“Iwas born October 2, 1901, in Burgundy. My mother left for Paris, leaving me with my grandmother who was already caring for five other little children that her three other daughters had given her to raise. We were six little love children: our fathers had forgotten to recognize us.” So begins Kiki Souvenirs, laying out in three sentences its central concerns: the warring pulls of countryside and metropolis; the search for love; the wounds of abandonment; and the responsibilities people decide to live up to, or not.
Before writing about any of her fascinating friends in Montparnasse, Kiki trusts readers to spend half her book immersed in the life of a lonely girl growing up poor in the countryside, turning into a restless young woman on the margins of Paris doing nothing more exciting than trying to earn a living. The importance of this backstory becomes clear as we see her drawing on everything she experienced as Alice Prin, illegitimate child of Châtillon-sur-Seine, to craft the character of Kiki, queen of Montparnasse. With every bawdy joke, outmoded regional expression, naughty story, and homespun dress, Kiki presents an amplified version of herself—a self-described “bumpkin”—to enchant her Parisian friends and eventually her fans.
As with her painting, much of Kiki’s writing concerns the pleasure she takes in other people. She almost always positions herself in relation to someone else. She seeks connection to her absent father and distant mother; to mysterious aunts and mistreated cousins; to men who make her promises; to women with miseries worse than her own; and to the artists who draw and paint and film her. And by sketching their portraits in words, her own portrait comes into focus. Kiki Souvenirs tells the story of a young woman becoming the person she is by finding the people who make her feel free.
New faces excite her. New sensations. Food features prominently: how to get the money to buy it; sharing it with friends when you have it; dreaming about it when you don’t. But new knowledge excites her most of all.
She writes about sex as a form of learning. In pursuing it, or having it, or talking about it, people reveal themselves to Kiki. In an early chapter, a friend advises her to “let herself be seduced” by an old man, since “they’re the best for deflowering you painlessly.” Kiki discovers that the would-be deflowerer is a professional clown and more interested in showing her his costumes and playing his guitar than anything else. She’s coy about their night together, saying only “he did a thousand wonderful things to me,” and that afterward she remained a virgin. Instead she focuses on reproducing verbatim the tender lyrics of the song with which the clown serenaded her.
Kiki shows herself as having absorbed so much knowledge about the adult world so quickly that, while still a teenager, she is jaded enough about sex that she can find eating the more appealing activity. She describes staying with a friend named Eva who was “kept” by an old Corsican laborer who gave the young woman a daily allowance of two francs, sausage, and cheese. “I was in the little room with them and they went to bed. They made love. I watched without much excitement and took the opportunity to eat their good sausage.”
As Kiki finds a home among the misfits of Montparnasse, she watches and listens to everything they do and say, amassing her arsenal of details. And by chronicling several small moments in their lives together, she realizes the outsider’s ultimate fantasy: to understand a place better than its so-called natives. She understands Montparnasse as a community that encourages artists to blossom, rather than as a point on a map in which artists happen to live. She understands how across the Quarter’s few blocks, everyone is influencing everyone else, whether they’re Russian painters or Spanish butchers or French landlords or Dutch models. “All the peoples of the earth have pitched their tents here and yet it’s one big family,” she writes.
Once her narrative settles on Montparnasse, Kiki lets little information in from outside to disturb its dreamers. The biggest problem among her friends “is deciding where to go for dinner.” She gives no sense of what anyone thought about other places. She doesn’t write of wars or refugees or the Spanish flu, nor of the question of the revolution of the working classes that vexed so many people in her circle and informed their art making; nor of the global outcry over the executions of the immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, which in Paris prompted protesters to storm onto Montparnasse’s terraces, rattling and thumping the tables. There is no mention of Hemingway’s or Fitzgerald’s novels or Lindbergh’s landing. Aside from Man Ray, Americans exist for Kiki as an energetic, faceless throng, dancing madly. “They’re like kids!” she writes.
But hers is a myopia born under the sign of love. She recognizes that the forces of family history, economic necessity, and her own desire for adventure, love, and self-discovery have her bound so tightly to Montparnasse that she can never leave. She writes: “I feel free here. I can sing my songs and mess up now and then without worrying about going back to eating nothing but baked beans. People here are open-minded. Things that would be hanging crimes in other places are treated here like minor sins.”
