The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  I’m musing on the theme of belonging/not belonging and wondering whether I don’t actually prefer being an outsider when I pass my neighbour Claude Duthuit going back to his sumptuous apartment on the piano nobile of the Hôtel le Lièvre, rue de Braque’s most impressive palace whose full-bellied stone balustrades repose on massive bearded heads of Neptune which I particularly admire. In one sense, Claude couldn’t be more French, since his father was a well-known French art critic close to Nicolas de Staël, the Surrealists and Samuel Beckett, and his mother, who fought in the Resistance, the daughter of Henri Matisse. On the other hand, Claude has spent a significant part of his life in New York, where his uncle Pierre Matisse owns one of the city’s most influential art galleries. So he too is something of an outsider, and that’s probably the main reason we get on so well. Claude invites me up for a drink, and I marvel once again at his beautiful interior with its period furniture and priceless paintings, but even more I marvel at the ease with which I’ve come from the fruit and veg stalls into such rarefied luxury. I suddenly think what an extraordinarily privileged life I lead, moving freely between fascinating extremes, from high to low and back again, just as yesterday was spent signing on for another month on the dole, then going to the British Embassy in the evening, where I slipped unperceived into the throne room and sat on the gilded throne before being shown round Duff Cooper’s fine circular library. All this has been recently enhanced by having Francis Bacon as another neighbour, who’s moved in to his new studio which, with Sonia Orwell and Alice, we baptised the other day during a drunken house-warming by ripping off all the flock wallpaper that had originally so offended Francis’s love of ‘simplicity’.

  It never occurred to me that all this could come to an end, suddenly and definitively, but Marie-Hélène and Bébert have apparently sold their lease with no warning or explanation to a Yugoslav who’s decided to open a nightclub on the ground floor and the cellars beneath. All the regulars who now have no bar to go to are completely mystified – did the couple split up, or go back to the Auvergne together? But they’ve disappeared without trace so there’s no one to ask, and the Yugoslav, who is rumoured to have links with the Paris underworld, is going to be a very different proposition. The first hint of this is not long in coming as soon as his club is up and running and the music and rowdiness keep me up at night and leave me deeply resentful during the day. I decide to confront the Yugoslav, who has the build of a boxer become boozer, and he sticks his face in mine and says he’d as soon see me dead as lower his music by ‘a single decibel’.

  My novel dwindles to a halt because my life itself has become so unreal that I have no stomach to try to write fiction. I start wandering round the city again, revisiting old haunts and discovering new areas like the maze of back streets leading off the Bastille. One of these, rue de Lappe, stands out by the number of bars and nightclubs (they’re on my mind) that line it, including the famous ‘Balajo’, where every kind of low life, from gangsters and night muggers to prostitutes, has been gathering since the 1930s. And there’s also a shop which fascinates me because it sells only three items: mountain-cured hams, walnut oil and wooden clogs, all from the Auvergne (Marie-Hélène and Bébert must also be on my mind). I go in and order a few slices of acorn-fed pig merely to savour the strange conjunction of these regional specialities, though I stop short of trying on a pair of hand-carved clogs. It’s not exactly Lautréamont’s ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’, but surely any Surrealist would appreciate the incongruity.

  I return home, mollified by this minor adventure, to find the door to my flat smashed in and hanging off its hinges, with my little room turned systematically upside down and burgled.

  8

  Entr’acte: 24bis rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire, VIe (1975–77)

  It’s only across the river and a short walk from boulevard Saint-Germain, but it feels as if I’ve come abroad all over again. I didn’t choose to abandon my native arrondissement for the Left Bank, I was forced out by Yugoslav thugs who had made my life a misery. So when an amiable French accountant I knew from my squash club offered to sublet me his apartment while he was transferred by his firm to Chicago for a year or so, I didn’t think twice. I need time to plan my next move, to get my life on track. For the moment, all I have is the promise of another loft-like space further up on rue des Archives, a mere five minutes’ walk from rue de Braque, but huge by comparison, where I could give big parties and have friends to stay. The lease on it belongs to Daniel Milhaud, a sculptor whose father was the composer Darius Milhaud. Daniel, who’s one of those artists with a flair for sniffing out underpriced real estate, has found a ground-floor space in the Marais better suited for making large sculpture, and he’s promised me I can buy the lease on his old studio once he’s ready to move.

