The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  The vigilance required overshadows my every waking hour and condemns me to a state of constant anxiety and tension. When I scent the possibility that my disguise has slipped, leaving my pitiful confusion and disjointedness visible even for a second, panic floods through me: my mouth goes dry, my heart races, and sweat starts snaking down my sides, forming dark, tell-tale patches on my shirt. I keep telling myself that these are passing fits, but they recur, without warning, at the oddest moments. It could be simply the way a person is looking at me in the Métro, a knowing look with pursed lips that seems to say they’ve found me out. It’s as if they can see through me, and sometimes I want to follow them, to make sure they’re not heading straight for the Commissariat to report that they’ve seen an odd, anxious-looking individual getting out at Opéra, who’s probably deranged and possibly dangerous. But that would be mad, of course, that would give me away immediately. I don’t know what the police would do in any case, except contact a hospital with a psychiatric wing where they could keep me for examination. The police really freak me out. Whenever I see a flic on the street, I cross over, just in case, especially since the other day when I was being given a lift back from the squash courts by one of my posher opponents who has a bright red MG and we got caught in a slow cavalcade of official black cars that must have been accompanying de Gaulle or some foreign bigwig, and the flics on outrider motorbikes kept roaring up alongside us and peering in and I was rigid with fear, thinking they’d pull us over and that would be that.

  But otherwise these fits come at any old time, while I’m sitting quietly in someone’s office or doing an interview and the conversation suddenly sounds quite unreal, and what I’m saying and what the other is saying doesn’t make sense any more, as if our talk has slid into another dimension where neither of us knows what’s going on but we keep up the pretence because there’s nothing else to do, we go on pretending to be normal and behave as if everything’s all right, but I can feel, I know, that my real self, the person I was before, is hovering above, detached, watching us and unable to intervene. Or I can be alone, having a drink at the bar of the café quite a few of us from Réalités use on the corner of rue Saint-Georges, and suddenly there is a kind of a shift, I think in French they would call it a décalage, where everything freezes for an instant, the hand in the air, the beer glass going to the mouth, then resumes, although subtly altered. At one point I was aware that the consistency of the dingy white paint on the wall beside me had changed, like a fog slowly moving, and I was very afraid.

  I tell myself I’m just having a ‘turn’ and to hold on, like one does when a plane goes through a spot of turbulence and comes serenely out the other side. But the turbulence is in my mind, and I don’t even know what caused it. I’m pretty sure that my friends at the Living Theatre decided to have some fun with me, the eager-beaver little journalist in his coat and tie who turned up from the bourgeois magazine in their midst, in their lair. Perhaps they just wanted a laugh or thought they should expand my consciousness so I could really get with what they were trying to say. I’ve smoked marijuana on and off before and quite enjoyed it, but it never did much more than make me drowsy and giggly. Did I have too much too soon, overreacting badly because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to handle the whole situation and get a good story? Or perhaps that last joint was laced with angel dust. I heard a couple of the actors chuckling about it while I was there: ‘If you really want to blow your mind, man, try the angel dust.’ Was that it? And would that be why I will have to go on living without ever becoming myself again?

  Anne must suspect that something has gone wrong. My whole behaviour must come across as more withdrawn, and I certainly don’t get as much fun going to the Puces to find the bits of furniture we still need, even though I was pleased with the classic marble-topped bistro table we found and the slightly chipped china soup tureen that has yet to be put to use. I don’t even enjoy our Cinémathèque on Sundays as much any more. We’ve seen so many masterpieces that I often can’t remember which unforgettable scenes come in which films, as if I’d made my own personal anthology, running certain highlights together: Bogart listening to ‘As Time Goes By’ at the bar in his white tux, Arletty repeating ‘Atmosphère! atmosphère!’ sarcastically, the shadows on the wall in The Third Man. But I do like merging into the dark, and even on weekdays, if Anne agrees, we take in a film, because once the lights go down I start to relax. Looking at the flickering screen at the end of the room is as good an analogy as I can find for my own relationship with myself. We know we both exist, even if we now exist apart. And in the peaceful gloom no one notices the tears welling up in my eyes.

  Even if two people live together, share a bed at night and every domestic intimacy, how much do they know about each other? Anne and I have been side by side for almost two years now without a break except for the odd trips when she went to Bologna for a children’s book festival and I went to interview the great Balthus in his splendour at the Villa Medici in Rome. But there was a point quite early on, possibly when we walked along the gleaming, empty beaches in Brittany on our first holiday together, that we felt closest and understood each other best. Afterwards, it seems, not only do you not deepen your understanding of the person with whom you share your life, you no longer even seek to grow closer to them as you make a common front to deal with all the banalities of everyday life – as if you are now more focused on what fish to eat or when to change the sheets rather than the arrested relationship you are caught in. Our sexual intimacy has always been constrained unless some chance detail unexpectedly binds us, as when Anne was naked but still wearing her knee-length boots and I, at least, was unusually aroused by the sudden conjunction of human fur and leather. Whatever is happening between us, Anne turns a blind eye towards the strange change in me, and I am deeply grateful for that, not least because I could never explain it to her any more satisfactorily than I’ve explained it to myself. So she doesn’t question what I think of as my longing for darkness, which I find not only in the film sessions we share but in the long, lonely, soothing walks I have begun to take after dinner across the city at night.