Kiki delivers her story in short popping sentences, as though we’re overhearing her sharing a drink with a friend and she’s hurrying to get it all out. This yields chapters of usually no more than a couple of pages, most often ending with some kind of punch line, sometimes stamped by an exclamation point. She’s smoothed her words down until they flow like water. Her sentences travel in one direction only. There is no doubling back, no tentative language. Maybe she took a long time to finish the book not because she was lazy about the undertaking, as Man Ray and Edward Titus respectively implied, but because she needed to keep refining her prose until she was satisfied that she sounded as confident on the page as she did on the stage.
She gets up close to her subjects, writing with her aperture wide open to let in lots of light while limiting herself to the tightest depth of field. She tends to capture people in a line or two. Famous names get no more ink than obscure ones. Her first boyfriend Dédé is “a big frog-faced blonde.” Kisling has the look of someone who’s been “well-cooked by the sun.” Derain “laughs at his own stories as he tells them.” Her cruel lover Robert wears “socks missing their ends, like mittens without tips. He told me this was the fashion and I believed him.”
For all its freewheeling talk of sex, drugs, and heavy drinking, Kiki Souvenirs is in the end a somewhat conservative work, focused on a young woman’s quest for acceptance from her group and love from the people she loves. Though she starts out a rebel—defining herself in opposition to her uncaring mother, her controlling teachers, the ignorant villagers representing the traditions and prejudices dictating how her life was expected to unfold—once she finds her way to Montparnasse, she becomes a conformist. It’s only that she conforms with nonconformists. She prides herself on how smoothly her life runs in tandem with those of her chosen community of outsiders, how easily she moves among them.
Kiki presents herself as a liberated woman, which she truly was. And yet her sense of freedom is intimately linked to her sense of service to others. She’s no cynical networker but treats each new friendship made as a kind of victory. She delights in the commitments these connections present. She finds pleasure in many forms throughout the book, but it seems nothing makes her happier than having someone to watch out for.
Kay Boyle called attention to that generosity of spirit when sketching Kiki in her own memoir of the 1920s. “This much I know: when you knocked at Kiki’s white stone flesh for entry, she too opened wide her heart and moved the furniture aside so that you could come in.” Even when she’s onstage, a setting that actively encourages narcissism and rewards self-aggrandizing behavior, Kiki sees herself chiefly as a servant, someone who has volunteered for the duty of providing a night’s enjoyment.
In a book so concerned with the search for connection, Kiki’s shortest and most evasive chapter concerns the person she’d known intimately for longer than any other. While Kiki Souvenirs features Man Ray’s photographs, giving him ten pages in which to tell his version of her story in images, she in return assesses him in an anodyne three-page chapter, “Man Ray,” that discloses nothing. She compliments his “pretty photos” and “absolutely extraordinary paintings” and tells the reader she finds him very attractive, “like the devil in the flesh.” But that’s about it. He garners another sentence in a later chapter as she surveys the Quarter at decade’s end, although she might as well be describing a passing acquaintance: “There is Man Ray, lost to the world as he stares into little pieces of glass—lost in his imagination—or else dreaming about some new-fangled sort of photographic apparatus.” In his own memoir, Man Ray chose to interpret the brevity of Kiki’s writing about their life together not as an insult but as an act of discretion.
Above all, Kiki Souvenirs makes clear that in her various incarnations, Kiki had always been a storyteller. She told stories in song, on canvas and paper and celluloid, and in the way she carried herself in front of other artists trying to tell their own stories through their portraits of her. The book stands as an expert performance of self, her most sustained and public step in presenting the character of Kiki de Montparnasse that she’d been crafting onstage and off for a decade.
On the page, Kiki is earthy, hungry, wounded, loving, haunted, excitable, impulsive, messy, clear-eyed. And loyal above all, grateful to the place that opened up her life to so much possibility and change and movement, even as she’d tethered herself to it so tightly that a walk across the Seine could feel like a betrayal.
She ends her story
My friends, through their talent, made Montparnasse what it is. . . . Some nights, I’ll admit, they tried to turn me from the path of duty to take me to Montmartre. But I refused to be a deserter.
KIKI
Montparnasse, 1929
On June 25, Kiki and Broca hosted a launch party at one of the Quarter’s most expensive restaurants (and James Joyce’s favorite), the Falstaff. Drinks were provided by the neighborhood’s beloved Liverpudlian bartender, the former prizefighter Jimmie Charters, recently poached from the nearby Dingo, the bar whose reputation he’d helped to make with his rough-hewn charm and strong cocktails.