  The nightclub was a front, of course, and the people running it real crooks who would have had me beaten up as badly as my door. My one piece of good luck is that on one bright, quiet morning, while the Yugoslavs slept off their drugged stupor below, I was able to sell the place to a Frenchman temporarily posted to the Ivory Coast. By the time he comes back to Paris, I can only hope that the Yugoslavs have been carted off to prison.

  I won’t pretend I’m in prison here, but I certainly feel exiled in this area, and I’m wondering whether my friend in Chicago will feel more of a culture shock than I do by moving from Paris IIIe to Paris VIe. People in this neck of the woods are very middle class, well dressed and snootily reserved; they also tend to work in offices, something of a rarity in the Marais. Most of the buildings date from the nineteenth century, with façades that are either overly ornamented with lifeless motifs or plain and dour. My building, made of dark red brick, belongs indisputably to the latter kind. It’s entirely residential but so far I have seen no one as I ply up and down the carpeted staircase to the fifth floor. The apartment I’m renting is silent and dark, insulated from the outside by double-glazed windows and shutters. The living room has walls that are padded with fabric and a sofa as yielding as the bed. I have comforts here that I have never had before – tufted rugs, pleated lampshades, a sandalwood drawer for my socks – but they serve only to make me feel uncomfortable, as if they were suffocating me silently. There are also unfamiliar gadgets, like a dishwasher and a microwave oven, that I resolve not to use, not just because I don’t know how to work them but because I have an obscure fear they will contaminate me with a bourgeois complacency that I think I have so far managed to avoid.

  There are also plenty of advantages to the area. The street may be faceless but it’s named after a cleric who fought to abolish slavery in France (Nantes and Bordeaux having been trafficking centres as active as Bristol). And the surrounding thoroughfares, like rue du Cherche-Midi, are quite lively, with food shops vying with one another in rich displays of lobster and foie gras, whole silvery salmon and gleaming, plump fruit. Most prominent, however, is the awesome Poilâne bakery, which draws chic queues for its sourdough bread the moment the loaves emerge from the wood-fired ovens, warm, crusty and redolent of a timeless France. I stood in line a few times but now I patronise a far more modest bread shop because I like to be in and out quickly, supplementing my baguette with a variety of unhealthy pâtés which I leaven with a green salad before wolfing the whole lot off the counter in my gloomy kitchen. Lunch done, if I haven’t got some pressing review or essay to write, I like to get out again and stay out for as long as possible. I’m not a flâneur by nature, I’m too impatient, but what I love is to walk and think, because the two activities seem to stimulate each other. If one flags, the other accelerates, with a stroll along the Seine unleashing flights of erotic fantasy, or a renewed decision, a sharpened resolve, quickening my pace to a military-style march.

  I mostly snake down rue des Saints-Pères, where Francis used to stay, or rue Bonaparte, where Sartre lived with his mother, towards the Seine. That is the premise for some of the best walks, if not in the world, then certainly
in Paris. At any moment I can branch off advantageously to revisit Delacroix’s dramatic scenes, such as Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, in Saint-Sulpice, or peer into the antique shops along rue Jacob, where Natalie Barney died at a great age a couple of years ago. Then I’m drawn as if by a magnet to rue de Furstenberg – which looks more like a square than a street, for the good reason that the original site once served as the forecourt to the ancient Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In his last years Delacroix established a new studio here in order to be within easy reach of the murals he was completing, and compared to most nineteenth-century ateliers the main space, overlooking a small garden, is delightfully light and airy. There’s also an antiquaire that fascinates me: the two ladies running it (I think they live together) have a range of nineteenth-century artists’ wooden mannequins with manipulable torsos and limbs, which I should love to collect if I had the money. They also specialise in antique globes on wooden stands, which I could see so well in my writer’s study, if I ever succeed in having one again.

