The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  It was a ridiculous situation. We were both overreacting, and in normal circumstances we would have laughed it off. But my running away must have awoken some deeper feeling of rejection in Desert Rose because from that moment on she started lying in wait for me on my way home from Le Monde, insisting that we spend the night together in my flat. There is nothing less erotic than being made to make love, and before long I was leading my life principally to avoid her. But Desert Rose was not to be put off, and what she took as a rebuff brought out a manic determination in her. On several evenings she drove her battered Citroën 2CV fast up and down rue de Braque, eventually screeching to a halt and revving up noisily in front of the café-bougnat. Once all the neighbours had come to their windows to see what the fuss was about, Desert Rose would point her graceful, tanned arm directly at my windows (where I was cowering, just out of sight) before driving off, but not before the whole street knew that the bearded young newcomer, bastard that he was, had obviously wronged the poor girl. On another occasion, Desert Rose managed to slip in to our building and then hammer on my door for hours, thinking I would give in. But she’s brought out an equally stubborn streak in me, and I imagined that in the end she would tire of it and mercifully go home. But I was wrong, of course. The knocking did stop sometime in the small hours, then later I heard that when Marie-Hélène emerged from her room in the early morning she found Desert Rose stretched out in a sleeping bag just outside my door. The story has now gone the rounds of the café, and my reputation as a tombeur or local Don Juan is firmly established. I take the ribbing this provokes as jovially as I can, but I’m annoyed to have become a bit of a laughing stock. The only advantage I can see is that there’s a distinctly intrigued look in Marie-Hélène’s eye when we meet now.

  Then at last the Sahara calls, and Desert Rose decides to leave Paris behind. She comes to me for one last goodbye, and we outdo each other in effusions of fond regret and amiability. Then, just before she goes, Desert Rose makes a rapid tour of my little room sweeping every gritty crystal and Touareg knick-knack she has ever given me into a plastic bag. And without another word she disappears into the night.

  Other, older women have loomed into view. There’s Sonia Orwell, of course, usually in Francis Bacon’s wake, but also under her own steam. Like Isabel Rawsthorne, another of Bacon’s great women friends, Sonia has had close ties with Paris which she is eager to maintain. It’s not surprising that Paris looms so large in her life. As editorial assistant on Horizon, she would have heard Cyril Connolly and most of the English artists and intellectuals she mixed with extolling the virtues of Paris and French art and literature. Then she had an affair with Merleau-Ponty, the leading exponent of phenomenology and, with Sartre and Camus, at the forefront of existentialist philosophy. From then on, Paris and what was done and the way it was done in Paris was her sole compass, not only in culture, style and food but in relationships and even sexual practice. I had a very brief and clumsy affair with her as a very young man, and I was taken aback on our first encounter when she suggested anal sex, which I had never even conceived of except in what I vaguely imagined to be male homosexual couplings. ‘But everybody does it like that in Paris,’ Sonia said conclusively, leaving me feeling both mystified and inadequate.

  Perhaps that has conditioned our relationship ever since. Sonia once introduced me loudly to a crowded room of far older and, to me, highly important, people as an ‘obscure young man’, and although I knew that was unnecessarily hurtful I didn’t know how to react, especially as I had been schooled to show instant, unquestioning respect to older ladies; which is perhaps why I’ve always treasured Brian Howard’s retort to the lady who, when she said, ‘I suppose you are a young man who has never read Schopenhauer [or whoever]’, unhesitatingly replied, ‘And I suppose you are an old woman who has.’ Certainly Sonia has continued to put me down at every turn. When I showed her a short article I’d written in French (in French, Sonia, French!) in Le Monde, her only reaction was ‘Not very big, is it?’ At the same time, I haven’t fared much better with the friends she has introduced me to. Sonia is a literary snob, and no one cuts as much ice with her as well-known Parisian writers. I’d met Marguerite Duras several times with Sonia and Bacon and found her pleasant enough, but I didn’t think much about her until she called me up and told me she was looking for someone to dub a character in her films. In our short conversation, I tried to give my voice every possible inflection to show I could ‘do all the voices’, but much to my dismay I never heard from her again. I was also summoned by another of Sonia’s great friends, the writer Mary McCarthy, and there my usefulness extended a little further, namely to taking back on my next trip to London the large handbag that Sonia, presumably when well gone in drink, had forgotten in Mary’s impressive apartment on rue de Rennes. From unadventurous lover to unused voice, I have been appointed temporary keeper and purveyor of the handbag.