The Parisian press had helped to publicize the book in the days leading up to the event: “Who doesn’t know Kiki, in Montparnasse, and therefore the whole world?” asked a columnist in the arts and letters review Comoedia. “Kiki, the Quarter’s mistress of ceremonies since the day she arrived [has] written her memoirs—and she has some stories to tell!” Most of the artists whose portraits of Kiki appear in the book attended the launch. Man Ray did not.
Kiki had planned to sign books as people bought them at the event, but the shipment from the printer failed to reach Paris in time. Instead she posed for photos holding a clunky mockup of the cover while Treize took preorders. A photo from the night shows a grinning Treize holding the mockup in one hand and a wad of bills in the other.
Kiki reached the peak of her fame that summer as anticipation for her book ran high and the Parisian papers started covering it. A columnist for Paris-Soir began reporting regularly on everything Kiki, from her random pronouncements (“I dream of visiting the Orient,” Kiki tells us, “to hear the chanting of the muezzin and to paint women lounging on beautiful carpets”), to her collection of home remedies (“Kiki has sulfur, veronal, venotrope, mercury, ether, camphor, and a thousand other products with sonorous names”), to the state of her mental health (“Yesterday over drinks Kiki told us that she’d been tempted, several times, to kill herself. We didn’t want to believe it. . . . The woman we’ve always considered the Queen of Joy has had her moments of despair. But then who hasn’t?”). Meanwhile Broca and Kiki contributed to the hype in the pages of Paris-Montparnasse, planting pieces such as an “official bulletin” describing how the florist next to La Coupole was facing difficulties ever since Kiki’s “election” as queen of Montparnasse, since “the admirers of Kiki are so numerous that his store is out of red roses by nine o’clock in the evening.”
Coco Chanel, who’d never before had any interaction with Kiki, chose her as one of two dozen guests she gathered to celebrate the closing of Le Fils prodigue (The Prodigal Son) created by George Balanchine with music by Sergei Prokofiev, which had run at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, the last ever Ballets Russes work under Serge Diaghilev, in what was to be the company’s final season in Paris. Kiki had never seen such piles of caviar as she did chez Chanel. The French writer Maurice Sachs, another attendee, noted in his journal: “Kiki, who had too much to drink, sang very obscene songs.”
A few nights later, with Foujita, Desnos, Kisling, Pascin, Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Duchamp, Brancusi, and other friends (but not Man Ray), Kiki went to a Bastille Day party that Hilaire Hiler hosted in a rented hall near Place Denfert-Rochereau. Hiler “installed a long wooden table, tubs full of bottled beer on ice, and jugs full of a potent punch, and let the party rip wide open,” as Robert McAlmon described. And in a leafy outdoor square adjoining the building, Hiler set up a grand piano, upon which Kiki sat and sang under the faerie lights and branches while he played, “surrounded by a constant but changing mob.” Many of them had seen some of the recent Ballets Russes shows, and much of the night’s energy went into dancing madly while Kiki and Hiler performed. “McAlmon was Nijinsky that night, leaping to incredible heights over the lighted paper lanterns,” wrote Boyle. “I did a wild ring-around-a-rosy dance hours after hour, while Desnos glided and stamped in an apache tango, flinging an imaginary partner to the other end of the leafy illuminated square, and dragging her back again.” It was, for their group, one of the great parties of the decade and one of the last.
Finally, Kiki had a proper book release at the Edouard Loewy bookstore on boulevard Raspail. It took place on the last Saturday night in October, on the uneasy weekend between the span of Black days (Black Thursday, Black Monday, Black Tuesday), when the American market shed close to a third of its value. “Kiki was kissing all comers,” reported the American journalist Wambly Bald in his column “La Vie de Bohème (As Lived on the Left Bank)” for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. “The line formed about 9 o’clock outside the book shop when the news swept the Quarter that for 30 francs, one could get a copy [and] her autograph and a kiss in the bargain. Men forgot their demis, dates and dignity and scampered over. One snow-bearded octogenarian . . . hobbled along to the party and came out with two books under his arm.” To accompany her signature, Kiki sometimes drew a little doodle of herself in profile, or head on, or a scene that the receiver would recognize as a shared memory. That night Kiki set aside a copy for Broca, which she inscribed, “to Baby, my Mouth is red, my eyes soft, and our bed is ringed in red lace curtains. Kiki, 1929.”
