We have another favourite place to eat just round the corner on rue Lacépède. It’s the only vegetarian restaurant I’ve seen in Paris, and I’m no enthusiast of its nutty and grainy menu, but it’s the one place where I’m welcomed like a hero and can eat almost for free because I’ve written an enthusiastic piece about ‘Veggie’, as it’s called, in the American press. That sounds rather grander than it is because the organ in question is the Journal Herald in Dayton, Ohio, and my review of the meatless fare at ‘Veggie’ appeared under the rubric ‘Our Girl in Paris’. This is normally written by Suzy, my colleague at Réalités, but from time to time she runs out of ideas and turns to me, who’s only too pleased to come up with some piece of ephemera that will earn me dollars that I convert into new francs whenever the exchange rate looks most favourable. Suzy reports back on the big fashion trends and shows in Paris, and although I can’t act as her understudy in that domain I do occasionally replace her in the guise of the Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec who is sent by Réalités every month to have lunch with smart, wealthy people in elegant Parisian apartments or vast châteaux around France. The Comtesse, or Mapie as she is known more familiarly, does actually visit these fine folk, but she makes notes in French about her experience, adds a recipe she has obtained from the hostess, then leaves Suzy or me to turn the whole event into deathless prose, beginning ‘This month Mapie visited the Marquis and Marquise de X…’ Thus, while awaiting higher literary achievement, I can be credited with finely tuned versions of how to prepare a truite au bleu or a sorrel omelette.
I don’t make any extra money by impersonating Mapie but David Warrilow, knowing that I’m finding it tough to make ends meet, has got me some dubbing work in a cavernous studio on the outskirts of Paris. It’s fairly simple: there’s dubbing, where you have to come up not only with a translation but something resembling the actor’s lip movements, which occasionally gives rise to hoots of laughs from the others; then simple sub-titling, where you can forget the speaking mouth, whatever its contortions. I find this kind of freelance work comes to me very easily. In fact, I’m a bit concerned that the more superficial the task, the more it attracts me and the better I am at it. Meanwhile, I grab every opportunity that comes up, not only because it’s easy extra money but because of all the incredible people you bump into at the studio doing retakes or whatever and hanging around the set as if they’re no one. I’ve actually talked to Claude Rich and Roger Vadim, and I’ve seen Jean Marais, the ubiquitous Laurent Terzieff, and the beautiful, unexpectedly serene-looking Catherine Deneuve pass by. It’s really given a new dimension to my life, and I love to be able to drop into the conversation with my more serious literary friends, like Jean-Claude Montel, that I’m currently working on this or that hot new film, although I don’t add how difficult it is to find the right lip-forming equivalent in English to ‘Zut!’ or even ‘Merde!’
There’s a phrase or rather a question in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet that comes back to me insistently: ‘Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?’ I ask myself this day and night, in silence and on thronged, noisy streets, but unfortunately no clear answer is forthcoming. I could easily say: ‘I very much want to, I’m powerfully drawn to the idea of writing. I love the sound of words and I think I have a certain facility when it comes to deciding how to use and arrange them.’ I could also add that I find most ‘real’ writing, writing ‘for myself’, as opposed to journalism, incredibly demanding and difficult; and that I think I lack not only the self-confidence and discipline necessary, but also a valid subject. On the one hand, I could reflect on my own experiences, thoughts and emotions, possibly transposing them – thinly enough – into a novel, with myself becoming the two mutually contradictory characters I often feel I am: a few days ago, I sketched out a short story about a Dutch painter and a French art critic, who were both like me in different ways while remaining distinct personalities, and both in love with the same gorgeous American woman. On the other hand, instead of the maxims, unfinished poems and inconsequential sketches that I do produce, I could aim at something more conventional, like a history of Surrealism, which I’m well placed to write since I can so easily retrace the Surrealists’ individual and collective activities in the city; or an account of twentieth-century art, focusing on the successive movements which had their origins right here in Paris. The trouble is that I don’t think anyone would be interested in the former, the thinly disguised outpouring of my inner existence, and I’m not interested enough in the latter.
