The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  A long silence ensues during which I begin to wonder, as the miles flash by, whether the driver isn’t taking me on the scenic route, although there isn’t much to see on the endless three-lane highway with its tolls and interchanges and vast, weirdly symmetric graveyards, and I am relieved to arrive eventually at Peter’s Bel Air mansion and to start trying consciously to acclimatise to a place where both the air conditioning and the central heating are full on and, in any case, all the windows are open to the balmy air coming in from a semi-tropical garden. The house is big and very comfortable, with a large pool and a reassuringly expensive Rolls-Royce sitting like some wealthy maiden aunt in the drive outside. Everybody in the house is in meetings or on the phone, and the cheerful housekeeper tells me that, whenever I’m hungry, I should just help myself from one of the vast refrigerators in the kitchen. I’m embarrassed by the idea of raiding someone’s larder and nonplussed by the vast slabs of frosted meat, so I make do, much as at home, with salads and pasta, with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter thrown in. Then I hang around, watching television and hoping to talk to someone who can give me a better idea of why I’m here and what’s expected of me. Still no one emerges from the apparently empty house, so I go to bed early but wake in the night because of jet lag and a whole series of new noises: the radiators cranking up, a racoon on the roof overhead, water sprinklers hissing at dawn.

  The pool is always empty, so I swim several times a day with the uneasy feeling that someone is watching or even filming my every move from behind the screen of acacia and mimosa trees. Peter appears occasionally, still in his elegant Brooks Brothers’ pyjamas, and we have a few casual meetings, but it seems already agreed that I should represent his father’s estate in Europe, getting his work better known to prepare the way for a big exhibition in Los Angeles. We get on well and Peter tells me amusing stories about having Orson Welles to stay, mentioning that all the fridges had to be padlocked because Orson ate everything in them at night; he once told Peter (here Peter imitates Orson’s sonorous voice): ‘If no one sees you eat, you don’t get fat!’ We talk about films, and Peter seems to know not only every film ever made but to have met everyone who directed or starred in them. Our conversations usually begin with reminiscences like ‘Do you remember the scene where Edward G. Robinson says…’ We also discuss a couple of movie scripts I might help with, and Peter asks me to sit in on various film discussions just to give him my feedback. We congregate in large, rarely used sitting rooms and sit cross-legged in a circle. I’m not at all sure who the other people are but everybody appears to be accompanied by at least one lawyer, since most of the talk is about contracts and payments. I’m also not sure who they’re talking about, but having worked out that ‘Cary’ must be Cary Grant, I assume ‘Frank’ is Frank Sinatra.

  ‘Come on, let’s stop jerking each other off here,’ one of the circle suggests. ‘Frank doesn’t need the money.’

  ‘But he needs the work,’ says another assertively. ‘Do you know how long it’s been since Frank made a movie?’

  I take all this in and supply Peter with my conclusions, crafting them with as much objective literary flair as I can muster. He seems satisfied with this, remarking that it’s good to have a European point of view, and I return to my daily routine of swimming, raiding the fridge and waiting for something to happen. Occasionally we go out for dinner, which is a huge treat, even though it takes so long to get to the restaurant I imagine we might have crossed into another state.

  To stretch my legs during the day, I set out to explore the area around Copa de Oro Road, but the hinterland turns out to be almost identical: large houses with luxury cars glinting in the sun and empty, manicured gardens with turquoise pools like the ones David Hockney paints. I’m completely alone on the road, but the bird song I appreciated so much at first is becoming oppressive and the bland, silent buildings take on a sinister tinge against the hard blue sky. Then a police car draws up suddenly out of nowhere and the officer at the wheel demands to know what I’m doing and whether I am a vagrant. I protest that I’m merely out for a walk, but when asked for identification I have nothing on me. The officer insists on driving me back to the station or to Copa de Oro to check my passport. Once I’ve been cleared, I vow not to venture out on foot again.