Kiki Souvenirs attracted immediate attention from the French- and English-language press across Paris, both for its subject matter and for its style. As journalists covered the book, they focused on the facts of Kiki’s life as much as on her telling of them. They played up how little the world beyond the French capital knew of Kiki, with how vital she was to her small corner of it, framing her rise as the quintessential only-in-Paris story. They loved her all the more for being their local secret. No coverage of Kiki’s writing failed to mention her physical beauty. Many reviewers, however, also took her seriously as an artist working in several media who’d chosen literature as one more avenue through which to tell her stories.
Le Temps, one of the city’s major newspapers, ran a front-page story under the headline “A Model’s Memories,” framing the book as a brave piece of writing from someone who’d made the most of a tough childhood to produce “something beautiful and touching,” a surprise coming from someone so young, and a work that didn’t feel derivative of anything else. Nodding to Kiki’s experience as a painter (“not without skill, totally untrained, but with a kind of naïve intelligence that reveals the great mimetic abilities of this wild child of nature”) Le Temps’s critic wondered if perhaps Kiki had been driven to write her memoirs because she knew that no painter could represent her as well as she could represent herself. “Her name may not go down in the history of art, but she helped a young generation to dream, by entertaining it,” he wrote. “By the time her young court painters have turned into wise old men, she’ll make her entrance into the Louvre, in effigy, by Kisling, Hermine David, or Foujita. But the museumgoers won’t know the name of this pretty girl whose attractive anatomy has already inspired so many canvases and deserves to survive longer than they do.” And he judged that while Kiki did an excellent job of making Montparnasse sound like the most exciting place in the world in the early 1920s, she more importantly conveyed how it was a place where “lightheartedness never got in the way of caring for one another, where a joke always held some tender feeling to it.” Kiki, he wrote, “teaches us far more about this world apart than can the learned aestheticians.”
A critic from Paris-Soir compared reading Kiki to eating a simple, hearty, and delicious meal and appreciated that she seemed guided solely by the desire to write about whatever it was that she found interesting, and that she was unafraid to offer no more than that. The critic for L’Intransigeant, appreciating Kiki’s “simple sentences, short, incisive, trenchant, sometimes exceptionally tender,” pointed to how Kiki, “educated in the streets [must have] learned by necessity how to size someone up in a single glance.” And he closed with a line guaranteed to increase sales: “Her book is . . . instructive for all sorts of reasons, but it’s not appropriate reading for young people.”
Another daily, Paris-Midi, while excerpting the book, featured a large reproduction of one of Kiki’s paintings of sailors. “She’s a true original and an innocent,” wrote the Paris-Midi reviewer, “even when singing dirty songs and propping her leg up on the table. She’s a good painter. And she’s beautiful.”
One of the most unexpected reviews came from the stodgy critic for another major Paris daily, Le Figaro. Kiki’s book “was not—certainly not!—a work of literature, even though it’s so tempting these days to pass off primitive stammering as the purest form of art.” And yet he considered it valuable as an unflinching document of a particular historical moment, commending Kiki on making the jump from model, to painter, to “resident ethnologist” of Montparnasse. She even managed a few “piercing anecdotes” about her painter friends, he wrote. “And although we’d prefer to keep it a secret, it’s true that as we romped our way through her irreverent tales of misery and amorous couplings, certain pages gripped us by the heart and held on tightly.”
By August Kiki and Broca had also collected positive reviews from the Berliner Tageblatt, Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse, as well as uncredited reviews written in Russian and Hungarian, all of which they reproduced in the pages of Paris-Montparnasse.
This reception did not go ignored by Kiki’s friends. For a time, she stood alone in their crowd. Kisling, Foujita, Léger, Picabia, and Man Ray might have gotten their names in the papers from time to time, usually when they had new work to debut, but none of them had written a book. Neither Matisse nor Picasso could say that. And yet there was Kiki on the front page of Le Temps, praised for being “clearly in step with her era.” There was Kiki being described as “everything” by Sisley Huddleston (“There are lively girls, heedless of convention; there are rowdy painters and bohemian poets; but Kiki is a lively girl, rowdy painter, and bohemian writer, rolled into one. She is everything.”) And she was not yet thirty. Three years later, when Gertrude Stein began writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she was driven in part by jealousy toward the people she’d known who’d already written well-received autobiographical works, including Kiki.
