All the same, I know it’s ridiculous to pretend that artists don’t go through just as much anguish as writers or anyone else ‘with the obligation to express’ does. They are equally compelled to probe their thoughts, fantasies and inner mess for something to say, with all the attendant frustrations of not being able to say it adequately. The painter whom I’ve studied and written about most recently is Nicolas de Staël, who succeeded in straddling both abstraction and figuration in some of the most evocative and sublime images of the post-war. There is an extraordinary tension that arises from these two overwhelming forces being held in a precarious balance, as if one were about to topple the other into nothingness or explode and leave only pools of inert colour behind. The tension on the canvas was of course the tension in Staël, and for reasons that have never become entirely clear yet which are linked not only to an unhappy love affair but to the anguished conviction that he had arrived at an impasse in his work, the Russian-born painter went out onto the terrace of the eleventh-storey studio he had taken in Antibes and, at the age of forty-one, leapt to his death.
Langlois has been reinstated, the Cinémathèque has reopened, and we can gorge ourselves once again on French classics with the odd foreign masterpiece or bit of uproarious American slapstick thrown in. But there are deeper rumblings, first out at the university at Nanterre, then at the Sorbonne, and now all over the streets a short walk from where we live. We know roughly what’s going on because all the media and everyone you meet, people you don’t even know, are full of it and eager to share their views. Anne is simply not interested and I’m not a political animal, being far more concerned with my little universe – my solipsistic bubble of art and literature, sex, travel, food and wine – than the world at large, but this is happening on our very doorstep and you can’t ignore it. Trees along boulevard Saint-Michel have been chopped down, cars overturned and set alight, often with their horns still blaring, and cobblestones, those ancient cobblestones, prised up from the roads to form makeshift barricades at various points throughout the Latin Quarter. I’m appalled, disturbed and deeply excited. All normal behaviour has been suspended, all authority challenged, and in the chaos that has ensued every kind of freedom seems to be there simply for the taking. Boys and girls, school kids and students way younger than me, are wandering around in semi-combat gear, with bandanas over their mouths that also make attractive neckwear or look great when used to tie up a ponytail. I realise that revolution is somewhere in these kids’ blood, but it’s extraordinary how instinctively they knew the best way to build barricades and to come up with the barrage of war cries that are plastered all over the quartier’s walls: ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, ‘Be realistic! Demand the impossible!’, ‘Under the cobblestones the beach’ (and it’s true, there’s sand where the cobbles have been pickaxed up), ‘I’m Marxist, of the Groucho tendency’. However cute these slogans are, they have a deadly undertone. Some of the students (as well as a few of the despised riot police) are now in hospital; others, rumour has it, have been dumped dead into the Seine. Meanwhile, a number of them go around showing off their bandages and their limps like war wounds. My pulse quickens in a way I would normally distrust and question, but there’s no shadow of a doubt: I have to be part of this.
The first demo I joined – spontaneously, off the street – turned out to be short and brutish. We began by linking arms in rue Gay-Lussac and advanced on the CRS waiting by the Jardin du Luxembourg, chanting ‘CRS … SS, CRS … SS’ and ‘De Gaulle … Ass-ass-in’, hissing hard on the sibilants and heaving the odd cobblestone like a discus in front of us to show we meant business. Up until then, it might have been a student prank that had got out of hand. We all felt secretly pleased with ourselves, we’d dressed up in the most suitable outfits we’d got, and we exulted in the applause that came from the café terraces and the bourgeois apartments high overhead where people, sometimes whole families, joined in our chants. We were young, younger than we had ever been, and on the cusp of empowerment. The old order would fall of its own rottenness, be swept away and replaced by our untarnished ideals. It was as simple as making love and so natural that the whole street applauded it. Then the tear-gas bombs went winging our way, exploding amongst us and making it momentarily impossible to see and difficult to talk. From having hung around, smoking and spitting, the CRS were now grouped in a sinister, helmeted line-up, their shields forming an iron wall as they advanced towards us. A few hotheads from our ragged ranks ran towards them, hurled a well-aimed cobblestone or two, then fell back, not without two of them being viciously clubbed to the ground and dragged away. We had no barricade within easy reach. Some comrades wielded sticks and the odd pickaxe but most of us had nothing, so we stood there indecisively for a couple of moments longer until a few stragglers began to walk in the opposite direction, quite casually at first, but as the CRS drew near everyone suddenly broke into a run and disappeared, taking cover wherever they could, in cafés and shops, in the maze of side streets behind.
