an awful paragraph

This is the second paragraph of Carlton Lake’s preface to Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso, which I picked up at the Museum today:

“About a dozen years ago Alice Toklas described to me a visit she had recently made to Picasso and Françoise Gilot in the Midi. She gave Françoise very faint praise indeed but in the process she succeeded, against her own best efforts, in convincing me that Françoise Gilot was a person of very considerable interest.”

Multiple things wrong here:

1. Lake lets us know that he’s on friendly terms with Alice Toklas, thereby placing himself in the thick of things in Paris. There would be no problem with this if it were somehow explained in some detail how it’s relevant to the story, but Lake tries to make it sound casual and natural. (Worse yet, he does the same thing in the previous paragraph, breezily letting us know that Fernande Olivier, the important early “muse” of Picasso, was his wife’s French tutor in later years.)

2. Lake makes Toklas look like a supercilious and catty gossip with her “very faint praise indeed” of Gilot. By putting it in the preface, he also guarantees that Gilot will hear it, if she hadn’t heard it from him already.

3. Lake also lets us (and Gilot, also a reader) know that Gilot was apparently viewed as Picasso’s lightweight playmate in the considered opinion of Toklas, and presumably the rest of her circle.

4. Lake then comes back and insinuates that, even though Gilot was viewed as nothing more than the latest Picasso chick, Lake himself was discerning enough to reach the counter-intuitive conclusion that she actually had some substance as well.

Nice way for a writer to treat his partner, without whom he’d have had no story to ghost-write.

I’ve not read the book yet, but did see extensive interviews with Gilot in one Picasso documentary. My impression was that she was bright and insightful, though a bit self-important. A few too many of her stories were about how Picasso said something to her and then she made a stunning, unanswerable comeback that silenced the painter– such stories concluding each time with a triumphalistic smile. (That’s one of my least favorite phenomena in general: people reporting on how they destroyed someone else in a conversation with the use of mighty, laser-sharp wit.) But once those tedious moments were ignored, she definitely had something to say.

Their son Claude, in the documentary I saw, gave the impression of being insightful and unpretentious, though maybe a bit brusque. Their famous daughter Paloma did not appear in the film.