  Although certain sights, like the palm-fringed boulevards and classic diners, are already familiar from American films I’ve watched, only less vivid, I am no more at home here than when I arrived a fortnight ago. It’s as if I’ve been trying to get through to a reality that recedes every time I move towards it. I panic slightly, wondering how I’m going to fill the days, since no one has suggested any date for my departure. Peter is travelling so I can’t discuss our various alluring projects any further. In the end I force the issue, and Peter’s assistant secures me a flight back to Paris immediately, as if I only had to ask, and I’m slightly disappointed as well as relieved. The house is empty on the Sunday I’m leaving, but I’ve promised the secretaries to answer any calls, so when the phone rings I pick up.

  The voice sounds oddly familiar, but I adopt what I imagine would be the lofty manner of an English butler to inquire who’s calling.

  ‘This is Cary Grant,’ the voice says in a warm, friendly tone.

  The scene in To Catch a Thief where he’s being driven by Grace Kelly along the Grande Corniche drops like a slide before my eyes, and as it does I nearly drop the phone.

  ‘Of course I’ll let Peter know you called, Mr Grant,’ I stutter obsequiously.

  Then, during the long flight back to Paris, I realise that I never actually set foot in Los Angeles. I’d been in a film.

  The Marais looks like a grimy old village, with soot on the walls and refuse in the streets, but it also looks and feels like home. If there was ‘no there, there’, as Gertrude Stein said about California, there’s as much here, here, as you could want. The ancient archways and cobblestone courtyards exude permanence, and in the mornings as I sleep off my jet lag I wake to the grinder whetting knives in the street and the gaunt Arab loudly hawking the kilims that he carries around on his shoulder. I’m drawn down to Marie-Hélène’s bar by the smell of coffee and the constant, human hubbub from the stall-holders on their second or third glass of white. In the crowd I see Dédé, permanently down and out and also permanently clothed from head to foot in my cast-offs, so much so that he looks to me, in his flowered shirt and flares, like a self-portrait dating from a few summers ago. I re-enter the banter at the bar like a fish getting back into water, but the buttered baguette dunked in a good, dark café au lait that Marie-Hélène provides doesn’t quite do it. I still need to recover from my West Coast refrigerator diet, and in the evening I head over to a little local restaurant much favoured by rugby fanatics whose glory lies in a rich, meaty, golden-crusted Toulousain cassoulet that I dreamt of while I was away. There’s a boisterous crowd in tonight, with bottles being passed round and the old drinking songs regularly taken up. My turn comes when an amiable fellow the size of a young bull at the next table fills my glass to the brim. As I empty it steadily and appreciatively in one go, the hearty chorus comes thundering back:

  Il est des nô-ôtres (He’s one of us)

  Il a bu son verre comme les au-autres (He’s drunk his drop like all of us)

  I couldn’t have hoped for a better homecoming and I’m touched to the quick, with sentimental tears beginning to well up, even though several other diners have been treated to these rustic honours. To cover my embarrassing gratitude, I order another bottle of Cahors and top up every glass within reach.

  When I thought of Hockney in Los Angeles, I was wondering how he had captured the strange vacuousness of California so accurately, and no doubt ironically, but without caricature. Luckily, I’ll get a closer look at his work again because he has recently become very big in Paris with a major exhibition that’s just opened at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and a show at Claude Bernard’s gallery. The French appear to ignore foreign artists until, suddenly, they
clasp one so enthusiastically to their breast that he seems to be transformed into an honorary Frenchman. I suppose over time this is how we got Le Titien and Le Caravage here, although it’s true that the English also once had Michael Angelo. Even if he isn’t being referred to (or at least spelt) as Ockné yet, David is getting all the honours of Paris. I haven’t really seen him since the early sixties when he contributed to a student magazine I was editing, but he’s been living in Paris for a while now and I’ve chatted to him at a couple of parties. The other day I was having lunch at the Coupole with Francis Bacon and David walked over from another table and kissed him on both cheeks: as soon as David turned away, Bacon began wiping his face elaborately with a handkerchief and complaining loudly: ‘Now why did he have to do that? He must have some ghastly, contagious disease!’

