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Eau de rancor Coco and Igor Chris Greenhalgh Review &# 163; 12, pp 311 Chanel and Stravinsky enjoyed love in the afternoon for a few months during the summer of 1920. He had lost his wealth to the Bolsheviks; she lodged him for free at her villa outside Paris, together with a consumptive wife, a brood of children, a pianola and an aviary of vocally trained parrots. In the autumn, she exchanged him for a younger and more sportingly virile Russian aristocrat, who had helped to kill Rasputin. As consolation, she secretly subsidised a revival of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, in which the carnivorous maternal earth gobbles up a sacrificial victim. He presented her, in return, with a triple icon, a sanctimonious souvenir of Mother Russia. For a while, she thought he might have made her pregnant.
Instead, she delivered a perfume into the world: this was the year, as Chris Greenhalgh says, in which Chanel No. 5 was born. From the ephemeral liaison of the milliner and the musician, Greenhalgh has elicited a fine, entrancingly poetic novel. He does his best to equality the partners, emphasising Chanel's wealth, her business-like cunning and her erotic egotism, while showing Stravinsky to be morally craven and emotionally thwarted. This is a man who scores the Great War rather than experiencing it: The shells whistled over the trenches in E flat. Carnally, Chanel is as frank and vulgar as nature itself when it groans in satiation during The Rite of Spring. For Stravinsky, after the decorous procreative drill of sex with his wife, the raw pleasure of rutting with Coco is like the sudden and liberating discovery of jazz.
Their orgasms are bifocal, as if two clarinets were playing simultaneously in harshly conflicting keys. Chanel startles Stravinsky by making it clear she considers her work to be just as significant as his. He retaliates by reminding her that shes just a shopkeeper, but Greenhalgh deftly uncovers a complicity between their artistic aims: A common loathing of fussiness and luxuriance that produced her funereally chic little black dresses and his stringently neoclassical symphonies. In 1928, she designed the monochrome costumes for his starchy ballet Apollon Music&# 232; te. Even the scent she marketed with a stark numeral instead of a name seems somehow Stravinsky in its chemical compounding of aromas, disdaining anything floral. Intriguingly, Greenhalgh has discovered that a critic in 1911 had called Stravinsky's Petrushka a blend of Russian vodka and French perfume.
Both characters are austere abstractionists, incommoded by the realistic mess of actual feeling. When Igor accuses Coco of being all surface, she snaps: What else is there? He, too, relies on a stern formalism to contain or suppress the violence that erupts in the primitive ceremony of The Rite of Spring or the crazed rejoicing of the clown in Petrushka. Greenhalgh watches him deal with the perturbing news of his mothers arrival: he folds her letter into a small square, as if with this action he might shrink his difficulties into a manageable space. The novel itself is constructed with the same patterned rigour, which mimics the alternating black and white keys on Igor's piano or the black initials on a white awning outside Cocos shop.
Even her nickname (she was born Gabrielle) compresses this duality: Coco is baby-talk for snow and cocaine, but also for poo and inky liquorice powder. In a world reduced to such abstinent simplicity, only Stravinsky's miserable wife longs for ruddy, blowsy colour: she disapproves of the monochromatic d&# 233; cor of Cocos villa, which remembering the radiance of the stained-glass windows in Russian churches she rightly considers an affront to God. But she, too, undergoing a chest X-ray, learns to see herself in black and white. Looking at the photograph of her diseased lungs, she understands that she is a ghost. The pattern-making continues after the affair and the novel are over, as Greenhalgh traces the parallel lives of Coco and Igor through the remainder of the century. In 1962, President Kennedy invited Stravinsky to the White House; the next year, Jacqueline Kennedy chose a Chanel suit for the Dallas motorcade and insisted on wearing it on the return flight to Washington, even though it was by then smeared with her husbands blood and brains.
And in 1989, when Karl Lagerfeld took over Chanel's business, he used the music of The Rite of Spring to introduce his first fashion show. Coincidence, or the working of an intricately symmetrical destiny? Speculation about such matters is just one of the pleasures on offer in Coco and Igor.
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