Wambly Bald and Gertrude Stein weren’t the only English-speakers in Paris following the Kiki story that fall. Also intrigued by the “hubbub” in the French papers, as he put it, was Edward Titus, husband of Helena Rubinstein. Before marrying, Titus had written copy for her then-small business in face creams and cosmetics. Rubinstein became rich and famous, and Titus continued to write her copy. By the 1920s (Titus’s fifties), he’d wanted something of his own, or Rubinstein had wanted it for him, and so borrowing against some of her many properties, she’d set him up with a two-story apartment next to the Dôme, the ground floor of which he filled with rare books and called At the Sign of the Black Manikin. The storefront served mainly as a respectable cover for his mania for books—he collected everything from Verlaine first editions to George Washington’s correspondence—all nominally for sale, although Titus rarely looked up from his reading to meet the gaze of browsers. The store’s other function was to put him in the orbit of writers he admired, who enjoyed the unhurried bohemian atmosphere.
At the Sign of the Black Manikin, unsurprisingly, leaked money, a situation made far worse when after two years of not selling books on the ground floor, Titus installed a printing press on the second, turning out small batches of titles for the city’s English readers, mostly chapbooks experimental in subject and style, often designed or illustrated by artists he knew in the Quarter. Rubinstein, who when in Paris lived separately from Titus, kept her distance from the enterprise. “How was I to know all those writers were worth a sou,” she later said. “I never had a moment to read their books. To me they were all meshugga . . . and I always had to pay for their meals!”
That fall Titus had been enjoying his first real success, albeit a minor one then, having published D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Titus looked to Kiki for his next coup. He’d known her for a few years and, seeing all the praise, figured he could turn a profit with an English translation, to be called Kiki’s Memoirs. He admired her writing, which he found “rough and ready.” He did think the French edition a bit slim and had Kiki add twenty pages that had been cut from her original manuscript, while he rounded things out with more of her drawings and a few extra portraits of her done by other artists.
Titus’s biggest feat was to arrange for Hemingway to write an introduction to the English edition. By then he was a figure of international renown, the author of In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, which had just come out that September. Titus had taken over editing the modernist literary journal This Quarter, to which Hemingway would later contribute, and they likely knew one another through the journal’s small community.
Hemingway wrote that Kiki’s was “the only book I’ve ever written an introduction for and, God help me, the only one I ever will.” He nearly kept that promise, writing only one other introduction in his career, for another friend from the neighborhood, the bartender Jimmie Charters, who penned his own Montparnasse memoir, This Must Be the Place, four years after Kiki’s.
As two of the biggest personalities on the Left Bank, Hemingway and Kiki must have had their brushes over the years. Hemingway knew Man Ray, who though generally not keen to spend time with his fellow Americans was charmed by the writer, who brought him to some boxing matches. Man Ray shot some of Hemingway’s publicity stills and a favorite portrait of him with his son, Jack. In the spring of 1928, he took a photograph of Hemingway after the writer had pulled what he thought was a toilet chain and brought a skylight crashing down on him, giving him one of the several serious concussions he would suffer from. The image is playful, satirizing Hemingway’s macho persona, as Man Ray caught his boyish smile, a jaunty felt hat propped up on his head bandage. Aside from the Man Ray connection, the closest we come to seeing Kiki crossing paths with Hemingway is a photo of her from 1925 sharing a table out front of the Dingo with Lady Duff Twysden, Hemingway’s model for Lady Brett Ashley, the two women flanking a happy American sailor, name lost to history. Standing behind them is Jimmie Charters.
Hemingway described his reasons for writing the introduction in a letter to an American bookseller who was compiling a bibliography of his work: “I wrote the introduction to please Kiki—look at a couple of the photographs of her in old days and youll [sic] see why—But would not have written it if was not, in parts, the early childhood [chapters] and [the first chapter on the] Quarter a damned fine extraordinary book—Read it in French.”
In referring, in this letter dated from early 1930, to “photographs of her in the old days,” Hemingway was calling back to images less than ten years old. In 1930 Kiki was twenty-nine and Hemingway thirty. But then in those ten years he’d lived in three countries, had two sons, blown up one marriage and started another, and written two of the century’s major novels and some of its finest short stories while working as a journalist. His introduction to Kiki’s Memoirs reads like a eulogy, full of grumbling and score settling.
“Kiki now looks like a monument to herself and to the era of Montparnasse that was definitely marked as closed when she, Kiki, published this book” he wrote. “When, in one year, Kiki became monumental and Montparnasse became rich, prosperous, brightly lighted . . . and they sold caviar at the Dôme, well, the Era for what it was worth, and personally I don’t think it was worth much, was over.”
