Vali Myers:
A Memoir
by Gianni Menichetti
The Golda Foundation, Fresno, CA 2007
244 pp., illus. Trade, $25.00
ISBN: 0-9785606-0-4.
Reviewed by Allan Graubard
442 West 57th Street, 3H, 10019,
New York, NY
agraubard@yahoo.com
Vali Meyers first comes to us in Love
on the Left Bank, a book of photographs
by Ed van der Elsken, who graced his cover
with her portrait from the early 1950s.
There she is at 20, gazing at herself
in an old corroded mirror. Audacious,
beautiful, with a certain flair for the
streets she lived on for eight years and
an honesty about herself and her desires
that will not desert her, Vali captures,
and captivates for us still, that post
World War Two bohemia. Lucky for us that
Vali was much more than what these photographs
frame. And until she passes in 2003 from
stomach cancer at the age of 73, she will
not let us forget who she is, what she
creates, and how she loves. Along the
way, constantly perfecting her art, living
always as she wishes, she will touch within
us a pulse that animates perpetually,
and which we leap toward if only to gain
its strength as our own.
So it is fortunate now that Gianni Menichetti,
her companion of 30 years, has written
this memoir. Who, other than Gianni, can
tell her storythis man who
knew her so well. And who, other than
Gianni, can offer it all as a gift to
Valis friends (those with us), the
many others who know Vali through her
art, and those first meeting her in his
words. But be warned: Valis appeal
is infectious.
And thus, her life: She is born in 1930
in Sydney, Australia, of "blue-blood"
stock; her fathers ancestors, convicts
both, being brought to the continent in
1790 and 1792, when danger was a byword
and England a memory. At five her family
moves to the Outback, and the wild countryside
there begins to shape her. Vali is a precocious
and rebellious child, and her love for
drawing and dancing distinguish her, even
so early on. By 14 she leaves home, working
in factories for rent money and to pay
for lessons at the Melbourne Modern Ballet
Company. She quickly claims eminence as
their premiere danseuse, and her
future seems bright. Adventure,
though, is another lure, and in 1950 she
chucks it all and sails for Paris, where
she settles finally on the Left Bank.
This is not café society for Vali
by any means or her version of the young
artist on the lam. Its poor, rough
and tumble, and Vali ekes out a living
dancing in local cabarets while continuing
to draw. Her crowd balances on its daily
tightrope between stinging hunger and
passing starvation, witty pleasure and
cruel despair, and the kind of brio that
keeps them vivant: artists, hoodlums,
and roustabouts alike. For her first exhibition
theres a police station; a private
viewing by cops who had just arrested
her on their regular sweep for vagabonds.
But Vali puts it best in one of her letters
that Gianni excerpts for us: "We
lived on the streets and cafes of our
Quarter like a pack of bastard dogs,
and with the strict hierarchy of such
a tribe . . . a world without illusions,
without dreams . . . [but with] a dark
stark beauty like a short Russian story
by Gorky that one doesnt forget."
Prison, murder, suicide, and insanity
are not unknown here either.
Paris is a mecca then, and Vali meets
up with a good number of notables. There
is the Israeli painter, Mati Klarwein,
a real compatriot, and Cocteau and Genet,
who she consorts with. Gabriel Pomerand
(cofounder of Lettrism with Isadore
Isou, a leading, if momentary, avant-garde
in the city) writes an essay on Vali,
now unfortunately lost. It is this essay
which George Plimpton uses for his famous
Paris Review, spring 1958 number,
where he publishes Valis black and
white drawings. Django Reinhart, the great
jazz guitarist, embraces Vali completely
and considers her one of the family. And,
of course, she meets others, the Dutch
painter Karel Appel (of COBRA fame, which
later inspires the Situationists) and
poet Simon Vinkenoog. During the latter
part of these years Valis addiction
to opium consumes her, and she retreats
for long spells to her cheap hotel room,
where she dreams and draws, draining herself,
as Gianni puts it, "to skin and bones."
Lammas Tide, a drawing she works
on for six years, is the pivot.
By 1958 shes had enough and heads
south to Italy and the Amalfi coast, landing
in a town that goes by the name of Positano.
That she enters the town barefoot, no
longer having any shoes to wear, seems
perfectly natural, what else was she to
do, though it scandalizes the natives
who want to throw her out. Of course,
they dont. Tennessee Williams and
Stella Adler, erstwhile traveling companions,
who have come to the town for a spell,
take to Vali. Later, in Orpheus Descending,
as Gianni notes, Williams will base
Carol Cutrere, one of his most intriguing
minor characters, on Vali; a play that
some of us know by its film version, The
Fugitive Kind. Needless to say, any
woman who lies back in a graveyard to
rest after a night of jokingand
hears the dead whispering "live,
live!"is a woman close
to my heart.
Near the town, though, is a steep gorge
with tall cliffs that harbors an "ancient
abandoned garden," il Porto, that
suits Vali perfectly, and which she discovered
four years prior. She elects to live there
in impoverished splendor, with her husband,
Rudi, then Gianni, and her menagerie of
animals; a menagerie she cares for with
exceptional dedication. Queen here is
Foxy, a foundling fox cub, who Vali raises
as a mother does her child. For 14 years,
Vali and Foxy live side by side, until
the fox dies.
If day in il Porto meant work, tending
to the animals, and other chores, night
meant art; her drawings, and the definition
of an oeuvre that would soon attract
leading curators in Europe and New York,
where exhibitions proliferate. Her time
in New York, where she roosts at the Chelsea
Hotel, brings to her other poets, revolutionaries,
and performers, from Ira Cohen, to Abbie
Hoffman, Debbie Harry (our "Blondie)
and more. Bobby Yarra, a friend of Gregory
Corsos, also grows close to Vali.
It is Bobby, in his role as immigration
lawyer, who aids Vali when legal issues
erupt about her status in the US. And
it is Bobby who arranges, through the
auspices of the Golda Foundation, the
publication of Giannis memoirs.
It would be silly of me to record Valis
life further because the book is here
for that, with its many insights and funny
stories gained from years of intimacy
between Gianni and Vali. But I will say
this, Vali Myers was an artist who lived
her creations and whose art, in response,
transfigured her life, and the men and
women and animals and places she touched
enduringly.
I can only hope that more and more readers
pick up this book and take to heart this
stunning, fiercely independent woman;
and that in her native Australia, which
she returned to at the end of her life,
her art will reach the people she hailed
from; preserving her legacy in a fashion
equal, at least in part, to how she created
it: from her shoeless feet up, turning
dog shit into stars