With everything out of joint – the country slowly paralysed by strikes, the government bewildered and almost on the run – my own dislocation, brought on by nothing more political than a poisonous drug, is no longer such an issue. If I have gone crazy, so has everyone around me, fighting, shouting, haranguing the crowds with everything from personal whimsy to outright, bloody sedition. Even though I always have Yeats’ line, ‘The worst are full of passionate intensity’, resounding in my ear, I thrill to the exhortations to violence. I am out of character and liberated. In the shadow of all these voices, all this confusion, we can let go and release the pent-up insanity that I suddenly realise is in all of us. And of course we all want change, just like the Living Theatre, we all want unlimited freedom and the promise of voluptuousness that drops like honey from the open, chanting lips and the breasts straining against the tight, military-style shirts. We are all mad now, high on revolution, with the tear gas lingering in our mouths like the taste of heroism.
I go back to every street skirmish I can find, fired by all the slogans even though I don’t really believe in them (I can hardly see grandfatherly old de Gaulle as a brutal assassin), but I long to join arms with the others in the quest of the unknown, releasing me from myself. We are like waves, moving up and toppling forward in the acrid air in a foam of flags and posters, then crashing down in front of the armoured forces of law and order, only to pull back, rattling stones underfoot as we regroup and charge again. And we know we will win, you can see from the smiles that flash from comrade to comrade that our cause is just and that victory is within our grasp, and we surge again, knowing that the change in the air is the change in ourselves, in our waking and sleeping dreams, and in our exultation we no longer know or care what change will bring or how this great, spontaneous uprising will ever end.
4
Love’s Labyrinth: 17 rue de Poitou, IIIe (1968–69)
Anne and I are terrifically proud of our new, squat, grey telephone since so few Parisians actually have one. I managed to get a line installed recently thanks to an older man I met at a gallery opening who told me he was a high-up at the quai d’Orsay and could arrange such things. I think he’s also a homosexual because he’s called several times since to ask me how I like having a phone, subtly suggesting that such privileges come at a price. So far I’ve played the thick foreigner who can’t understand (or even spell) innuendo.
We are just finishing a hurried breakfast when the phone rings. It’s always an intriguing moment since most of our friends, who are forever complaining about being stuck on the waiting list, have to go to a café if they want to call. I tense up, thinking it’s either Garith or David, one or possibly both of them having struggled into the office despite the continuing riots and strikes and wondering where the rest of us are. Garith has been spouting phrases like ‘I’m not suspending the magazine to allow a load of hairy students to fornicate in the bloody streets!’ If it’s neither of them, it will probably be my new gentleman friend anxious to
know whether the unrest has caused the line to be cut off.
‘Mich-a-ël?’
Only Jean-Claude Montel says my name as if it were a German forename, pronouncing each syllable distinctly. I breathe a sigh of relief. From having been my mentor in peace, Montel now acts as my Virgil in the student inferno. We went together, as trees were axed and cars torched, to hear Sartre talk at the Sorbonne and were amazed to see how tiny and frail he looked as he held forth (‘Cut it short, Sartre,’ some wag called out from the crowd that had gathered in the main amphitheatre; but of course he didn’t). We also turned up at the Odéon while Jean-Louis Barrault made an impassioned plea for freedom and tolerance, followed by a mature-looking, bearded Latin American student who berated us all for being there rather than, as he put it forcefully, ‘standing shoulder to shoulder with our worker comrades at the Renault factory’; my sense of guilt would have come to the fore had another live wire in the audience not piped up: ‘What I want to know, comrade, is why you are not with the comrades at Renault?’ The laughter that echoed round the Odéon took us momentarily out of revolutionary fervour. But Montel wanted to take us back in.
