Paradise regained

PAUL MORAND

A French author views the Nudists, and concedes the Naked Truth to be moral, but not always beautiful

I know a ravishing young woman who married into a very conventional family. Under a false name and without their knowledge she dances nude, or almost nude, every evening in a Paris music-hall. In the course of a performance some months ago, she crossed that arbitrary line which the public authorities draw between the modest and the immoral. She discarded her last veil— which promptly led to trouble with the police, and got her picture in all the papers. Some days later the young dancer told me of her fright when she saw her father-in-law, at the family table, open his newspaper, ponder the immodest portrait, and condemn it as a moral outrage, without once suspecting that the culprit, his own daughter-in-law, was seated at his own table! At first I simply thought of this as a likely theme for a story or motionpicture, but afterwards I came to realize that it had much wider claims to consideration.

This elderly gentleman, whose eyes refused to recognize beauty when it showed itself in the nude, might symbolize an entire generation. Not content with piling on as many clothes as possible, this age had covered its rooms with curtains, its chairs with tufted upholstering, its doors with heavy portieres, its pianos with cashmere runners, and its pictures with plush frames. The old fellow was condemning the generation of to-day: the generation of glass and nickel tables, smooth surfaces, electricity, suntan, and open air; the generation of everything simple and direct; the generation, in short, which has taken to the glorification of the nude and has made a cult of Nudism.

In the days of the heresies, there was a sect which recruited its members from among the peasants of Bohemia, Poland, and the Ukraine. They held that since our first parents had covered themselves with leaves on the day following their expulsion from Paradise, the proper way to regain the state of primal innocence was to take off these leaves (in their case, clothes). They were called Adamites. "Clothing is pride," they thought in the simplicity of their hearts, as they undressed. Since they lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, instead of being fined one franc each, these heretics were burned. Yet, as one of our humorous authors has written, with the memory of Adam and Eve to inspire him: "There is not a single religion that can boast of such remote beginnings as Nudism."

This modern cult of the nude is, to my mind, the ultimate consequence and result of the ideas of the super-Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom we are indebted for various hymns to nature, for the interest in hiking and botanizing, for our sympathy with the primitive, for the doctrine of the equality of races, and for many ways of thinking which are at the bottom of the French Revolution. Thus, Nudism (or Naturism; by the current distinction, the Nudist requires absolute nakedness and the Naturist tolerates a light veil, but the spirit is the same) comprises a return both to ancient conceptions and to certain austere Protestant principles. The word "nude" can have two very different meanings. It can suggest the obscene nakedness of paganism. Or it can imply severity—as a "naked soul," a "naked sword," a "bare room." Just as Genevese philosophy of the Eighteenth Century invented a "noble savage" to contrast with an "ignoble master" (brother to the "wicked rich man" of the Bible), so our modern hygienists distinguish between the "virtues of nakedness," and the "vices of civilization and clothing." Actually the first Americans a European ever laid eyes upon were nude. When Christopher Columbus landed at Haiti he wrote: "These are pleasant people. They are not grasping . . . and they always have an amiable smile. Men and women are as naked as when their mothers brought them into the world; but your Highnesses can be assured that their morality is above reproach." Hence the Eighteenth Century concluded: Since these naked Caribs were good, the Spaniards of Madrid, bedecked with silk, armor, and velvets, were wicked—and this error in logic is still with us.

The Nudists insist that we feel the cold because we do not go naked. Our bodies could become as accustomed to the cold as our faces, it seems. And does not the smiling Montaigne say in his Essays: "Why shouldn't a man be all physiognomy," or in other words, why shouldn't his body be as exposed as his face? Paradoxically enough, the Nudist theories generally spread more easily in Nordic countries, despite the low temperatures, than in the sunny Mediterranean regions. Around 1860, they took root and flourished in Germany and Austria. Before the war there were already a number of Nudists disporting themselves among the birches at Berlin. It is well known that with the lower classes of Russia and Scandinavia it is the custom for both sexes to bathe nude together in summer. In 1922 when I published an account of my experiences in a Finnish Nudist club (Nordic Night, in my book, Open All Night) the story caused some stir at the time by its novelty, as Nudism was unknown in France. Four years later a Parisian magazine, Vivre, was founded, though it makes a poor showing in comparison with the thirty German ones. In France today there are several thousand Nudists and Germany has more than a hundred thousand. In the serious establishments at Berlin, strangers are not admitted. As for the rest, any self-respecting bell-hop will introduce you. Near Paris about five years ago, the new Adams chartered the island of Villènes, at Poissy, in the Seine; but they could be seen from the banks (and what is sinning if not being seen?). The police made them put on at least those little triangles of black cloth which are the fig leaves of the Twentieth Century. The result was a Schism: the confirmed advocates of pure Nudism retired to a park surrounded by walls, and last year they founded the Sparta Club, an austere name calculated to silence the Gallic witticisms of Frenchmen.

