The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  I’m not proud of these exploits (well, that’s not quite true) but they don’t inspire guilt in the same way because they are skirmishes, passing encounters that don’t threaten to rock the boat. So Anne and I appear to be getting along much better, and we enjoy sharing forays into unexplored corners of the area, which is highlighted for us now by various landmarks. One of the Marais’ endearing oddities is a fully fledged Chinatown that dates back to World War One when the French government brought in a contingent of Chinese workers to help with the war effort. Many of them stayed on, settling in the northwest of the Marais and opening small leather workshops specialising in ladies’ handbags. The crooked little streets are dotted with Chinese restaurants which Anne and I try out, comparing this one’s sweet and sour pork, a challenging dish which varies enormously in quality, with someone else’s round the corner; overall the food is pretty standard but it is warm, filling and very reasonably priced.

  Another of our favourite haunts is Izraël’s specialist grocery on the southern edge of the Marais, which we get to by using one of our special short cuts through the ancient church of Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux, where a passage along the nave allows us to go in at one entrance on rue des Francs-Bourgeois and reappear at the other on rue des Blancs-Manteaux, itself named after the ‘Servants of Mary’, who have worshipped the Virgin in their white cloaks here since the mid-thirteenth century. Izraël never fails to delight us because it has everything from tapenade to tarama on its crowded little shelves, and there’s always some new spice, like the pungent peppercorns they import from the forests of Madagascar, or an exotic rice, a raspberry-flavoured vinegar or a rare olive oil that we haven’t tasted before. Once we’ve stocked up on a few delicacies, we like to move on to a Moroccan restaurant nearby that has simple, well-prepared couscous and their own orange blossom water with which, in one of those minor rituals couples enjoy, we wash our hands before starting the meal. The delicate scent in which we are now bathed proves propitious: having taken our dainty packages home, we make love spontaneously and satisfyingly for the first time in weeks.

  I didn’t think I would see Danielle again but as the days shorten she turns up in Paris, and as if nothing has happened, nothing has changed, we go back to meeting clandestinely once or twice a week in the afternoon. Subtracted from the ordinary routine, the hours we spend together in café or hotel or wandering down the old streets of the Latin quarter or the Marais have a different density. Although we merge intensely into each other, we are also more aware of our solitude, as if we came together to experience our separateness more keenly and poignantly. The more we meet, the more Danielle becomes an enigma. She tells me she has seen Beckett, whose presence is very important to her, and that once again they sat in silence together. She has lent me Héliogabale by Artaud, whose writing has long affected her. We also discuss Louis Guilloux, a fellow Breton who wrote Le Sang noir (Black Blood) and was a close friend of Camus, but mainly because I happened to strike up a conversation with him while we were both having lunch in a bistro in rue du Dragon, just opposite the offices of Cahiers d’art, one of the art magazines I most admire. ‘What is love,’ Guilloux said to me as a parting shot, ‘but the instant of a breast between two shirts?’

  I have also visited Danielle in her very simple, small flat in Belleville, which is almost as anonymous as the hotel rooms we go to. In moments of intimacy I realise she is more worldly wise and more sexually confident than I am, although I’ve never found myself lagging behind in this department before, and I have already rather primly declined one or two options she suggested. ‘I thought you liked everything,’ she commented, then left it at that. Situations like these could be comical, and I would be the first to make a joke out of them, because laughter always seems to me to offer the best way of smoothing life’s unexpected turns. But although she has great charm and can be devastatingly ironic, Danielle remains serious throughout. We were lying on her oddly virginal bed one afternoon about to make love and I looked up to find her examining the tip of my penis intently. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked uneasily. ‘I’m admiring it,’ she said, unanswerably. Then later, out of the blue, she said, ‘You have something that Frenchmen have lost.’ I felt hugely gratified, as if she had raised me to a superior rank. But then I wondered, what it could be that I had and they had lost: a naivety, a vulnerability, the awe I experience before the mysteries of sex and love? I couldn’t ask, and Danielle remained inscrutable, saying nothing more. She doesn’t say much at the best of times, and when she does talk it is always very softly and simply, with a natural authority which I would never question, just as, in another age, I would have no doubt submitted to the sibyls uttering their ancient, mysterious prophecies.