  Francis is not best pleased by David’s success in Paris. He always likes, and mostly manages, to be the absolute centre of attention, and he’s certainly not inclined to share it with another artist – and another queer artist, to boot, as our meeting with Jasper Johns made abundantly clear. Still, he’s accepted David’s invitation to come and see his Paris studio, partly I suppose because he’s still thinking about finding a place to live and work here himself. Francis and I meet for another extravagant lunch, then we waft woozily over to Odéon to David’s studio, which is hidden away in the Cour de Rohan, three ancient little cobbled courtyards joined together just off boulevard Saint-Germain. David has done himself very well here: his studio is not only attractive and secluded, but also historic because Balthus worked in the same space in the 1930s. David greets us very pleasantly and we sit round chatting about life in Paris, with me struggling to keep awake after drinking more wine at lunch than I do during a normal week. There are several new pictures propped up round the studio, including a double portrait of two American artists, Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, who go around with David basking in his reflected glory and apparently hoping some of it will rub off on them. Francis doesn’t even look at David’s exposed pictures but he livens up when David, who’s started recording everything with a camera like Warhol, suggests doing some Polaroids of us both. Francis is immediately engaged and when he sees them, says ‘It’s a pity they’re not in colour, because they would be more distorted and of course that would be much nicer.’

  The moment we leave the studio, Francis starts tearing into David’s pictures.

  ‘People like them because there’s nothing there,’ he says with abrupt finality. ‘There’s absolutely nothing that people have to engage with or struggle with. Of course they’re perfectly fine if in the end all you really want in art is covers for fashion magazines like Marie-Claire.’

  We walk along boulevard Saint-Germain to the crossroads where the café terraces are filled with a mixture of expectant tourists and elegantly bored Parisians, and Francis tells me how he first met Giacometti just outside the Flore. ‘Of course Paris had that marvellous moment after the war,’ he says in his concise way, ‘and you could meet everybody in these cafés. And Giacometti was just sitting there and I went over to him and said how much I admired his work. And then I got to know him a bit better later on, through people like Isabel Rawsthorne and Michel Leiris.’

  Since Francis has told me several times how much he would like to have a place in Paris, I’ve lined up a couple of things for us to visit, starting with Puvis de Chavannes’s magnificent old studio and a pleasant but quite simple room in a seventeenth-century building beside the place des Vosges. Francis decides, slightly to my disappointment, that the Puvis studio is too ‘grand’ but he likes the room, partly, I think, because it looks like a larger, more professionally renovated version of mine on rue de Braque. ‘I knew the moment I came in that I could work here,’ he says emphatically, as he stands framed against the tall French windows, looking approvingly out on to the quiet, cobbled courtyard. And that seems to be that. Although I protest that the asking price is far too high, Francis dismisses the objection: ‘Just give him what he wants,’ he says. Then we wait as the whole arcane system of purchasing property in France grinds laboriously into motion.

  In the lead-up to the sale, Francis and I meet frequently, often spending long evenings together, from restaurant to bar to club, as we used to do in London. He talks so much and so openly, and I find myself noting every word down and recreating whole conversations, which is made much easier by the fact that Francis repeats himself the longer we stay out and the more we drink. It seems natural to put all this material, which by my standards has grown into an impressive pile of typed pages, to some use or other. I don’t feel I can use it directly because Francis is very ambivalent about these things. On the one hand, he says, ‘I think the only way of talking about one’s life is to tell the whole story’, before proceeding to provide me with fresh, alluringly intimate reminiscences; then on the other, he excludes my making anything of them by saying ‘It would take a Proust to write my life’, while shooting me a pointedly disparaging glance.

