Whatever Happened to Adrienne Fidelin?

July 23rd, 2008 Posted in Mystery, Concrete incident or process, Biography

Adrienne Fidelin, nick-name Ady, was the love companion of Man Ray, American artist and photographer, in the latter half of the 1930s (circa 1936-1940) in Paris. Their relationship is celebrated in Ray’s autobiographical memoir “Self-Portrait” (1963) and in photographs there and other photos now available on the web.

Mlle. Fidelin was a dancer by profession, from a Guadeloupe family, a French citizen, and lived in Paris amidst close kin. Ray mentions her brother in his narrative. She accompanied Ray on the famous exodus from the city in the spring of 1940 at the time of the German invasion but they and most of the others returned after the beginning of the occupation. Shortly after Ray decided to get out while he could since America was not yet at war and he offered to take Fidelin as well but she refused. So they parted. The letters they wrote never got through and their separation did not weather the war years that followed. During this time they each found their permanent mates.

Over the war years Ady and her new French husband tried to secure and protect the works Ray had left behind and thought they were not entirely successful a good part of the collection was saved.

Then Ady exits Ray’s story and disappears. We, as readers of Ray’s book, suspect that she continued on with her own story (life) but it is not easily available to us. What happened to her after Ray is a point-of-view mystery. She and the circle that surrounded her and their descendants who are still alive might know the continuation of her narrative but the rest of us don’t. For me and the rest of Man Ray’s literary audience she goes off-stage, period, without echo except in the question I am posing now.

This experience of the incomplete narrative is constantly with us. I do not have to go to Man Ray to find it. Fellow students from elementary school on up wander off as do comrades from military service, former work-mates and colleagues, teachers, fellow jurors and so on.

During an idle moment you might call to mind a particular lost person and question “Whatever Became of …” before returning to your concrete, here and now, life. A friend of mine gave me this image: He was standing on a street in London and a military truck carrying Sikh soldiers passed. He waved and one of the soldiers made eye contact with him and waved back. The truck continued on and was immediately lost in traffic. But what about the life and narrative of that soldier? Totally gone for my friend, only the gesture remains.

This is another way into a sociology–an attempt to describe and understand the plural experience–isn’t it? Each of us an ego-central for self, with a unique and concrete story line. Each also playing the alter (another person) within the spaces of the other egos as they do the same for us. Narratives intertwined into a complexity that none of us can actually know in detail.

^^^^^

Richard Lamparski issued a famous series of books of interviews with people who had fleeting moments of fame and then fell into obscurity or, for us, into a point-of-view (or relative) non-existence. Essentially they disappear into their locally well-known addresses. So the “Whatever Became of Series…” confronts the loss of the string of another person’s narrative but by emphasizing fame as well as a virtual instead of a physical presence it truncates our more general interest in loss of the other.

A similar situation turns up in the theatrical play. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is full of other characters. It is Hamlet’s story, he is the central figure, but others have their parts, each called out, illuminated into existence, by the needs of the Hamlet narrative and plot. Tom Stoppard in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” pulls out two minor characters from “Hamlet” and speculates about their lives off-stage (while the initial play is on-going). It is an imaginary parallel on-stage presentation of what these two men are doing when they are not actually on-stage in Shakespeare’s play.

Stoppard finds what is going on in their lives is radically limited by the primary narrative. They are fated to die by the earlier script and though they do not know this (or much else) until near the end of both stories they speculate philosophically on issues of chance and on confusions of language and on the nature of theater and fiction and, in the process, on the mystery of the individual in social life.

The question in real life is the possible effect on the trajectory of B’s narrative as a consequence of his participation in A’s story. And vice versa. As with Hamlet and R & G it might go overwhelmingly one-way. But other outcomes are obviously possible.

^^^^^

I will continue to chip away at this theme in future posts. But meanwhile will someone with a French connection please investigate and bring us up to date on the Adrienne Fidelin story.

A serious request: e-mail us at avi@ordinarysociology.com

 

Note.

The web sites on Adrienne Fidelin present her with an American sense of ethnicity of a decidedly narrow variety to which I suspect Ady might not subscribe. Please read comments on the Flickr site by Bill Jones Jr. and Omega418.