - I certainly have my doubts about it. Hard to imagine. She never mentioned her father disinheriting her or her going to court about it... I have always been very fond of Elisabeth, she is truly a wonderful person... I answered her last letter (1973 - E.R.) but heard nothing more from her, not even a Christmas card. She always sent a Christmas card and note all through the years...’
I will end with two quotations from Céline himself. The first is from his book ‘Journey to the end of the Night’, in the translation of John H.P. Marks. It refers to Molly, a character in the book:
‘She tried very hard not to show how much I hurt her, but all the same it wasn't difficult to see that I did... her hurt was much deeper than ours is, because what happened with us is that we're more given to making things out worse than they are. With American women its just the opposite. One hates to see it... it may be pretty humiliating but all the same it really is genuine sorrow, its not pride, not jealousy either, nor just making a scene - its | |
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real heartache...’ The second is from at letter to Milton Hindus, author of ‘The Crippled Giant’. The letter was included in the correspondence in L'Herne no. 5:
‘Quite by chance (though the United States is an ocean) perhaps you might happen to meet someone who could tell you what has happened to Elisabeth Craig. Her last address known to me in 1935 was - - - She would be about 44 years old, if she is still living!... Enfin, this all by chance... it is a phantom, but a phantom to which I owe much. What genius in that woman! I would never have been anything without her - what wit! What finesse... what dolorous yet elf-like pantheism... What poetry - what mystery. She understood everything before you'd said a word. They are rare, the women who are not inherently slovens or servants. Then they are enchantresses or fairies...’
It seems to me that with the above, Louis has himself given the dominant characteristics for anyone wanting to make a portrait of Elisabeth without knowing her. His words give a picture of a generosity other than that written about by most of the authors I have quoted. It is a little as if they would pounce upon and exaggerate sexual abnormalities, excesses, insinuations. Perhaps the scarce material about Elisabeth gets lost in their sea of material about Céline. I believe too that Elisabeth's father sounded a possible truth when he confided to me that he was afraid Elisabeth had exchanged the Kosloff obsession for a Destouches obsossion. I would say then that just as she gave herself to the Kosloff training to achieve results, so she did with Destouches. And this was her real generosity.  |
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