  You hope that these large, powerful ladies might take a feckless young man under their wing, but generally they don’t. I realise I look for this kind of support, patronage even, and perhaps that’s why I’m often drawn to older people. Bacon has provided it massively, so did the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma when I lived in Barcelona, both homosexual of course, and I’ve never had that kind of protection from a woman, certainly not from my poor mother, who barely knows how to defend herself; so I don’t have to look far to see where the need comes from. It was clear I’d get nothing of the kind from Sonia, quite the reverse; and when I tried to cosy up to Nancy Mitford the other day I made no impression at all. I’d gone with my charming friend from Le Monde, François Villon, to a fashionable but notably inexpensive table d’hôte lunch that’s held every Sunday at the hotel on rue des Beaux-Arts, which became well known because it’s where Oscar Wilde spent his last few days (and, famously, said to the ghastly wallpaper in his room, ‘One of us has to go’). I was seated next to Nancy and tried to interest her in my forlorn youth and general waywardness that cried out to be taken in hand, but she remained adamantly uninterested and continued to dominate the conversation relentlessly with witty, snobby remarks delivered in her very ‘U’, cut-glass accent. The fact that I couldn’t get a word in edgeways soon convinced me that I was irremediably ‘non-U’, and I spent the rest of the lunch in an intensely awkward, embarrassed silence.

  I certainly wouldn’t get the slightest support, either, from Vera Russell, who’s been making regular beelines to Paris recently. For one thing, she has her own agenda permanently in mind, and for another she is a very large, intimidating grande dame; beside her voluminous charms I would look like one of those little men shown next to big bathing beauties in saucy seaside postcards; and when Bacon says she has ‘legs like bolsters’, I have no reason to believe he is simply being bitchy. Vera was married to the art critic John Russell, but they’ve divorced, and now Vera seems to have reinvented herself as an art publisher, bringing artists and writers together to produce finely made, limited-edition books. It’s a particularly French tradition: artists and writers have long been seen as natural allies here. Baudelaire wrote on a wide range of painters, of course, while Apollinaire became a spokesman for the Cubists and Sartre and Genet helped create Giacometti’s reputation. Conversely, to take only the big names, Bonnard illustrated Verlaine’s poems and Picasso embellished Pierre Reverdy’s haunting Le Chant des morts (The Song of the Dead).

  Thinking along these lines, Vera has managed to get Jasper Johns to work on a luxury edition of Beckett’s Foirades, which is quite a coup, and she now hopes to persuade Bacon to illustrate a text of his choice. I don’t think it’s going to work for a moment, since Bacon has always made it clear he ‘detests illustration’ of any kind; but Vera is not so easily put off and she thinks she can get him to change his mind by getting me involved in the project. This makes me very uneasy, because Vera wouldn’t worry for a moment about making me look as if I’m working behind Francis’s back. Her great mistake is to believe in her own manipulations. This became all t
oo apparent when she gave a lunch to bring Johns and Bacon together. Johns turned out to be as withdrawn as his great friend Rauschenberg – whom I met through the photographer Hans Namuth – is open and gregarious. Bacon, on the other hand, grew venomously aggressive the moment he set eyes on Johns. Although no blood was actually drawn, their encounter, far from the frank and fertile recognition of each other’s talent Vera had fondly imagined, produced nothing but instant mutual loathing.

