Books on the Performing Arts
The divine monument
Peter Conrad MY Double Life Sarah Bernhardt (Peter Owen £6.95) Sarah Bernhardt and her World Joanna
Richardson (Weidenteld and Nicolson £6)
Bernhardt was much more than an actress. Indeed she was hardly an actress at all. She despised that imitative nonentity which Diderot thought was characteristic of the actor, who must specialise in simulating feelings he does not shareand impersonating identities other than his own. Bernhardt dramatised herself. The parts she condescended to play were annexed to her own imPerious, combative self. She flaunted the lack of veracity in her assumptions. Hamlet, for instance, was doubly snubbed : she apPropriated the part sexually by playing it in travesty, and temporally by undertaking it at the age of fifty-five, passing off her raddled Middle age as energetic boyishness. She retained the right to disfigure the texts provided by her captive dramatists: once, in a Dumas play, sedated by opium after a convulsion, she simply forgot her most crucial scene, and turned her lapse into an act of creative nonchalance by saying to her disMaYed colleague, 'Madame, I asked y,ou here today to tell you why I have behaved like this ... I've thought it over, and I'm not going to tell you today.' On stage and off, Bernhardt's single role was herself. She did 'lot act Hamlet; rather she suffered Hamlet to impersonate Bernhardt. Her repertory was a series of auditions: Phedre, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Marguerite Gautier and her Other heroines were all reduced to anxious aspirants, eager to qualify for the most Prized of all parts, that of Sarah Bernhardt. rn My Double Life, dictated in 1906, she Composed a script, as negligently inaccurate as any fiction, for the unremitting performance Which was her life. The memoir ends with her determination to live, but that Means to act: 'I resolved to live. I resolved to be the great artiste that I longed to be.' The concern of her existence has been, she admits, the creation of 'a personality for myself.' Character is not a hereditary endowment, but our daily invention. Our mission in the world, Keats said, was to make ourselves a Soul; Bernhardt's, less spiritually, was to make herself a persona. She manufactured, from the unpromising raw material of her illegitimacy and her miserable childhood, a radiant fictitious self in which she could lose herself The process was like that of sculpture, her hobby : the excavation of a form buried in the obtuse mass of stone. Her first Performance was as an angel in a convent Play, and for her the theatrical profession Wa'S a natural extension of religious voca tion. Religion offered resurrection, the theatre the more immediate satisfaction of reification : one was free to remake oneself, rat her than wait ing on t he millenn ial appearance of the redeemer. As a student she set about opening her voice and rendering it vibrant, disciplining her deportment to make it suit imaginary moods, brushing, combing, curling, pinning and pomading her recalcitrant hair, punishing nature into the semblance of art.
Once this self-fabrication is completed, Bernhardt cannot write about herself confessio'nally, as a subject: she is now a venerable object, and in the memoirs she treats herself less as an artiste than asan institution. That institution is alternately regal, diplomatic, industrial, scientific and even military, since she described the theatre as her battlefield. State carriages transport her to gala appearances, royalties salute her in Europe, while in America she receives the homage of the Iroquois tribal chieftain, and during rehearsals for Ray Bias, in which she played the Spanish Queen, she writes to Hugo as that monarch, and is sent a reply in which he signs himself her valet. (The joke has an ironic accuracy: Bernhardt's dramatists were merely her costume-designers.) Herself an institution, she honours other industrial institutions with her presence, touring armament factories, petroleum wells and the Chicago stockyards. The unelected ambassadress of her race, she boasts that 'all countries have been hospitable to me.' As well as monarch, magnate and itinerant conscience, she conceives of herself as a patroness of scientific invention, paying a nocturnal visit to Edison's electrical kingdom in New Jersey, and ascending in a balloon during the Paris exhibition of 1878 to eat foie gras and drink champagne at an altitude of 2500 metres. Her acts are auguries: when she blots the ComedieFrancaise contract she is signing, she doubles the paper and unfolds 'a magnificent black butterfly,' a Rorshach image of herself. Her riches are a global accumulation of tribute: she transcribes her ledgers of receipts, marvelling at her capacity to generate wealth. She groans under the weight of dfferings loaded on her. Preparing to cross the Channel, she is forced to accept 'lozenges for sea-sickness, sedatives for headache, tissue paper to put down my back, little compress
plasters to put on my diaphragm, and water proof cork soles for my shoes.' As the memoir ends in 1881, she vanquishes America. Her triumph is enacted at Niagara Falls, which she defies to turn its tumult into a roar of approbation, the applause of the elements, as she dresses up coquettishly to impress it, and then contrives to upstage it by stepping out on to an icy hillock in the torrent. Returning to France, she finds her institutional eminence confirmed by the declaration of a public holiday as she lands at Le Havre.
Bernhardt treats herself as a ponderous national property. She became a monument and in 1914 even played Strasbourg Cathe
dral in a scenic poem by Eugene Morand. Joanna Richardson's brief life treats her, however, as a muse, an image omnipresent in decadent art. Ellen Terry called her an azalea or an orchid, a treacherously sensual flower of evil. Wilde thought she resembled an ancient Roman coin, and wrote Saknne in French in the hope that she would play it since the corrupt virgin ity of his heroine and her dancing transformation of herself into an image, vacant, amoral, cruelly self-involved, are extrapolations from the personality of Bernhardt. She herself modelled a bronze inkstand which set her head on the body of a sphinx, another Wildean emblem of depraved wisdom. In Sardou's Theodora she resembled `the fantastic queens of Gustave Moreau.'The compoSerReynaldo Hahn pointed out that all her gestures conformed to a spiral principle, and her dresses were tailored to suggest this linear instability and involution which is the rhythm of Art Nouveau: 'She liked a draped corsage and a skirt which was tighter at the ankles than the hips and seemed to turn in a spiral around her.'
The thick-lipped drowsy Jane Morris with her nimbus of hair and dazed somnambulistic expression was the muse of the pre-Raphaelites; Bernhardt was the more febrile and elegantly sinuous muse of Art Nouveau. Shaw said that her complexion gave evidence of her study of modern art : blanched like ivory, suggesting the opalescence of the Impressionists not the glare of the preRaphaelites. Lalique's jewels, in the form of predatory mermaids or ostentatious peacocks or plumed serpents, were designed for her. Mucha's posters, in which she wears tiaras of lilies or stands' i n a Byzantine cape against a mosaic wall like a figure in a reliquary, did not merely advertise her productions but created a decorative style based on her attitudes and ornaments. Maurice Baring declared her to be the primary source of modern art, subtly forming the poetry of D'Annunzio, the theatre of Rostand and Maeterlinck, and the music of Fauri and Hahn.
Bernhardt's life, even gossipily told by herself, is of less interest than the images of her these artists made. Miss Richardson's book is therefore valuable mainly for its illustrations. Bernhardt was one of the first celebrities to be invented by the camera, the instrument which suited her infinitely versatile superficiality. She was nothing but what she wore and what she pretended to be, 'a symbol, an ideal, an epitome' and not a woman, as Ellen Terry said. The camera understands this attitudinising, symbolic surface better than narrative can, since it knows how little there is beneath it.
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