  However much Danielle remains an enigma, I realise I am addicted to the strange mix of guilt and excitement that seeing her involves – I feast on her clear eyes, I feast on her paradoxically innocent, untouched face – because nothing else delivers the same emotional kick. I suffer constantly, wake in the night, and while making a furtive call to determine where we’ll meet next guilt makes me sweat so much my shirt is sticking to my body by the time I hang up. But on every occasion, although the tension of leading a secret life keeps me in a state of extreme anxiety, I come back for more. I even emerge from the shadows where I lurk with her and risk being seen – being unmasked in public – as I take her to exhibitions I think she will like, particularly the haunting exhibition of Giacometti’s work that the Orangerie has put on this winter. We go back there together several times, walking through the Tuileries where the ornamental pool has iced over and the trees stand black and bare, like Giacometti’s skeletons, against the lowering, grey sky. Jean Genet has called Giacometti’s figures the ‘guardians of the dead’, and I have sometimes thought that the most striking venue for a Giacometti show would be a graveyard, with his gaunt figures placed at intervals among the tombstones. The Orangerie’s bright lighting and stark white walls cannot dispel the sensation that an ancient funeral has taken place and that death retains its ever-present dominion over life. Danielle has never been to a complete retrospective of Giacometti’s work before and she is transfixed by seeing so many of his sculptures together. I can feel her excitement mount as we move from the small heads to The Chariot and the towering Women of Venice. As we walk amongst these grimly dramatic figures, holding hands like children, she looks up at me constantly as if to say: ‘Do you see now? The only meaning of life is death.’

  Going back to the Giacometti exhibition several times has revived the desire to write about him, and I’ve been able to do two fairly long reviews of the show for an American art magazine and a British newspaper. I’d like one day to be able to write a whole book about Giacometti since he may well remain – as I’m often painfully aware as I take in numerous exhibitions of minimal interest every month – the only modern artist other than Francis Bacon to whom I would want to devote that kind of intense scrutiny. But of course I am not alone and the field is full of well-known Giacometti specialists because both the work and the man – Giacometti’s whole aura – attracts the best poets and writers, not only Genet, but Sartre, Leiris, Breton and a younger French poet I have got to know, Jacques Dupin, who has put on several Giacometti shows at Galerie Maeght and written the first complete book about him. And that is only on the French-language side, because in English there are two heavyweight art critics, David Sylvester and James Lord, who dominate and who, like the French writers, have the incomparable advantage of having known Giacometti himself – while the best I can say is that I have become familiar with his entourage: his brother Diego, his widow Annette and the various experts, whether critics or art dealers, on his work.

  There are whole areas around Giacometti that haven’t been touched on at all. I’m fascinated by the kind of ‘crossover’, for want of a better word, between art and literature, which has been particularly strong in France, where poets, from Baudelaire through Apollinaire to the Surrealists, have long been natural allies fo
r artists, discovering their work, drawing attention to it through their writing and even dealing in it (as Breton and Eluard certainly did to scratch a living). And a leading reason why Giacometti has been so well served by writers – alongside the fact that his work strongly attracts literary interpretation – is because he forged such good friendships with the best writers of his time, not only reading their work and talking with them regularly (Simone de Beauvoir says that Giacometti’s conversations with Sartre were of an exceptional breadth and subtlety) but making lithographs and etchings to accompany the books they published.

  We already know a good deal about Giacometti’s close relationships with Genet and Sartre because they both wrote brilliantly and at length about him. The friendship that intrigues me most, however, is the one that Giacometti had with Samuel Beckett. A woman who noticed the two of them sitting together on the terrace at the Rotonde in Montparnasse went inside to the bar and announced: ‘You have two of the most remarkable men in Paris sitting on your terrace and I thought you should know it.’ She was right, of course, but since Giacometti never portrayed Beckett (as he did Sartre, Genet, Leiris and so on), and Beckett never wrote about Giacometti (although he did write about several artist friends), their friendship has been largely passed over. Yet the mere fact that they met frequently in the cafés and bars of Montparnasse and even walked home together after long nights out sets off the most evocative images in my mind of what intellectual life was like in Paris in the decade after the war. However individual their vision, each one’s work echoes the other’s at almost every turn, with both men constantly paring away, whether in language or in clay, to reach an irreducible essence. In the end, Beckett’s plays were known as much for their silences as for their sparse, tentative phrasings, while Giacometti’s figures were reduced so much that, if they didn’t crumble into little piles of plaster, they would fit quite literally into a large matchbox.

  The one instance when the two men are known to have worked together was when Beckett asked Giacometti to design a tree for a production of Waiting for Godot at the Théâtre de l’Odéon a few years ago, when Giacometti was still alive and keeping doggedly to his punishing schedule of working (and chain-smoking) through the night. The result was predictably stark: a spindly white plaster tree with leafless branches that emerged from previous trial versions and repeated discussions between writer and artist sometimes lasting until dawn in Giacometti’s tiny, tumbledown studio in Alésia. In the end both men were relatively satisfied with the result, although of course neither was ever really satisfied by anything they had created, and even while Godot was being performed both sculptor and playwright would reposition the twigs on the tree before the curtain went up. The Odéon put Giacometti’s tree in storage once the production ended but it disappeared for good during the 1968 ‘events’, when hordes of us occupied the theatre to debate what was going on and where it would all lead.

  ‘A Country Road. A Tree’ were Beckett’s lapidary instructions for the Godot set. Giacometti sketched trees incessantly, and he once said that all men would be better off as trees. When they were walking home together down a tree-lined street in Montparnasse one late evening, after a round of the bars and possibly more (both men frequented the local brothels), Beckett suddenly said out loud: ‘I can’t look at these trees any longer!’, to which Giacometti replied gently: ‘That’s because you love them so much, Beckett.’