  Feeling estranged in myself has given me an almost physical desire to penetrate deeper and deeper into the city that has become mine. I like to do it at night, furtively, as if I were breaking an ancient taboo. Anne doesn’t seem to mind, particularly as I readily wash and tidy away our dinner things before I leave. Then the city opens out in front of me. I take the cold and the rain in my stride, because I see them as obstacles over which I have to prevail, like a medieval lover, and when a wind is blowing hard I come as close as I ever come to exultation. Another advantage of bad weather is that the streets are empty and Paris is all the more mine. I head quickly along rue Larrey to place Monge, smelling the musty, slightly sour odour of the Métro as it billows up from the gratings in the square. Like a student or a pilgrim might have done in the Middle Ages, I plunge with all my instincts alert to danger into the labyrinth of tiny, ancient streets, their wet cobblestones glinting and their little shops shuttered up for the night. Then I come to Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and go down past the ominous silhouette of the Panthéon into the freedom of a quartier no longer so instantly familiar as my own round the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  Just as, on other nightly walks, I circle the Jardin des Plantes, thinking of its animals sleeping, roaring, mating, urinating within its dark, enclosed mass, I go round the Luxembourg thinking of all the poets who have walked there: Hugo, whose favourite gardens they were, Nerval promenading his lobster on a blue silk ribbon, Baudelaire, who is commemorated by a bust that stares out into infinity under a leafy tree. I try to summon up lines from their work, their animal cries of love and despair, but I rarely get beyond the first few words. The Luxembourg at night looks like the dark forest, the ‘selva oscura’, that Dante entered when he lost his way, and I know as I follow its perimeter like a beast pacing beside the tall railings that this represents one more challenge I will have to confront if
I make it as far as middle age. But then there is the Odéon, a sudden return to the classical symmetry and balance that I crave. Timidly at first, I cross the reassuring proportions of the cobbled square as if I had come on to a stage, then descend the stately rue de l’Odéon, past the site where Sylvia Beach ran Shakespeare & Co, to the brightly lit cafés and surging traffic of boulevard Saint-Germain.

  The other evening, knowing I wouldn’t sleep, and having made some feeble excuse to Anne about only being able to marshal all the facts for my next article on concrete poetry by a long walk through the night (given my sad, withdrawn mien, she could hardly think I’m having an affair), I scuttled down to rue Larrey and headed due north. The Seine was glinting malevolently with the dull, oily trail left by the day’s procession of barges and tourist boats as I crossed over Ile St-Louis, glancing up at the brightly lit, expensive apartments along quai d’Orléans with their privileged views over the river and the Left Bank. The wind that had been buffeting through the city all afternoon suddenly dropped, leaving a strangely expectant sensation in the air. I walked over the hump of the island, then on a whim turned left down rue de l’Ile St-Louis to the bridge leading across to Ile de la Cité. These two islands formed the absolute centre, the vital inner organs, of a city that had emerged from the Seine. I stood for a moment, listening to the river’s heartbeats, imagining the silt building up out of the water into dark carapaces that over millennia would become cultivable, habitable land. These outcrops grew into the first solid foundations, rocks in an otherwise liquid world that set up ripples washing over both banks of the Seine, fertilising and eventually creating the first settlements of Parisii in their wooden palisades. Coming here, as I did regularly, was coming to the source, and I watched the water with a melancholy passion, thinking as it chafed against the sides of the island that what the Seine had given the Seine would one day take away, swallowing the land back ripple by ripple into its black maw.

  Having pushed down quai des Orfèvres to the prow of the island (touching the stone base of Henri IV’s equestrian statue like a talisman), I came back as usual through place Dauphine to Notre-Dame-de-Paris. I’d hoped that this ‘house of God and abode of men’, built on the site of a temple to Jupiter, might still be open for some late evening memorial or concert, since I always benefited from finding a quiet corner under its majestic nave where I could close my eyes and withdraw from the confusion both outside and within me. But I was unlucky and could only walk in the dark gardens, with my hand brushing the ivy that grows along the wall by the Seine and reaches down into the water like powerful tentacles that root the island, stopping the great, heavy cathedral from being swept down river. But in a sudden squall it began to rain heavily, with the rain caught in the wind so that within minutes I was half-drenched. I could have taken shelter under the main portal, beneath Christ seated in majesty in the middle of the Last Judgement. But on impulse I just stayed there, in the massive baptism offered by the elements, until I was soaked through. Then, with my hair matted and my face streaming with water, I looked overhead at the night sky and without any forethought screamed out: ‘Cleanse me! Heal my mind!’