  One admirable thing that Vera has done, in my eyes, is to have got me to pick her up on the way to that lunch at the ‘Maison de Verre’, where she is staying. This is the kind of surprise that Vera pulls all the time, and then she has all my attention, just as when she described meeting James Joyce when she was a girl (as Vera Poliakoff, the daughter of a Russian émigré in Paris) or her work as a spy in London during the war. Of course, Vera is nothing if not a myth-maker, above all about herself, and her main career has been as an actress, which is perhaps another reason for taking her stories with a pinch of salt; but then, just as one begins to have serious doubts about the authenticity of her tales, she comes up trumps. Without her, I would certainly never have seen the interior of the iconic building in glass and steel that Pierre Chareau, originally a modernist furniture designer, completed in 1932 (I smile wryly when I think of the ‘Man of Glass’, as I still see myself even though I wrote the story years ago, being invited into the House of Glass). When you go into the courtyard you are confronted by a façade of what look like large bottle-ends, through which you enter into a double-height living room where every object has been specifically designed for the space and nothing has changed (not even the ashtrays!) in the intervening decades. Vera remains mysterious about the owner and how she comes to be staying there, but once again she holds me spellbound as she recounts that in its heyday a salon was held in this luminous space and the guests frequently included Walter Benjamin and Picasso as well as every Surrealist writer and painter of note.

  The further we get into summer the more the city empties out, and if I were still with Anne we’d be planning our holiday somewhere along the Brittany coast or staying with friends in a farmhouse in Provence. But it seems pointless to shoot off into the blue alone, particularly when Paris is at its most enchanting and available, with the Seine idling between half-deserted quays and the parks empty except for a few tourists and sunbathers. In lieu of any seaside, I’ve started going to the Piscine Royale and the Piscine Deligny, both of them quite ancient bathing establishments on, or actually in, the Seine. The Royale is pretty rickety but not too crowded, and it has the added attraction of a ping-pong table, whereas Deligny looks as if all the remaining populace of Paris has foregathered there. I tend to stick to the Royale, although it’s hardly hygienic and I’ve been told (I hope it’s a joke) that dead fish are decomposing in its murky depths. Once I’ve got a lane to myself, I like to swim backstroke (face well out of the water) up and down, up and down, allowing a miscellany of thoughts to surface in all their contradictions, trying to resolve some of them while summarily dismissing others, so that each visit is not only good exercise but therapeutic. What’s off-putting at Deligny, apart from the crowds, is the elite of bronzed young gods and goddesses who strut around the pool all day every day, insolently flaunting their oiled physiques, perky bras and bulging crotches. It’s a blatant pick-up place, which is all very well, I suppose, except that with a skin the colour of white asparagus I can’t even begin to compete.

  Luckily I’ve got a better use for my time because a young film-maker who’d dropped in to Marie-Hélène’s bar told me he was working on a documentary about the Marais, and we started talking about my doing a commentary for it in English. I love the idea, and I’ve even thought of recording some of the street cries you still hear, like the knife-grinder who’ll sharpen your knives outside your house or the glazier (‘Vitrier! Vitrier!’, you hear him cry) who’ll cut new panes of glass on the spot from the large sheets he carries about in a wooden contraption on his back. So the last few weeks of summer have taken me further into the old heart of the area, clambering into the recesses of its dark palatial hulks and getting to know them, festoon by triumphal festoon, stone by forgotten stone. We’ve filmed the most ancient houses in Paris, two listing, half-timbered edifices on rue François-Miron believed to date back to the fourteenth century, then all the major mansions as well as several – with sonorous names like Hôtel Hénault de Cantobre or Hôtel d’Aumont, seat of the Ducs d’Aumont – which I didn’t know existed. We’ve also got some footage of the blackened façade of Hôtel le Lièvre, the most imposing house on rue de Braque, but when we get inside it seems deserted, with a monumental stone staircase leading only to closed doors.

