How surrealist are my encounters with Setsuko? She came into my life because we were sitting at adjoining tables in a little café just off the place des Vosges and started talking, and since then she has been coming to Paris once or twice a year to stay with me. These trips are planned with meticulous forethought, but they can alter if the office where she works as a secretary in Osaka suddenly decides they need her. She keeps me abreast of such hitches in the frequent airmail letters she sends. ‘Japan economic animal, I hate it,’ she complains, then she worries that her delayed visit might change things between us. ‘I hope you are no marriage, no steady, no make love with other woman – I want you to look at me only,’ she says, then asks wistfully, ‘Am I still the cup of tea?’
Now that she’s here, she seems happy to fall in with my routine, particularly if I make elaborate meals for her. We eat in complete silence, and I’m always surprised that someone so slight should have such a voracious appetite. Setsuko shows no interest in monuments or museums, but she does like gardens, so we walk regularly through the Luxembourg Gardens and watch the children send their little sailboats scudding across the central pond. She is also very keen to spend time by the Seine, especially if the sun is out and she can sunbathe on the quays, watching the gulls that have made their way up-river swoop over the dark water in search of food. She finds the bouquinistes very ‘cute’, and even though she never looks at the dog-eared paperbacks and faded magazines they have stacked up on sale she regularly persuades a potentially huffy vendor to take photographs of the two of us together, poring with fake avidity over his wares. The Ile Saint-Louis has never looked more seductive than on these long, lazy, summer walks. I point out places that fascinate me like the Hôtel Lambert, another Louis Le Vau masterpiece and once home to Voltaire, then to the Polish élite in exile in the mid-nineteenth century (though it has just been bought by the banker, Guy de Rothschild), or the mysterious Bibliothèque Polonaise on the bank opposite, which I have never visited since I’ve yet to find a good reason to consult its unique collections of Polish literature or its shrine to the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. But Setsuko shows no curiosity in these crumbling edifices. I ask her to come with me to an exhibition devoted to the publisher Tériade, whom I revere for having produced not only great art magazines like Minotaure and Verve but wonderful, hand-made books with Giacometti (Paris sans fin), Picasso and Matisse; then I realise that for Setsuko they amount to little more than piles of dusty old paper. On the other hand, she never protests that she’s bored as I continue doggedly to point out the Ile Saint-Louis’s fine old mansions or most impressive apartments (notably the one where I interviewed James Jones), and if she flags from time to time, she immediately revives when I buy her a vividly coloured pistachio and raspberry sorbet at Berthillon, which is to ice-cream what Poilâne is to bread.
Yet Setsuko has come to know much more about me than I know about her. The day after she arrived, we were wandering up boulevard Raspail, enjoying the rhythm set up by shafts of sun followed by the shade of the trees, when I saw Garith Windsor making his way down the steps in the Métro at Vavin, and when I mentioned his name she knew he had been my boss at Réalités. Garith had aged in the seven or so years since I’d last seen him, but his pace was still brisk and his face as weather-beaten from those long walks he’d probably still been taking in the wilds of Normandy. He was carrying an odd kind of poacher’s bag slung low over his shoulder so that it banged against his thigh as he clattered down the stairs. My first impulse was to call out to him, but something held me back. Garith was the past, but a past still too recent for me to want to revisit it. It was enough to have glimpsed him and to have had that rush of sensations: the smell of the canteen, typewriters clattering through the morning, Garith’s Alka Seltzers and his clumsy pass at me as we got changed in the narrow cubicle at Piscine Deligny, as well as my vague guilt at leaving our cosy office for good. Then no sooner was he out of sight than I regretted my hesitation. He had always been generous, allowing me to work at home whenever I wanted to get over some ghastly hangover and being generally tolerant of my foibles. Then I wondered what it must be like to be at the end of your career and perhaps even your life, and I felt both embarrassed and sad.
Setsuko is very quick to pick up on changes in my mood. She suggested we go back to the apartment and she allowed me to make love to her right away. I am physically obsessed with her and eager to make love to her as often as she will let me throughout the day. ‘You too strong love-making, you kill me,’ she says. I don’t know whether this is a complaint or a compliment, but it goads me even more to take advantage of her apparent submissiveness. Sometimes she compares me to Bob Dylan, which I know is a good sign, saying ‘you both got men’s soft-hearted and men’s powerful’, then she adds, ‘but you less sexy’. She plays his songs all the time as well as what she calls ‘easy listen music’, which she dances to, giggling girlishly, while I look fondly on, awaiting the next opportunity to pounce. But each embrace leaves me vaguely perplexed, because I suspect sex isn’t nearly as important to her as it is to me, and I have little doubt that if it came down to another quick go on the thickly carpeted floor or a Berthillon ice-cream, she would opt unhesitatingly for the latter.