It’s a real dilemma and I wonder if Rilke’s question, although sincere, doesn’t oversimplify the issue, because even if I could say without hesitation ‘Yes, I must write’, it would lead inevitably to further questions, such as ‘How can I write?’ and ‘What can I write about?’ The need to write doesn’t necessarily lead at all to writing; in my case, it leads to a constant, gnawing frustration of wanting to write yet being apparently incapable of writing anything I can sustain or that anybody else could be bothered to read. Meanwhile, of course, I have my stopgaps: the fragments that I conserve in various notebooks and diaries, which are elevated occasionally to the status of a few typewritten pages, and the welter of journalism of various sorts that I take on. And in the most silent hour of my night, what I ask myself is not so much whether I must write, but why my writing focuses on things like Mapie’s blasted sorrel omelette.
Although these issues rage around in my mind, making me sick at times from the tension and self-loathing they induce, there’s no one I can really discuss them with. Anne would probably think I am complicating my life wilfully and tell me to stop wallowing in my own contradictions, an exhortation I would eagerly comply with; but you might as well admonish someone suffering from severe depression to ‘snap out of it’. I could broach the problem with David, who would be sympathetic but I’m not sure he would understand my particular brand of literary impotence, especially now that he is all set to start out as a serious actor and leave journalism behind – as I would love to do as well, even when I reach such higher flights at Réalités as introducing the Italian novelist Elsa Morante to our readers or translating from the German an excerpt from Niembsch by Peter Handke, whose work I have admired since I came across it as a reader for the publishers Seix Barral during my year in Spain. I’ve even sketched out a ‘portrait’ of Jimmy Baldwin, whom I met with Bacon in London and bumped into at the brasserie on Ile Saint-Louis. I admire Giovanni’s Room and Another Country enormously, and that would probably have made me too tongue-tied to speak to him. But his face looks so full of suffering and he himself is so approachable that we talked very openly for nearly half an hour. I’ll show David what I’ve written about him, but I suspect Garith won’t go for the idea of what he would call a ‘pansy’ black novelist.
I give all these pieces, as well as the others on Bonnard, Beardsley or Balthus, my full attention, though less in the research, it has to be said, than in the actual word-by-word crafting; and part of my problem is that I take infinite pains over every phrase, not allowing myself to move forward until I have the perfect first sentence, followed by the perfect first paragraph, and so on, which might accommodate my tyrannical perfectionism but means I not only lose the thread of the piece’s central argument but spend so much time on stylistic niceties that I’m undertaking less and less ‘creative’ writing of my own. As I writhe in frustration before this impasse, the thought comes to me that I will at best become a ‘man of letters’, that pallid, incomplete figure I have always dreaded who has published the odd minor novel and book of essays, eking out his literary career with reviews and prefaces, instead of sitting in a room overlooking the Mediterranean, with the words flowing in from the open window and settling themselves – with echoes of all my favourite writers from Shakespeare to Beckett – effortlessly on the page. I live with this fantasy, and even though I know it is make-believe I cling to the idea that one day my pen will race across and fill page after page with sublime prose, poetry and dr
ama, pages that fall with the ink still wet onto a Versailles parquet floor already strewn with masterpieces.
