The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Another reason that I miss Francis is that he spoils me while he is here. No delicacy or vintage is too good, and from time to time he showers me with presents. I’ve got used to a modest, even Spartan way of life but I can’t deny the hunger for luxury that lurks beneath or how skilfully Francis knows how to draw it out. I’ve been to several art collectors’ apartments overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens or the Seine recently with Alice, who is far more familiar than me with the upper echelons of the international art world, and I come away lusting after an impressive group of Cycladic figures or an Old Master painting hung in a gleaming, tortoiseshell frame. Even smaller details, like a Venetian chandelier or an Art Deco desk, represent a certain achievement, an affirmation of superior taste that is singularly lacking in the dull, bourgeois interior to which I’m currently condemned. I’m longing to move into the plain, whitewashed spaces of the rue des Archives and begin to make them my own, but every time I ask when they’ll be free, Daniel Milhaud merely smiles, as if my impatience will only add to the delay of his moving out.

  I might never own an Assyrian bas-relief, a Senufo mask or even a pair of rock crystal obelisks, alluringly twinned on the classical mantelpiece of an eighteenth-century interior, all of which I’ve encountered in various collectors’ and art dealers’ showpiece homes, but Joe Downing’s apartment in the Marais turns out to be quite as covetable and far more within my reach. I met Joe through Alice, who’s taken me several times to her country house in Ménerbes, a hill village in Provence where Joe also spends the summer, painting away and hobnobbing with other summer residents like the sculptor Raymond Mason and the poet Stephen Spender; he also gets glimpses, he tells me, of Picasso’s former mistress, Dora Maar, who lives in seclusion in a big, dark house there. I’ve since got to know Joe well: he’s naturally gregarious, but Art International has asked me to write an essay on his work, and that has opened all doors.

  Being both a painter and homosexual, Joe seems particularly gifted in creating extraordinary homes with minimal means wherever he is. He saw the point of the Marais even before I ventured there and he bought the first floor of a dilapidated, late seventeenth-century house on rue de Thorigny. The house is still dilapidated and Joe’s apartment retains a cracked, crumbly look, but it has lofty ceilings and grand proportions, with Versailles parquet and a view onto the similarly dilapidated Hôtel Salé, so named because its original owner made a fortune out of collecting the salt tax, and now being considered for rehabilitation as a gallery to house the Picassos that have been left to the State. Joe is very elated by the idea that Picasso might be exhibited opposite his studio, and I imagine that the Picasso of the rue des Grands-Augustins studio at least would have felt immediately at home in Joe’s mix of beaten-up period furniture and unusual or quirky objects, all garnered from flea markets in Paris and the provinces. A big trestle table that can seat a dozen people comfortably is lit by three huge, carved gilt-wood candlesticks, while the chairs are a bewildering miscellany of periods and styles, from Louis XIII to Empire, with the walls enlivened by sumptuous altar hangings and Joe’s own paintings, some of them on canvas, others on large, flat pieces of wood, including the odd discarded door.

  More, barely dry paintings are propped up around Joe’s studio. Despite the big, burly frame that he has inherited from a long line of Kentucky tobacco farmers, Joe is a painter of infinitely delicate nuances. Although clearly nowhere near Picasso in his range of radical, formal invention, Joe has nevertheless created his own distinct world, an infinitely expanding universe of touches of colour that shift like improbable shapes on the ocean floor or the fleeting shadows cast by the sun as it moves over a dense, mysterious forest. If you make out a Russian fairy tale in one, with onion-shaped domes against an ice-blue sky, then you might awaken to a tiered garden scented with fresh, green herbs in another. Lending extra depth to all this is the presence of Joe himself, who cuts short his camp monologue about other queer artists he doesn’t like with a surprisingly nimble tap dance, then imitates a blackbird he heard recently in his garden in Provence or rummages around for a particular Côte-Rôtie he wants you to try or puts on a kaftan he’s picked up in Barbès-Rochechouart, the most ethnically varied and supposedly most dangerous area in all Paris.