  People are drifting back to the city as if unaware they are no longer strolling down the beach with the sand between their toes or sitting under the plane trees with their evening drink as the dry, cracked earth slowly exhales the heat of the day. They wander down the boulevards, in shorts and sunglasses, showing off their perfect tans, as if still in a holiday dream. Surely it’s not the dreaded rentrée already, when parents go to their offices and children back to school? For an extended moment, the illusion holds. Couples embrace as if on the seafront at Saint-Tropez or in the chic villages of Provence; the waves still crash on the shore, the scent of crushed thyme fills the valley… Then the cars rev up, the telephone shrills and the bills have to be paid.

  I have been let down very gently into the autumn, even if staying intra muros throughout this long, hot summer has left me feeling rather desiccated and stale. Francis Bacon is here in the lead-up to his big new retrospective for meetings with the director of the Grand Palais and other grandees like Michel Leiris, who has written the catalogue introduction and so is ‘presenting’ Francis in a certain sense to the French cultural establishment. When Francis is in town, his energy and excitement about life, twinned with stark pessimism, always accelerates everything and everybody around him. I love this strange mix and lap it up like mother’s milk, although I am aware of the dangers flowing beneath all the exuberant fun. Francis has just called to ask whether I might by any chance be free to join him and his estranged boyfriend, George Dyer, for lunch at the Grand Véfour. Me? Free to meet at one of the world’s grandest restaurants, where Napoleon and Victor Hugo once supped? I’m already wondering whether my best suit, once cleaned and pressed, will pass muster.

  As well as being one of the oldest restaurants in Paris, the Véfour is also the prettiest with its gilded mirrors and paintings of the abundance of the earth: all fruit, flowers and pretty women in neo-classical poses. The atmosphere is so rarefied and the food so exquisite that you do not feel you are having a meal so much as participating in a high ritual where every dish served and morsel eaten has a precise, symbolic meaning. Francis exults in the formal perfection of this performance while undermining it by obsessively ordering more champagne, more Burgundy and Bordeaux than anyone can accommodate. He and I both drink heavily, tossing back the bottles as if we are in competition, while George is on an apomorphine cure and neither drinks nor eats but chain-smokes throughout the meal. However luxurious, the lunch has a distinct undercurrent of sadness. Francis has already told me that ‘there’s been nothing between George and me for ages’ but that he felt George had to be invited to Paris for the exhibition opening since ‘most of the pictures are about him’. I’m not sure I understand his reasoning here, but it is delivered with such finality that, as usual when Francis makes a statement, no one questions it.

  Francis takes George back to the Hôtel des Saints-Pères where they are staying because George is plainly not well. I try to counter the lingering sense of melancholy by walking through the Palais Royal, but gusts of it waft up from the piles of dead leaves around the gardens and the dusty little shops selling ancient genealogical charts, briar pipes, military medals and other curios for which there appears to be no demand. One shop here intrigues me because it is stuffed to the ceiling with collections of china from
old French families, and when I found a set of dinner plates with gilded, scalloped edges and a flowery golden ‘P’ with a coronet above it, I couldn’t resist buying them. I’ve been back several times since and got to know and rather like the woman who runs the shop. But a mutual friend has told me that, after a quarrel with her lover, she came back in a rage with an umbrella and smashed every single piece of china she had; I notice that the shop is now firmly shuttered. The whole episode must have been distinctly cathartic, since we all crept round there in fear of breaking something. But what can the poor woman do now?

  This grand, arcaded square has always attracted me, and before buying my little flat on rue de Braque, I made a futile attempt to rent a small apartment just under the eaves of the east wing, before I found out that even the garrets were reserved for the great and the good of the city. I’d heard of it by word of mouth, but I was never allowed even to see it, which made me all the more curious about what these coveted flats are like. So when I got the chance, while I was writing a freelance piece about a French decorator, to visit Colette’s famous apartment on the main floor of the building, I jumped at it, only to find that it wasn’t the least as I expected, all silk froufrous and furbelows, but quite plain and modest, like one of the sparser bachelor sets at Albany in Piccadilly, although with the huge luxury of a plunging view onto the Palais-Royal gardens and the great Véfour restaurant, which Colette called her ‘canteen’, situated conveniently just below.