  I thought of taking those lines as the first exchange in a play about Giacometti and Beckett, principally a dialogue between the two that would centre on their extraordinary awareness of man’s place, or lack of a place, in the universe after the horrors of war. But what did they actually talk about on those rambling walks across Paris as dawn was about to break? It seems that Giacometti certainly disburdened himself to Beckett about the impossibility of ever recreating exactly what he saw, whether a face or a glass on a table (which Beckett thought of as a game Giacometti played with himself where one hand tries but just fails to catch the other); and one might assume Beckett talked about his problems as a writer, although he was given to long silences even when surrounded by close friends. But of course I’d have plenty to paraphrase by rereading the classic Beckett texts and the revealing interviews that Giacometti gave. Yet the trouble there – there always seems to be ‘trouble’ whenever I attempt to think in terms of a book rather than a few scrappy articles – is that I probably won’t have the time. Yesterday I was asked to join a new venture at the very high-minded, influential French newspaper, Le Monde, which is about to launch a weekly English-language summary of its contents, with two pages being set aside for literature and the arts. If it were a question of only translating and editing texts, I would probably decline. But I’d be the editor, the boss, choosing the articles, then getting others to translate them. I can already see my new visiting card, ‘Arts & Literary Editor, Le Monde’, and I can’t say I’m doing that well as a freelance. It would be nice to have a regular salary again, and I do sometimes miss having an office to go to and the company and joshing around that brings…

  Le Monde is certainly a big step up from Réalités, that much is obvious right away. Because it’s a daily, there’s an altogether different urgency in the building, not least in the hot-metal typesetting room down in the basement where articles are pulled at the last moment and titles changed; I immediately take to the compositors, who speak an evocatively crude, direct French and have a sense of humour to match, which proves very useful when you have to plead to change a headline yet again at the last moment. The daily paper comes across as altogether more real than the monthly magazine, which is hardly surprising since we’re dealing with the latest news hurtling in pell-mell from across the world rather than fey reflections on lifestyle, art and design; even so, Le Monde feels less like a hive of hard-bitten journalists than a kind of unique university where the European affairs specialist will confer with his learned North African or North American colleague before completing his exposé for the day. I get caught up in the excitement of feeling that everything is in constant flux, whether the story is about Nixon or Teddy Kennedy or the men on the moon. I find it impossible to plough through any edition of the paper from cover to cover, since there’s so much in-depth stuff on so many subjects. Every now and then a story comes up that holds my attention and I try to follow it, like the bizarre ‘Markovic affair’ that has been dragging on for over a year and involves the killing of one of Alain Delon’s ‘bodyguards’ who apparently had photographs of ‘sex acts’ that involved the wife of President Pompidou, who looks like everyone’s maiden aunt, and about as sexy. All the elements for front-page revelations are there, including that intriguing mix of the improbable with the all-too-likely.

  Of course, we’re only the English edition, tucked away in offices on the fourth floor, just behind the huge clock that marks the façade of the Le Monde building on rue des Italiens, which is set back from the grands boulevards and a short walk from the unashamedly lavish Belle Epoque Opéra. I like the area, which I got to know when I was at Réalités, because it’s such a far cry from the Marais. This is the modern, hard-nosed side of Paris that wants to keep up to date and competitive in today’s world almost in defiance of its hallowed past. So the notion that dominated in the Fourth Republic of a businessman who took wine at lunch, then a siesta with his wife, has been energetically superseded by a more American model of the driven executive, all breakfast meetings and mineral water, although the French notion of ‘five to seven’, the period devoted to one’s mistress between leaving work and returning home, has so far proved more resilient.

  Le Monde en anglais, as we are officially known, is actually more American than English. We have an American chief, Anaïs, who worked sporadically at Réalités, and several wandering correspondents or ‘subs’ originally hailing from the United States who have wound up here via Reuters or Agence France Presse. It’s a pretty odd mix, including a moonlighter from the Trib who looks like an all-in wrestler run to fat, a charmi
ngly effete dandy brought up between Paris and Los Angeles with the improbable name of François Villon (who moreover lays claim to being the ‘thirteenth Baron Tanqueroy’), a bearded Welshman called Gwyn, who disappears on week-long benders only to reappear at work in a state of near-total amnesia, and myself, who is not exactly run of the mill either. There is also a regularly changing roster of reproving secretaries who leave either because they cannot take the brutal daily interaction of all these characters, which includes frequent shouting and the occasional fist-fight, or because they find a husband, or both. We also have a regular supply of old Paris hands who come in to do the odd translation, and two of them, I’m delighted to discover, are close to Beckett: Patrick Bowles, who worked on translating Molloy from its original French, and Barbara Bray, who’s extremely discreet but, Patrick tells me, is actually Beckett’s mistress.