If his introduction was as much about Ernest Hemingway as about Kiki, it made plain how much he admired Kiki’s writing, even as he cloaked that admiration in flippant and misogynistic language. He praised her “wonderfully beautiful body” and her “fine voice,” specifying that he meant her talking voice, not her singing one. He congratulated Kiki on keeping that voice intact, as well as her kidneys. He wrote that “her face is as fine a work of art as ever. It is just that she has more material to work with now.” But following that insult, and then hedging somewhat by joking that “the people who tell me which books are great lasting works of art are all out of town so I cannot make an intelligent judgment,” Hemingway deemed Kiki’s Memoirs among “the best I have read since [E. E. Cummings’s] The Enormous Room,” and added that parts of it brought to mind a modern Moll Flanders. He also made a reference to Virginia Woolf, citing that Kiki had never had “a Room of Her Own.” He did worry that Kiki’s writing might not come across well in English, advising “if it does not seem any good to you, learn French. . . . It is a crime to translate it.” And while poking fun at her reputation by saying she was “a woman who was never a lady at any time,” he acknowledged the heights she’d reached: “For about ten years she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady.”
Titus published Kiki’s Memoirs in June 1930 with a run of a thousand copies printed on thick, glossy paper by Darantière, the same printing house that had produced the first run of Joyce’s Ulysses with its eye-catching cover of murky blue-green. Titus had the cream-colored cover to Kiki’s book wrapped in a red band of glassine, squat enough to allow for “Introduction by Ernest Hemingway” to be visible above it, and dubbing the contents beneath it “The Book of Montparnasse,” promising that Kiki’s book would be the only one you needed to read to understand the place. Titus meanwhile displayed some of Kiki’s paintings on the walls and in the windows of his bookshop.
If the stiff English translation from the journeyman writer Samuel Putnam does fall as short of its task as Hemingway anticipated, Putnam at least anticipated that failure from the start. “The problem is not to translate Kiki’s text, but to translate Kiki,” he wrote in his translator’s note, more apology than introduction. “To be able to do this, one must have the feel of Kiki, the feel of the Café du Dôme at five o’clock on a rainy, bleary, alcoholic morning. Yet, this is not enough; it does not give the picture; it is unfair to Kiki.”
That same June 1930, Bennett Cerf, editor in chief of Random House, was in Paris to handle a contract with André Gide. He met with Titus to discuss publishing an American edition of Kiki’s Memoirs. He left without finalizing anything but in early July ordered 150 copies from Titus, paying him $300.
Later in the month Wambly Bald was telling Tribune readers how “on the terrace of the Dôme and the Coupole, in the quiet studios of artists and writers, at the Deux Magots and on the Right Bank, everyone is discussing the English version of Kiki’s Memoirs [which is] the most daring event of the year.” He praised Kiki for revealing “a world wherein life is as simple as breathing” while suggesting “to orderly people new possibilities.” Her “intuitive reactions [to Montparnasse’s] individuals and crowds are more revealing than the thundering and fictionalized word-excursions of the literary gentry,” he wrote. “Her experiences are told . . . without emotion or exaggeration. . . . Never was she daunted by the magnitude of her courtiers.”
Titus sent the 150 copies to Cerf on July 22, 1930. But American customs officials confiscated the cargo as soon as it landed in New York, tipped off about the “obscenities” within, though, as Man Ray noted, the book contained not a single word of foul language. “As we gravely feared, the shipment of Kiki’s Memoirs was held up by the U.S Customs,” Cerf wrote to Titus in August. Cerf asked him to mail another batch in shipments small enough to escape notice, ten separate mailings of fifteen books each, to be spread across ten employees of Random House. He provided Titus with their home addresses. But Titus waffled for reasons unknown. Cerf wrote again a few weeks later to demand the books, now giving Titus his home address and telling him there were people eagerly waiting to read them.
Titus seems not to have sent any more copies to Cerf or to anyone else. Random House never published Kiki’s Memoirs. Kiki and Broca printed only a small second run of the French edition. Titus, who would close At the Sign of the Black Manikin in 1932, printed no more of the English edition.
When word reached Paris of how American officials had seized the first shipment of Kiki’s Memoirs, Wambly Bald sought out its author for comment.
“The village queen was informed of the bad news yesterday while sharing a cracker with her little [dog] Péky on the terrace of the Coupole,” he wrote. “Laconically and with a characteristic shrug, she remarked: ‘I’m not losing any weight over it.’ ”
Her book was not to become an international hit. It was apparently enough, for her, to have been a hit in the neighborhood. Enough to have sung of herself and her friends and their moment.