‘Mich-a-ël, I’ve talked to the committee comrades and you have been elected a member of the newly founded Union des Ecrivains,’ Montel says, pausing to allow the significance of his news to sink in; and it’s true I’m immediately elated at the idea of being considered an ‘écrivain’, a fully fledged writer rather than a drudge cobbling together texts on everything from artists long ‘recuperated’ by the capitalist system to grand bourgeois meals concocted in feudal castles dotted around the country.
‘But first of all, to make place for the new,’ Montel continues, his voice rising with excitement, ‘we have to kill off the old. For the new Union to flourish, we have to do away with the corrupt Société des Gens de Lettres, the so-called official writers’ body in this country. They have a headquarters, the Hôtel de Massa, which sits in a park – yes, in their own park, these lackeys, these moribund mouthpieces – on rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, where they ponce around dictating to all of us what literature should be! We need to capture it from them and occupy it, so as to signal that the Union des Ecrivains has replaced them totally and definitively.’
I absorb this latest suggestion warily. It was all very well tearing up a cobblestone here and there and joining in the demos: if you didn’t get too near the front line, there was always time to dash out of sight down a side street whenever the CRS began their baton-wielding charge. But from that to physically ejecting what I imagine will be a bunch of inoffensive old men sounds like a step too far. As a foreigner I myself could be ejected very quickly right out of the country: there were already reports of ‘undesirable aliens’ being marched to the frontier and forcibly repatriated.
‘I don’t suppose you’d need me as such a new recruit,’ I venture. ‘I’d probably just get in the way, Jean-Claude. I mean, I’ve got absolutely no experience of occupying anything, actually. I’d be hopeless at occupying.’
‘The Union needs each and every one of its members,’ Montel replies in an implacable tone I’ve never heard him use before. ‘We’ve decided to attack this afternoon, so I can pick you up on the way to the Métro.’
When Montel arrives, I’m slightly reassured to see that he doesn’t seem to be carrying any weapons, but an uneasy silence has replaced the animated conversations we usually have. I’d like to ask him whether he realises that what we have in mind is illegal, but I know he will reply with some revolutionary slogan about the ends justifying the means. But what if some poor old writers die trying to prevent us from entering? And what if the poor old writers have been forewarned and – who knows? – are themselves armed, even if it’s with ancient pistols? From gathering up some ancient figure lying inert on the floor, I see myself instead lying inert, my shirt soaked in blood, and I groan inwardly.
We’re out of the musty old Métro, breathing in the balmy spring air of the gardens that surround the Observatoire, whose lofty white cupola fills the early evening with a distant notion of order and harmony. Outside the Hôtel de Massa, a stately, neo-classical building with huge ground-floor windows that overlook well-tended lawns, a raggle-taggle group has formed. Most look as if they had come directly from one or other of the skirmishes still being fought at odd points in the Latin Quarter, while a handful are formally dressed in jacket and tie. There is also a fair sprinkling of girls, a couple of them in tight shirts ready for combat, as well as a well-known Left Bank poet with flowing silver hair and a bandana knotted artfully round his neck. A few hard-liners are carrying shillelagh-like fighting sticks, but the atmosphere seems more celebratory than aggressive. There is a wave of anticipation, nevertheless, when the leader of the newly formed Union gives us the order to push open the garden gates, run in single file on either side of the gravel path, then fan out to right and left of the Hôtel. A straggly manoeuvre ensues, bringing us to the main façade, at which point our leader chooses a contingent of larger members, myself included, to batter in the main door, pausing dramatically beforehand to wrestle with the ornate brass door handle first. Unexpectedly the heavy, panelled door swings wide open to disclose an empty marble-tiled entrance hall. We pause for a moment, listening, then all troop cautiously in, unopposed, but immediately checking, like cops in a film, the neighbouring salons and the rooms upstairs for any pockets of resistance. It is soon evident that the building is completely empty and silent, as if vacated for the summer.