I suppose the one person I could discuss these dilemmas with is Jean-Claude Montel, who I bump into regularly in the quartier. He seems as approachable as ever, even though he has recently had the extraordinary distinction, for me almost a canonisation, of having his first book, Les Plages, published. It was brought out moreover by the Editions du Seuil, which I worship from afar as being with Gallimard the most hallowed, not to say glamorous, publisher in Paris: I never pass by the yew tree in the little courtyard outside their offices on rue Jacob, just opposite Natalie Barney’s house, without making a deep mental obeisance and acknowledging the fervent wish that rises from my innermost being that I, too, might one day join the exclusive ranks of their writers. Montel himself doesn’t make a big deal of this achievement, which I find both astonishing and a relief, although such attractive modesty doesn’t make it any easier for me to discuss my literary impotence with him, since his quiet confidence makes my problems look even more weird and superficial. Very generously, Montel gives me an inscribed copy of his beautifully produced, pristine book, which I immediately take home and devour, skipping what seem to be the most obscure passages and allusions, in the hope that I will find a key (I’m encouraged by the fact that Montel still lives on rue de la Clef) to the block I can’t seem to overcome. The main subject of Les Plages appears to be the narrator’s obsessive attempt to recreate the life of a recently deceased man about whom he has only a handful of facts, while the text hints teasingly that the dead man in question may also turn out to be the narrator himself. I founder early on in this growing ambiguity, conscious that both the story and the stylistic innovations that accompany it are beyond me. Nevertheless, I call Montel immediately to tell him how much I appreciated the book and how I should like to discuss it with him.
We begin to meet regularly, because Montel seems as keen to pursue a literary friendship as I am. He already has quite a few writer friends, like Jean-Pierre Faye and Maurice Roche, with whom he is discussing the possibility of launching a literary review called Change. I find this news hugely exciting and feel I am as close as I could be, in Paris or wherever, to the emergence of a new group like the Surrealists, even if they could hardly have anything like the same impact. I have also met a few writers, not only Michel Leiris and his friend Georges Limbour, but Stephen Spender (whom I confused, in a horribly embarrassing moment, with W. H. Auden), and been at least near several others, including ‘Cal’ Lowell, William Burroughs and Philippe Soupault, an errant, amiable Surrealist who turns up occasionally at Réalités to joke with us staff and visit Garith – as does Sachie Sitwell, who seems of such a different order of writer that I mentally, if unfairly, exclude him from this chosen band. I’ve also actually sat next to Samuel Beckett (you couldn’t mistake him, with that extraordinary eagle-like profile and unwavering pale blue stare) on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas, just at the end of boulevard du Montparnasse, and although I never managed to speak to him – he was alone, like me – because nothing I thought of saying to strike up a conversation seemed apposite or profound enough, I felt that by simply being near him, by osmosis, I might absorb some of the literary direction, talent and decisiveness that I lacked. But this served only to underline my indecisiveness because a passing American tourist, complete with backpack, hailed him from the street (‘Aren’t you Samuel Beckett?’), and Beckett allowed him to come over and have the kind of brief, courteous exchange that I had hoped for. All that I gleaned from this was that Beckett spoke in an unexpectedly clipped, upper-class English voice rather than the soft but subtly piercing brogue I had expected.
Perhaps being with Montel will also somehow transmit the magic that leads to a book of mine being written and published, if not by the Editions du Seuil, then at least by someone with a halfway recognisable name. In my spare time I’ve pieced together a text on the ‘100 Masterpieces of the Louvre’, commissioned by a firm I’d never heard of in London and printed, darkly and smudgily, in Yugoslavia; I’ve seen the proofs, but nobody has bothered to send me a finished copy of the book, which is probably just as well. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Montel has not taken me closer to the mystery of creation. It’s not as though I was expecting some secret formula: practical advice of the ‘plan your chapter in advance’ and ‘keep the sentences short’ kind, or even ‘try writing through the night’, would have given me some temporary relief from this overpowering sense of frustration. But Montel’s discourse is on an altogether different level. He has already advised me in his open-handed way as to some of the ‘fundamental texts’ I should be reading, and I thought that, having grappled with Averroes, I could tick the box as far as medieval philosophy was concerned; but now the name of Avicenna returns regularly to the conversation, and reading Nizan is found to be no longer sufficient but has to be complemented by Merleau-Ponty and Althusser, to say nothing of a very curious-sounding author called Raymond Roussel, who Montel says was taken up by the Surrealists and is now ‘absolutely fundamental’ – Aragon called him ‘President of the Republic of Dreams’. While waiting for the avant-garde review, Change, to appear, Montel adds conspiratorially, it would be worth following the latest literary developments in its current competitor, Tel Quel. Dutifully, I go to La Hune bookshop at the Saint-Germain crossroads, one of the high places of intellectual Paris, to buy a couple of back issues of this austere periodical and pore over it with my spirits plummeting from page to page. The complexity, not to say the impenetrability, of Tel Quel’s contents, coupled with a tone of absolute authority, saps whatever little self-confidence I retain in myself as a future writer. These extraordinary minds, whether translating the untranslatable Finnegans Wake or writing about themselves and each other, are so far advanced, both in French and in cosmic understanding, that I am unable to paraphrase even the gist of their essays, while remaining as perplexed as an illiterate peasant before their playful syntax and challengingly erratic but patently avant-garde typography, which occasionally leaves entire pages blank but clearly quivering with a significance that I may only guess at. My insecurities grow to the point where I fully merit the most dismissive phrase that Montel and his literary peers use about those many others who, for all their efforts to enlighten them, remain in the dark: ‘Ils n’ont rien compris’ (‘They just don’t get it’).