  So I’ve decided to turn my long relationship with Francis – it’s lasted a good twelve years now – into a novel set mainly in the Paris art world. I realise it is more or less bound to read like a thinly disguised autobiography, but it allows me much more freedom. My Francis figure, whom I’ve tentatively called Everett, will take on aspects, and even remarks, of other older men I’ve known, especially Jaime Gil de Biedma, and possibly certain traits from a variety of characters like Oscar Wilde (and indeed Proust himself). Since I sense such a profound dichotomy in myself, I’ve split my character into two people, a down-to-earth Flemish painter called Adriaen van Dormaël, and Denis Roussel, a more sensitive French art critic; both men have an interest in Van Dormaël’s seductive American girlfriend, Cristina; I’ve no idea yet how this is going to play out, it’s based on an earlier short story I wrote, but I suspect it will end badly. There are various lesser painters and art-world people, notably a picture dealer called Robert Fried, based on Claude Bernard, whose personality and behaviour have been considerably spiced up by a collage of characteristics I have noticed – and have been either amused or appalled by – in New York gallery owners.

  This new piece of writing absorbs me as nothing else has since I arrived in Paris. I love the way the story flows and the characters interact without, it seems, much prompting from me. Sometimes I feel I’m cooking up some great big dish, a bouquet of herbs here, a dash of mustard or red wine there, mixing in all sorts of ingredients that come to hand, including yesterday’s cold potatoes and the dry bread that can be transformed into delicious, crunchy croutons. Often the characters feel and say things I hadn’t suspected, and I realise that dialogue comes more easily to me than any other kind of writing, and I begin to wonder whether I couldn’t turn the whole thing into a play instead. But what astounds me most is that whenever I get a bit stuck for a descriptive detail, or for what a particular character would say at a very specific moment, all I have to do is to walk down rue Rambuteau, watching the way people look or listening to the crude repartee between customer and fishmonger, until it comes to me like a gift from heaven, the exact phrase that Cristina would have sung out as she descended the staircase, the ragged polo neck that Denis pulls on as he struggles out of bed or the dismissive look on Fried’s face as he turns on his well-heeled shoe.

  As I write, for the first time in my life, everything is given to me. I feel blessed, as if I had stumbled unknowingly into a realm of rare privilege. I am, I slowly realise as I shuttle between typewriter and street, writing without hindrance, in nothing less than a state of grace.

  I thought I’d come back from the market with a big cluster of muscat grapes, which I buy because they’re delicious and also because that intensely sweet grape sugar settles my stomach when I’ve been drinking too much. But the strange, taciturn Berber from whose rickety stall I usually buy my fruit on rue Rambuteau has given me a bag full of change – over a hundred francs’ worth – instead. It’s a pain to have to traipse all the way bac
k, but I imagine he’ll be worrying about what’s happened, since all those notes and coins probably add up to a couple of days’ takings. When I hand the bulging bag back to him, I expect him at least to thank me, but he remains as impassive as ever and merely swings the original bunch of grapes I wanted towards me, averting his gaze, which I imagine must once have contemplated the burning sands of the Sahara. Perhaps he doesn’t want to thank me because he senses that his debt to me would then be acknowledged and become a lasting encumbrance.

  They’re a funny lot along this street. I know most of them, and they range the whole gamut from loudmouth to self-contained, cunning to transparent, intuitive to coarse. The posher shops like the cheesemonger’s and the butcher’s couldn’t be more French, and their white-aproned owners have a distinctly superior air as they recommend their runny Brie and tender offal from behind gleaming counters. But the fruit and vegetables are sold mostly by immigrants from the Maghreb off crudely converted wheelbarrows parked temporarily in the gutter. They tend to keep themselves to themselves, and I wonder what kind of life they can have outside working hours. I know they go back to dingy hotels around the Halles run by marchands de sommeil – ‘sleep sellers’ – who pack as many of them as possible into every tiny room. Apart from that, they’ve got a few Arab cafés and those few prostitutes who will take them on when they have the money. They certainly don’t identify with me (they probably wouldn’t even guess I’m not French), but I’ve always identified with them because, however much our status and prospects differ, neither they nor I could ever expect to become an integral part of the society we live in. However long we stay in Paris, the fruit-sellers and I, aping the language and manners of our hosts, we are condemned to remain ‘outsiders’. And I somehow very much doubt that the bewildered African-born rubbish collectors who President Giscard d’Estaing invited to a hugely publicised (and equally derided) breakfast with him at the Elysée Palace last Christmas now feel part and parcel of French society.