  Last Sunday Anne and I were shocked to find the old Cinémathèque closed. Same story up at the new screening space at Palais de Chaillot we’re told by a couple of disconsolate regulars, who are loitering around because they don’t know how else they’re going to fill their afternoon. Apparently Langlois was fired from his position as supremo (which we’d all imagined he held by divine right) on the orders of Malraux’s Ministry of Culture, and this has triggered a full-scale demonstration led by big cinema people like Truffaut and Godard demanding that Langlois be reinstated. But then the CRS, the riot police known for their brutality, were sent in and things turned nasty with some of the protesters getting clubbed and badly injured. The incident has turned into a huge scandal overnight, the couple tells us, with protests coming in from all over the world. I’m a bit ashamed not to have been aware that this was going on, but now that I do know I see the repercussions being reported all over the press and it looks as though Malraux is going to have to climb down. It’s said that even de Gaulle, le grand Charles, has been concerned by the proportions l’affaire Langlois has assumed, although to begin with he is supposed to have asked: ‘So who is this Monsieur Langlois?’

  I feel I should really keep up more with the news, particularly with things happening immediately around me. But we don’t have a television, and I hate having the transistor radio crackling away in those delicate and usually silent moments when Anne and I have breakfast together. Occasionally I buy Le Monde in the evening and try to plough through its dense coverage and analyses (Garith jokes that he’ll sack anyone who manages to read it since they should be too tired if they’ve done a decent day’s work), but I feel my time would be better spent either trying to fill in some of the huge holes in my knowledge of French literature or reading more Kafka and Borges, Joyce and Beckett. So I just accept that I live in my own bubble, out of touch with contemporary events. At least I’m getting better acquainted with the Surrealists thanks to a chance encounter with our secretary’s boyfriend, who would have struck me as perfectly ordinary had I not known that she hung her dresses on his erect member, but who interests me even more because he has an extraordinary collection of Surrealist books which he lends me very freely. A few of the authors, especially poor, doomed René Crevel, have entered my pantheon of literary heroes, but I’ve also come across more minor, fascinating characters, like the boxer Arthur Cravan and the defrocked Abbé Gengenbach, who played a significant, passing role in the movement.

  I’ve tried to write a portrait of Gengenbach, but it petered out after he’d had his face slapped by another member of the Surrealists and my story diverged into a kind of parallel account of the movement (in which face-slapping occurs with deadly inevitability throughout). I also thought that finding a voice for my sensations of disconnectedness might have a therapeutic effect, so I started writing a story called ‘Man of Glass’ since I often have the feeling I’m so fragile and brittle now that I might shatter; and I’ve since found that, although extremely rare, the weird conviction of being made of glass and needing special protection has been recorded, notably in the case of Charles VI, the medieval French king, who as a result always wrapped his buttocks carefully in blankets. This attempt meandered to a halt as well, however, because describing the state as it occurs in me is deeply distressing and makes me feel even crazier than I think I am. Why is this kind of writing so difficult when, for instance, I can toss off a piece about the Sistine ceiling in a day or two (depending on how much I perfect my superficial style)? I suppose because in the so-called ‘creative’ writing I’m trying to go further, deeper, into more personal and violable territory. I’m immensely struck by that remark of Beckett’s: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’ That says it all, and says it better than any formulation I might devise. And there is also the rider that Beckett does continue to write and be published and be performed.

  If I had the slightest discernible plastic talent, I’d try my hand at being a painter or a sculptor. I’ve spent time recently not only interviewing grandees like Balthus but more approachable artists like Soulages and Calder, and they seem to have much more fun. Following Sandy Calder round his huge, messy atelier down in the Touraine was like being with a big, old baby at play as he pottered about among his amazing, airborne toys; at one moment, he seemed on the point of asking me to join in and link up a little mobile rather than stand there scratching away in my notebook. Soulages, too, doesn’t appear racked by doubt as he sweeps his big canvases with broad swathes of glistening black pigment. Unlike writers scribbling away furtively in cafés or spare rooms or on the train, artists have studios, visually compelling and congenial spaces which prompt them to work or at least have some kind of activity, like stretc
hing and preparing canvas, that warms them up. I particularly like spending time in studios, and I’ve started visiting a sculptor called Etienne-Martin who has an amazing space under a big sky-lit roof just nearby on rue du Pot-de-Fer. It’s bone-chillingly cold in all seasons, and small, rotund Etienne is usually dressed in a trapper’s hat and a thick loden overcoat with lots of flaps and pockets out of which he dredges up all sorts of tiny ivory carvings and crucifixes and other exotic objects to show you. The cracked walls of his studio and the chaos of tools, chippings and other detritus strewn all over the floor fill me with ease because they resemble the confusion that I have come to think that we all carry within us and conceal; and when I peer into the strange troglodyte ‘demeures’ or ‘dwellings’ Etienne has been carving in wood I long to creep in and hide in their aromatic dark.