  Another antiquaire I like to visit is Madeleine Castaing, once I’ve summoned up the courage to go into her eau-de-nil-coloured, bibelot-laden, gallery-like shop. One reason I hesitate outside is that her very feminine, theatrical décor is not to my taste, as well as being very expensive. Another is that I find it difficult to look at her: although wizened, and dwarfed even more by the huge armchair she sits in, she wears a large, lustrous wig attached by an elastic band that seems to keep her neck, and possibly her whole head, erect. Yet Madame Castaing has been close to many exceptional Parisian artists and writers, from Modigliani, Derain and Cocteau (whose house she decorated) onwards. Most importantly, she met Chaïm Soutine in the mid-1920s and looked after him and his career until he died, with the result that she now owns over forty of his works (including a striking portrait of herself in red and black).

  I can also drop in to a couple of art galleries where, in a minor mode, I’m persona grata. There’s Galerie Jacob, where they made a point, very courteously, of presenting me with a watercolour by one of their artists when I happened to write about her show; and Galerie Point Cardinal, to which I once took a collector friend, who bought an Henri Michaux drawing in India ink that looked like a mass of panicked, fleeing figures, and the next time I went in, the owner gave me a ten per cent commission, the only one I’ve ever received (and I would be lying if I pretended I wasn’t delighted by the windfall; it will help me replace the leather jacket, the carved, polychrome statuette of St John and other items that disappeared when I was burgled).

  There are also a couple of African art dealers who have things I like, although I have abjured buying anything until I have paid off the chaise à palabres or ‘palaver chair’ I bought with Dado. The suave and silky fabric showrooms dotted around Saint-Germain allow me to daydream about future apartments I might decorate to my own taste, although if it ever came to it I’d probably limit myself to a few exquisitely fluted drapes in an architecturally remarkable but otherwise austere interior. Specialist bookshops also abound in the area, and I have been tempted not only by first editions of some of the key Surrealist writings, like Breton’s Nadja or L’Amour fou, but even more by the illustrated books that bring together great literature and great artists, like Picasso illustrating Pierre Reverdy’s Chant des morts in bold strokes of red, or Matisse’s amazing Jazz. Luckily, I’m happy enough just looking and don’t suffer from cravings to acquire these delectable items. I content myself with more affordable pursuits like building up my Collection blanche edition of Proust, since the odd volume I’m still missing crops up from time to time for the price of a couple of drinks on the terrace of the Flore.

  These walks are never planned. One notion leads to another, just as it does in writing, if you ever attain the state of grace I recently fell from. Once I’ve skimmed through the latest issue of Tel Quel or Change at La Hune (I still can’t say I understand them but, as with Lacan, I’ve decided I’m not bothered), I might treat myself to a leisurely draught beer at Brasserie Lipp or wander through three imposing parallel streets – rues de l’Université, de Verneuil and de Lille – until I arrive at the Seine. And the great river is an historical encyclopaedia in itself, of course, as well as a whole novel and a sheaf of famous poems. But for me it is anchored into the Left Bank by the most beautiful building in Paris, the Institut de France, Louis Le Vau’s masterpiece, whether you view its magnificent gold-ribbed dome and colonnaded façade from the Pont des Arts or from the Louvre opposite, where Louis XIV planned to admire it from his future state rooms.

  If I’m so full of praise for this hallowed edifice it might be partly that, among my recent incursions into high privilege, including visits to various embassies, was an invitation to see a writer I knew through some collector friends being accepted ‘sous la Coupole’, in other words into the Académie Française. The ceremony began with a mounted Garde Républicaine drawing swords in a salute to the Academicians as they arrived (many of them bent over canes and walking sticks). Once we had filed into the august space beneath the cupola and taken our seats, there was a long roll on the drums, and our friend, resplendent in his ornate green coat and decorative scabbard, got up to propose a eulogy to his deceased predecessor. Then a living ‘immortel’ delivered a lengthy encomium of our friend’s own literary achievement, in which there were more imperfect subjunctives than I have ever heard pronounced in a single sequence before. Yet while the address lasted, I looked round at the other ‘immortels’ without finding a face I could put a name to. Later I consulted a list of the forty members and reluctantly concluded that, although in the past Voltaire and Victor Hugo had been elected, the vast majority of France’s best writers had not, and among the present elect there was not one whose works I had read.