Whether or not we go so far as absolute nudity, our age of synthesis, speed, and simplification does undeniably tend towards scantness of attire. Many young people take walks in the nude. In 1900, a woman wore from twenty-five to thirty items of clothing; to-day, in summer, she does not wear more than four or five. At Newport at the time of Taft, or Trouville at the time of Loubet, women went bathing in stockings and short dresses. The police regulations for music-halls required a complete covering of pink tights from head to feet. Five years ago, bathing trunks which left the upper part of the body exposed were prohibited on the Cote d'Azur and at Biarritz. The first town to allow them was Juanles-Pins, in 1927. The resultant success generally led other mayors to a similar tolerance—except at Biarritz, where a Spanish strictness still holds. (Ten years ago at St. Sebastien, I saw a woman bathing with gloves and a hat on.) But surely the República Española will change all that—for Republican ideas are also naked and unadorned. Victor Hugo bathed naked at Jersey. At Juanles-Pins, I saw George Bernard Shaw exposing a chest which has the overwhiteness of a Northern barbarian. And the Prince of Wales, forgetting that kings are made of ermine and royal purple, readily permits himself to be photographed in a bathing suit.

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From antiquity to the modern times, the question of the nude in the theatre has repeatedly agitated the censors of public morals. In Monna Vanna, the actress opens her mantle to the view of the soldiery. But that takes place in the Renaissance; and besides, her back is to the audience. Though Isadora Duncan danced naked several times—Saltavit et placuit— this happened at Venice before the time of Mussolini. It is said that last year at the festival of Delphi, organized by M. Sikilianos, there were danseuses nude beneath the moon, among the olive trees, in the centre of the sacred hemicycle, on the slopes of the Parnassus—but I wonder whether there are not better ways of honoring the Apollo who preferred his own beauty to that of all others.

Where does beauty end and vice begin? Up to what point can the aesthetic be carried? These are questions which custom alone can decide. Until the Seventeenth Century our forbears went bathing naked. The twopiece bathing suit is compulsory in the United States and the English colonies, but in Japan whole families are to be seen bathing naked in a grand reunion. And, nevertheless, since the Eleventh Century the Samurai of Kyoto have maintained a civilization which, by its refinement and chivalrous decorum, makes the Occident seem barbarous indeed. In the taverns of our severe and monastic Middle Ages, travellers slept without night-clothes, four or five in one bed, as the Gothic miniatures bear witness. The Arabs consider our women with unveiled faces quite as shameless as we might think the savages of the Pacific, whose loins glisten in the sun. The Chinese would find it much more immodest of a woman to expose her foot than to remove her gown. Better still: an explorer, M. Forbin, tells of giving a dress as a present to a young native of the Marquesas Islands. When she was alone with him, she took the greatest pleasure in wearing it, but when she returned to her village she would roll up her dress in the leaf of a banana tree and go naked, for fear of shocking all right-minded members of the community. The sense of shame exists everywhere, but it always expresses itself differently.

To bathe naked, to feel the water of the river gliding across the loins, along the legs, beneath the arm-pits, then to loll upon the hot sand without clothing—all that is sheer glory. To run barefoot through the dew in June, to sleep naked in the moonlight in August, on the deck of a boat, while looking up at the stars; or to breakfast on the seashore, in the intense glare of mid-day, with the sting of salt on the skin—these are enduring and unforgettable delights.

But there is also the bad side, (though I skip the subject of colds). One should not scandalize the majority of his contemporaries. There must be no element of defiance in one's doffing of clothes. We must not set new fashions solely out of impatience with current ones. "Nudism," the couturier Poiret has written cleverly, "is a new style of dressing"—and he adds: "I believe in the future of clothing, the only thing that can make us appreciate the nude." Here, for once the true voluptuaries join the most austere Puritans.

To how many sorry sights would we be condemned, were we to go naked in the interests of beauty? Imagine Chaplin without his shoes, the Pope without his robes, Marlene Dietrich without her silk stockings, Mussolini without a uniform!

And the crowds? Think what a Nudist Wall Street would be like at noon! All the business men with their securities under their arms—where would they put their money? Money demands pockets. Capitalist society is founded upon pockets. I once asked some Papuans why they had no possessions. "Because we have no pockets," they answered me. "The man who owns things must hold them in his hands, so that he cannot protect himself, and he is killed"—and eaten which is to say that he is pocketed in the stomach.

Let us silence our regrets. For though we be handsome for a few young years, we are unsightly during the major portion of our lives. We should think of more than our own health and comfort: we should consider the esthetic senses of others. Let us spare them the galling spectacle of our decrepitude. Let us go back to our tailor, asking him to correct our narrow shoulders and curving tummies.

"If you condemn the nude," say the Nudists, "to be logical you would have to destroy all nude statuary." This is pure sophistry. We are twenty years old but once—whereas the youth of art is eternal! So let us entrust to art the task of preserving the welcome illusion of our beauty, in bronze and marble,—materials less perishable than human flesh, and less subject to corruption.