It is not only the imperviousness of Tel Quel and Montel’s breadth of arcane literary and philosophical knowledge that have crushed my own aspirations. As I mentioned earlier, wherever I look around in my immediate area, I am confronted by a concentration of buildings of higher learning: the Collège de France, where such august figures as Bergson, Valéry and Lévi-Strauss have taught, stands opposite the cluster of courtyards that make up the venerable Sorbonne, itself cheek by jowl with two of the city’s foremost secondary schools, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Lycée Henri IV, and within spitting distance, of course, of such grand postgraduate establishments as the Ecole Normale Supérieure, whose aloof gaze confronts me every time I go to the Cinémathèque. They alone would be sufficient to make all but the most imperturbably accomplished scholar question their intellectual qualifications, but the entire quartier has been created in that learned image, so that where you might expect a grocer’s or a café elsewhere in the city, here you find every exotic and esoteric kind of bookshop, some of a manifestly academic nature, others specialising in Eastern religions, modern Italian literature, ancient Persian philosophy (where I eventually bought my Avicenna) or the French cinema, and others still in used art history monographs and second-hand legal or medical treatises. Then between the bookshops come the stationers’, the specialist pen shops and the small printers eagerly waiting to reproduce and bind your doctoral theses, your collected essays and your memoirs destined for private circulation. Even in the cafés here, people read, their apéritif barely touched in front of them, discuss the latest nouveau roman or, failing both, focus on their game of Go, the anc
ient Chinese equivalent of our chess, which has become all the rage (indeed all the go) here.
I might not have found this intellectually dominating atmosphere so oppressive if I’d written something more impressive than a handful of desultory short stories and, more significantly, if I had not reacted so violently, so psychotically, to the drugs I took with the Living Theatre. Even though that happened several months ago and I managed nevertheless to write a chirpy account of their plays and other antics, including their claim to have evolved out of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, nothing has changed since I sat under the shower at home, hoping that it would wash away the strange poison that has spread through my nervous system. Anne appears not to have noticed anything amiss, and in the office no one has commented on my being more withdrawn and preoccupied than usual; at most, I think I may have caught a questioning glint in David’s eye. Yet inside this horrible sense of division, of breakage, goes on. My mind is somewhere up there, the balloon that broke loose and now looks down on the body it left behind. There seems to be no way of mending the rift. In desperation, I’ve been going on long walks aimlessly round the city, and since that doesn’t bring the physical exhaustion that allows me to sleep deeply, I’ve taken up squash, sometimes playing against one partner after another until I am so exhausted I can barely get myself home. My greatest fear is that I have gone clinically and definitively mad, that the drug infiltrated some crack in my personality and split it irremediably into two. Since my father has acute, cyclical depression, and my grandfather actually killed himself during a bout of what was then classed as melancholia, I’m not altogether surprised that this brutal scission has happened. Like Lear, my first reaction is ‘O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’, but if, as I suspect, I have gone mad, I will do everything in my power, or rather by infinite cunning, to conceal it. As long as no one else suspects, I may be able to squeak through and not be publicly branded ‘insane’.
The Existential Englishman Page 8