This peaceful domestic life, where we make few demands on each other and conversation is necessarily limited, tends to be particularly conducive to work. Whenever our silences become oppressive, Setsuko says, ‘Sorry, my English must be something wrong,’ before putting on another record, and I go back to the word-for-word translation into French that Francis Bacon has asked me to do of his interviews with David Sylvester. The plan is to give instalments of my halting, literal translation to Michel Leiris (whose English is weak), who will then transform them into flowing French; so as soon as I’ve finished a new batch, I go round to quai des Grands-Augustins, where Michel lives amid priceless modern paintings, and hand it to his concierge. Then, when he’s ready, Michel calls me and we meet for morning coffee at the Deux Magots to review his more elegant rendering and ensure no literal errors have crept in.
These sessions couldn’t be more of a privilege, not only because I’m working with an eminent writer in one of Paris’s literary temples on Francis’s most comprehensive statement about his life and work, but also because I am seeing my lumpy prose transformed into a supple French way beyond my means: since I know the original text by heart, this is the finest, bespoke French lesson imaginable, and it will enable me to forge a more assured relationship with the language: I am correspondingly overawed and grateful. At the same time I realise, as Michel and I bat various interpretations to and fro, that once he has chosen a certain phrasing he is extremely loath to change it, even if I tell him that it misrepresents Francis’s original meaning altogether (‘But that’s one of the meanings given in the Harrap’s,’ he protests). This precipitates a conflict. I am faced either with contradicting a venerated older writer (whose complex, autobiographical confessions, Sonia Orwell assures everybody, are ‘indispensable’) or betraying Francis’s trust in me. I have no doubt where my allegiance lies, and since each morning meeting with Michel leads to a convivial lunch where we both drink too much and Michel, from being very reserved and formal, opens up to the point of being embarrassingly confidential, I decide to wait until the ‘light’ wine he orders, usually a Bourgueil or a Chinon from the Loire, has relaxed him sufficiently for me to ask him as indirectly as possible to reconsider some of the knotty linguistic problems we have been tussling over.
My ploy is rendered immediately inoperative because once Michel broaches his favourite topic – which, much as in his books, is his woeful lack of physical courage and the unresolved conflicts at the very core of his existence – he shows no further interest in the translation we have embarked on. His sole concern is to demonstrate how abject he and his life have been. ‘I’m nothing but a dirty bourgeois,’ he keeps repeating, and all the more forcefully when I protest to the contrary that he once risked being lynched by shouting ‘Down wi
th France’ during a Surrealist demonstration and showed admirable bravery by exposing his contradictions so publicly in print. After lunch, by which time he is visibly drunk, I help Michel back home to quai des Grands-Augustins, but at each following work session at the Deux Magots he remains as impervious to my reconsiderations as before. I realise that the only course of action left open to me, sneaky though it seems, is to apprise Francis of my doubts and let him have them out with Michel if he sees fit.
Francis once said to me, and I quoted the remark in a short piece I wrote a couple of years ago for Le Monde, that if the French appreciated his work he would feel he had succeeded. He appears to admire Michel hugely, and he’s certainly aware of how essential Michel’s support is, particularly in France – not unlike one immortel introducing another – but Francis is not above taking some sly digs at him when he’s with me. One thing that sticks in his gullet is Michel’s left-wing sympathies that he thinks, given his wife’s considerable wealth, are hypocritical. ‘It’s as if he’s trying to play both sides at once,’ Francis says deprecatingly. I suppose these are the contradictions that Michel himself deplores so volubly, without ever suggesting he might try to reconcile them. He seems on the contrary almost to wallow in being a sale bourgeois, or perhaps he believes that his support for left-wing causes makes up for his privileged existence between luxury residences and chauffeured limousines. A detail that piques my frivolous curiosity is that Michel makes special trips to Savile Row to have his suits made. Does this former Surrealist wear them, I wonder (but of course I can’t ask him), when he mounts the barricades or joins in a demonstration? Did he wear them when he visited Giacometti in his famously dirty, plaster-filled little studio (marvellous, grainy photos of which I’m still collecting)? As I continue to work with Michel, I become almost as obsessed with his ‘contradictions’ as he is, wondering how they affect him as a writer, until I realise that they are the very reason he writes, seeking to exonerate himself in page after page of intricate confession. I feel I’m on to something here, and I try to work out, simplistic as it sounds, whether all writers and artists aren’t trying to reconcile inner contradictions. Was that the common link between all these people, this special breed I admired so much – Bacon and Giacometti, Joyce and Proust, as well as my friends Danielle and Dado; and if so, where did that leave me, boiling over with inner contradictions as I am? Should I be writing to say I can’t write and like Michel analysing all the reasons I can’t: my lack of determination, discipline and talent? It certainly doesn’t sound too promising a subject, and I think I’d probably rebel rather than revel in it. I feel privileged to be working on the Bacon interviews but I’d be happier still if I’d been invited, as indeed Michel has been, to provide the introduction to Francis’s new show at Claude Bernard’s gallery, and I’m a little jealous even though I’m aware I have nothing of Michel’s status to recommend me for the job. Other things haven’t materialised, such as creating a publishing arm to Galerie Claude Bernard where I would have been able to bring out the writings on art I thought most interesting and worthwhile; Claude had been getting me on his side because he thought I might be useful in persuading Francis to exhibit in his gallery, and once Francis had accepted the whole publishing idea vanished. I’ve had something of the same run-around with UNESCO, where several bigwigs welcomed my project to go to Rhodesia and record the cave paintings and Shona religious ceremonies, but now they have gone ominously quiet.