  Besides painting, Joe’s greatest gift is for having fun, and once I’d convinced him that I would never even contemplate going to bed with him (‘Well, I thought I’d at least ask,’ he quipped shamelessly, ‘it’s a bit late in life to be coy, isn’t it, especially when you’ve been raped as often as I have’), he’s found plenty of other ways to keep us both amused. Alice and I arrived at his flat at noon the other day for a glass of champagne as a start to what Joe called one of his ‘special’ days. We had no idea what he had in mind but we were quickly reassured by the lunch he served – a guinea fowl stuffed with raisins and a nice Mouton-Cadet – and the fact that when we came out on to the street there was a taxi waiting for us. Our first stop was the Sainte-Chapelle, which delighted me because I had never been inside it before, even though I’d waxed indignant when there had been threats during the May ‘events’ to blow it up. It has in fact survived (apart from grievous damage during the Revolution) since the mid-thirteenth century, and most of the stained glass is original. As I watched the luminous colours playing with and against each other in the dark, I tried to imagine the scene when Louis IX had entered the chapel, barefoot and dressed as a penitent, bearing the relics of Christ, including the Crown of Thorns, he had acquired at an astronomical cost. Then I nearly burst out laughing, as I caught Joe’s twinkling eye and realised that he had brought us here to point out how much his paintings resembled this kaleidoscope of brilliant and subtle tones.

  Our next port of call wasn’t without its sly reference to Joe’s palette either. After walking through the Jardin des Plantes, we went in to one of the dour-looking buildings that run down one side and were amazed by the variety of butterflies it contained, with forms and delicate colours that made all art appear clumsy and derivative by comparison. Joe had made his point, and I will come back to it when I write my essay on his development as a painter. To round off our afternoon, we go to rue des Rosiers to pick up Joe’s favourite tea, exotically named La Main de Fatima, then return to his flat for a bracing mint julep.

  Caught in a sudden gust of wind, dead leaves, autumn leaves, are blowing up into the air and rustling down the gutters, just like those images used in old films to denote the passage of time. It’s a melancholy moment, reminding you like the song, which I love so much, of past hopes, past loves. A sense of an ending with no beginning in sight has descended on the city, the morning mists feel and smell sepulchral and the day ends early. I’ve had improbable news, terrible news, from rue de Braque, where there have been three deaths. The Yugoslav who more or less obliged me to pull up stakes left a loaded gun lying around: his two young sons started playing with it and the older one shot his brother dead. Then, on the third floor, a crime of passion. I had never realised that we had a lesbian couple living up there. They must have been so discreet as to disappear into thin air. Neither Marie-Hélène nor anybody I knew ever mentioned them. Then that discretion simply blew up, with one of them stabbing the other to death before turning the knife on herself.

  Death is always in the air, of course, and does its work as well in the most glorious spring as in the dark, bitter waning of the year. I’ve always looked on Malraux with suspicion as well as admiration, but like Breton he, or at least his myth, has become a part of my life here, so his death affects me personally. I think one carries a number of people around in one’s head, a kind of personal pantheon, that one refers to from time to time, and not necessarily so much people one’s known but those whose work one has read or whose life one knows about. What fascinated me most about Malraux was how improbable he sounded. Even as a fictional character he would have stretched the imagination: adventurer, art smuggler, best-selling author, war hero, Gaullist minister. You couldn’t make it up, as they say, but appar
ently Malraux did to a significant extent, inventing here, exaggerating there, until he was accused of having personally and deliberately fabricated most of the myth surrounding him. I’m fascinated by this need to go on inventing and reinventing oneself by means of elaborate charades and brazen lying in the face of being caught out, but perhaps that is because my own need is to demystify constantly in the hope that I will arrive at a certain truth. On top of everything, Malraux looked so weird: he was all jerky movements and facial tics, and he had such an odd voice and delivery when he spoke or rather orated publicly, that he could have as easily turned into a caricature held up to ridicule as a dominant presence on the French intellectual and cultural landscape. And what fascinates me even more is how eagerly the public seems to welcome these flawed, fabricated figures, as if people en masse so want to be seduced and entertained they are willing to be shamelessly hoodwinked.

  The year ends on a brighter note. I haven’t contacted Daniel about the lease on 77 rue des Archives for several weeks, because I’ve become resigned to his moving out bit by bit, month by month, even, God forbid, year by year. When I get desperate, I fantasise about looking for somewhere else, but I know full well that I’ll never find another space like this one in the Marais.