‘Voilà,’ our leader cries out triumphantly, as if he had been expecting this dénouement from the start. ‘Men of letters indeed! More like reactionaries running scared. These paper tigers didn’t even have the courage to confront us. Vive l’Union des Ecrivains!’
‘Vive l’Union des Ecrivains,’ the hard-liners repeat, without much conviction. Their sticks are hanging awkwardly by their sides.
A group of us have spread out into the well-appointed suite of reception rooms, noting the point de Hongrie parquet, the ornate chandeliers and the gilded elegance of the whole place.
‘You see the luxury these literary pigs live in!’ expostulates one heavily bearded camarade I recognise from the barricades. ‘They spend their time here swigging champagne and promoting each other so that they can sweep off the top prizes and sell their crap in vanloads to the unsuspecting public. We should deface the whole building to show our disdain for their compromised principles and their putrescent values.’
‘I totally agree with you, camarade,’ says a more urbane character, straightening his tie. ‘But why don’t we show up the system for what it is more subversively, more derisively? Those old farts would never know how to let their hair down, they’re too old to dance and too committed to writing their dreary, outdated drivel. Let’s have a party! We’ve got the weather, we’ve got the space. Let’s have one great big fucking party here so that our doddery old friends wouldn’t even recognise their own stupid, stuffy premises!’
The idea catches on. A couple of camarades go out to buy wine, another produces a guitar, and the urbane character takes what he calls ‘Tibetan bells’ from his pocket, tinkling them as he begins a grotesque parody of an old man dancing through the rooms and down the main staircase. Doubled up with laughter, several others go into an aged, vigorously stiff-hipped twist. Then a couple move out and start jiving gracefully on the lawn. The wine arrives in crates and litre bottles of it are circulated freely. Some camarades fire up joints and stretch out on the grass. I grab a bottle of wine and steer clear of the tell-tale smell of mind-buckling weed.
There’s a girl who has intrigued me since I arrived. She’s not conventionally attractive, more wholesome and innocently wide-eyed, but she looks at everything that’s going on with an amused detachment which, now that I know I’m not going to have any dead old men on my hands, is close to what I feel. She’s sitting alone on the grass and when I go over and offer her my bottle she takes a good long swig. We start to talk and although her name – Danielle Collob
ert – doesn’t mean anything to me, I soon realise that she is the real McCoy. I mention that I once sat next to Beckett and, without the least condescension, she tells me that she visits Beckett regularly, that sometimes they talk about writing and things but mostly they sit in silence for a long while before, at a certain point in that silence, she leaves. To give myself a bit of importance, I tell Danielle that I’ve come here with Montel, who’s just had a book published. She knows Montel and likes him, she says. I press her on the publication issue. Yes, she says awkwardly, almost unwillingly. She has had a book published by Gallimard. I find myself drawn deeper and deeper into her hazel eyes. My head is swimming, but it’s not the crude red wine. It’s her. It’s her strange, easy acceptance of everything. She seems apart, detached, even resigned. There’s a sadness coming from her, from her unwavering gaze, and I begin to drown in that steady, undeceived stare. As we talk, I can only tell her the truth, because only the truth matters, and when she asks casually why I joined the Union, all I can say, truthfully, is that I want to be a writer and joining seemed a better choice than not joining, even though I didn’t believe that anything I could say or write would ever help our camarades at Renault or any other factory. And I thought she would get up and leave me there and then as a self-confessed opportunist masquerading as an activist in the class struggle, but she leans over and kisses me for one long blissful moment full on the lips.
The Existential Englishman Page 10