With Setsuko back in whatever uncongenial job she currently has in Osaka (from where, she tells me, she is already plotting her next trip to Paris), I often bolster my spirits by listening to a small repertoire of classical music. Although I know considerably less about music than I do about most great periods of art, I appreciate it instinctively quite as much; I also like the fact that it belongs to everybody and nobody, like the wind, the sea and the sky. My greatest loves are Bach and Mozart, and although I feel woefully inadequate when I listen to musicians or musicologues talking, I don’t doubt that certain performances touch me as deeply as them. I was lucky enough to be at a private concert where Rostropovich played the unaccompanied cello suites, and that has set the standard for me, although I have time for Pablo Casals and for mad, deviant Glenn Gould. As autumn creeps in and I reflect on what little I have succeeded in writing over the year, I open a cheapish but drinkable Côtes de Bourg and put the cello suites on the record player. The melancholy deepens on the first plangent notes but slowly you are no longer listening, you are no longer you, you lose yourself to the music and the music replaces you so that you turn into the strings over which the bow is playing, your nerves and tendons are where the music takes flight.
When Francis is back in town, the mood always quickens. Being with him means changing tempo. He has an energy and determination that carry his deep nihilism before him. In the conversations I am translating Francis talks about his ‘exhilarated despair’. The phrase is not just memorable: it encapsulates his attitude perfectly. Michel and I have debated endlessly what the best equivalent would be in French. When I say to Francis that people only have the despair they can afford, he agrees intently, and I realise we are actually talking about his extraordinary capacity to accommodate darkness. Only his huge reserves of vitality could entertain a vision so devoid of hope or redemption.
Meanwhile, we dance over the abyss, one bottle of champagne following the other as the round begins from grand hotel and restaurant to sordid bar. Francis seems to be slowly absorbing George’s death and he refers frequently to the new portraits he has done or hopes to do of him. I feel emboldened, as we proceed from the grandeur of Lucas Carton to the Crillon, the Ritz to Taillevent, to talk about the difficulties I encounter in my writing, and I’m aware that Francis is not only one of the very few people I can discuss this with but that his comments are very perceptive.
‘I think that writing like painting has become very difficult,’ he says after a long pause. ‘How can you write after Proust and Joyce? They’ve done so much, just as Picasso did. How do you even find a subject? I used to look for extreme subject matter, then as I got older I found it in my own life and in my friends. But then there’s the whole problem of technique, of how you can do it, how you can what’s called nail the facts down. How do you find a technique that interlocks completely with this thing you’re trying to say. I sometimes think you have to almost make an art out of your critical faculties.’
Between voluptuous drinking sessions I mull over Francis’s comments, and I begin to wonder, now that my novel incorporating facets of him, myself and the people around us, has lost its momentum, whether I couldn’t tackle the subject more head on, without the latitude that fiction provides. Since Francis’s own life is already as striking as any novel, perhaps it would make a better book presented as ‘fact’ as accurately as possible. Although I’ve always enjoyed reading novels, I find that I’m growing more interested in biographies, diaries and letters: having heard Francis talk enthusiastically about it for years, I have just finished reading an abridged version of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, and I did feel they conveyed the peculiar blend of high ceremony, intrigue and boredom that characterised Louis XIV’s Versailles more graphically than any fictional account. At all events, I’m excited by the idea of relaying my impressions of Francis and verbatim snatches of his conversation, which I’ve been noting down for years, directly – rather than imitating him and putting everyone in fancy dress, as it were, with invented dialogue, as they would be in a fictionalised account.
When Francis leaves, the high goes and I am left to my own resources, along with the realisation that I had been half-consciously hoping that enough of Francis’s pollen would have rubbed off on me to produce a burst of creativity. But I’m still waiting for the words to form perfectly by themselves on the page, and I waste morning after morning rewriting the same first lines of my new book about Bacon, and only when I come to quote him does the phrasing seem to come with the immaculate spontaneity that I associate with true creat
ive work. Otherwise it does not come, and I’m lucky if I’m left with a paragraph so incessantly revised it no longer means anything at the end of the day. If this is what Francis meant by making ‘an art out of your critical faculties’, my attempt at it appears doomed from the start, and when I think of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about taking out a comma in the morning and putting it back in the afternoon, it’s so close to home that it sounds more cruelly accurate than funny.
The Existential Englishman Page 24