  Another cupola on my new Paris beat has proved a constant draw not only to me but to many of the writers and artists I admire. However less exclusive an academy, the Coupole brasserie can claim to have been at the centre of the art and literary worlds since it opened in the late 1920s, and while I’ve been in Paris its lustre hasn’t really dimmed; it’s just that those who made it famous, from Matisse, Picasso and Giacometti to Joyce and Hemingway, are dead. I have my ‘own’ Coupole because I’ve picked up all kinds of anecdotes about the place, so when I go in for a meal or a drink I can muse about Aragon meeting his great love, Elsa, there, Breton slapping De Chirico during an aesthetic dispute and Joyce lining his whiskies up in anticipation of growing, drunken pleasure at the Art Deco bar. But these antics were by no means the reserve of such great names. The Coupole was traditionally the place to come to let your hair down and behave outrageously. Kiki, artists’ model, singer and the once-famous ‘Queen of Montparnasse’, bathed naked in the illuminated pool at the centre of the restaurant, and Abbé Gengenbach, the defrocked priest who had joined the Surrealists, enjoyed donning his soutane in order to sit outside on the terrace with a flirty girl on each knee. Gengenbach also dressed his mistresses in soutanes, having had them dyed in vibrant colours, a gesture that was particularly pleasing to his new Church and its ‘Pope’, André Breton.

  Paris cafés played a central role in the Surrealists’ life, and none more so than the Brasserie Cyrano, a couple of doors down from the original Moulin Rouge on place Blanche in Montmartre. During an important, formative period in the movement, the Surrealists met there every evening under Breton’s critical eye, outdoing each other with fabulations of what had happened to them during the day. These rowdy sessions ceased once too many members of the public took to coming in and rubbernecking, and since no other café proved as congenial and stimulating, the meetings were eventually moved to Breton’s own apartment nearby on rue Fontaine. But cafés were only one aspect of the Surrealists’ obsession with Paris, and by drawing attention so inventively to its stranger facets they reinvented the city to a remarkable degree. Since Breton remarked on the incongruity of the Tour Saint-Jacques, sticking up like an ancient, weather-beaten bone in the middle of the modern city,
I for one appreciate Paris more keenly, so much so that I try to adopt the Surrealist technique of removing things from their habitual connotations and discovering them anew as I wander round the city. Otherwise I should never have visited certain places that they rendered more magical, such as the waxworks at the Musée Grévin, with its ‘Palais des mirages’ and ‘Cabinet fantastique’, whose tired and dusty aspect renders it all the more evocative; or the extraordinary taxidermy emporium on rue du Bac, Deyrolle, where the stuffed animals – an elk looming out at you here, a leopard about to pounce on you there – would have to have had the term ‘Surrealism’ specially invented for their unexpected power to dislocate the ordinary and call all received interpretations of reality disquietingly into question.

  You exit the faded charms of Musée Grévin on boulevard Montmartre directly into Passage Jouffroy, one of a series of glass-roofed arcades that haunted the Surrealist imagination. Aragon was the first to remark on the singular atmosphere of these covered passages and their frequently bizarre shops when he devoted the first chapter of his evocative Paysan de Paris to Passage de l’Opéra, and the other Surrealists were not slow to appreciate the enigma of these singular walkways. At one point in the mid-nineteenth century Paris had scores of them running through buildings and between streets, and they were much prized not only for their shopping facilities but for the protection they afforded from the manure and refuse on the streets outside; accordingly, each passage had its décrotteur or ‘shit-scraper’ for clients who wanted to have their boots cleaned as they came in. Once the importance of the passages declined and they were threatened with demolition in the wake of Haussmann’s modernisation, so their shops became increasingly outdated and quaint, forming what Aragon called a ‘secret city’. Many of them interlink, providing an internal corridor through tracts of Paris, whereas others emerge at unexpected intervals across the centre. I love to wander through them, wondering whether I will ever buy a china doll or a lead soldier along the way or order traditionally engraved visiting cards or stay in one of the seedy hotels they harbour. I once took a stopped alarm clock to a watch repairer in Passage des Panoramas, as the spring sunshine tried unsuccessfully to pierce its subterranean gloom, and realised that I was talking to a man so distracted by the proliferation of every kind of timepiece from fob watches and cuckoo clocks to stopwatches and deeply chiming grandfather clocks encircling him that he had gone half-mad. I hastily retrieved my own arrested movement and bolted out towards the normality of the surrounding boulevards.