  Then as soon as I’d made myself forget about the whole thing, what should happen but a cheery Daniel was on the phone telling me that I’d be able to move in early in the New Year. I feel a surge of triumph. I’ve appreciated being close to Montparnasse, the Jardins du Luxembourg and Saint-Germain, but I’ve been in exile all this time, as far from my roots as if I’d been in a foreign country. Now my new life, my real life, can begin again. I’m going back to the Marais. I’m going home.

  PART THREE

  (1977–94)

  9

  Laughing Boy: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe (1977–81)

  I can’t believe I have all this space! It’s almost comical!! I wander from room to empty room, sometimes slowly, blowing the dust off a window sill or picking up a piece of junk Daniel forgot to remove; then briskly all the way round, as if to prove I can take in the whole interior without bits of it dropping off and disappearing behind me as I go. This has to be seven or eight times bigger than the rue de Braque studio, and its sheer scale has gone to my head.

  On the street side, which overlooks the rue des Archives from the third floor, I’ve got a corridor leading off onto two small rooms I have no particular use for and a large, plain room with a fireplace that I’ve earmarked for dinner parties. Then, on the other side, overlooking the courtyard, there is a single, loft-like space with a platform at one end, where I’ve put my bed, a walk-in alcove just off the middle of the room that will house my library perfectly, and a sitting area with a fireplace at the other end. When the sun is out, light floods through the windows and a pair of French doors that lead out onto a ‘terrace’ (basically the slightly sloping lead roof of the building below). Since both bathroom and kitchen adjoin the big room, I have everything I need on this side alone. My refectory table has already found its natural place beside the alcove, so I’ll be within a short grab of any book I need when I’m working, and I’ve moved my old sofa, a coffee table made out of a large square of Versailles parquet and a couple of vaguely Bauhaus chairs into the sitting area. The burgundy-coloured leather armchair has been strategically placed beside the telephone Daniel left for me; I have already spent hours here, gossiping to friends, following up on professional leads but mainly sunk in deep analysis of my own contradictions, hopes and dreams with Alice, who gallantly hears me out.

  Buying the lease and doing the premises up a bit has swallowed most of the money I got from selling rue de Braque. I didn’t bother to redo the plastering so the whole flat still has its crumbly look but repainted in a brighter shade of white. I’ve kept the old, reddish, hexagonal floor tiles throughout except in the big room where they were so cracked and uneven that anyone who didn’t already know the floor well enough to negotiate it in their sleep could trip up and break their neck. So I got the two Spanish brothers who did the painting, Juan and Jesús, to spread a layer of concrete over the whole choppy surface.

  When the carpet-layer came in, I imagined he’d be pleased to have such an even floor to work on, but I hadn’t bargained for the particular brand of Gallic bloody-mindedness that came with him. Having offloaded a great roll of carpet directly onto my bed, he looked round in apparent disbelief, then strode up and down the room shouting ‘Merde! Merde!! Merde!!!’ in crescendo, intent on convincing me that carpeting this smooth quadrilateral was the most complicated job anyone in his profession had ever been lumbered with. I tried to placate him at first, offering a glass of beer and emphasising the absence of any fiddly corners; then I caught the sly look in his eye, and the penny dropped. He was already working on me for what he hoped would be a handsome tip on top of the installation charge I had already paid. I gave him a stony stare and suggested he wouldn’t want to waste any more time before fitting the underlay. There was a moment’s standoff and then, muttering further ‘Merde’s under his breath, he dropped to his knees and started slicing the thick black felt effortlessly to size.

  The few pictures I have form a cluster down at the sitting end of the room. Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard, which Bacon gave me a while ago, stands resplendent in its gold-leaf frame as the undisputed centre of this small galaxy, drawing into its orbit a couple of Joe Downing oils, a few Dado etchings, some Denise Esteban gouaches and a painted landscape relief by Raymond Mason. Everything here has been a gift from the artist in question, and perhaps that forms the link between them, because what might have looked like a hotchpotch of styles and subjects hangs together, to my eye at least, without any obvious dissonance. Nevertheless, even in this relatively benign trio of heads, Bacon dominates without question. An intensity in the very paint strokes, in the grain of the pigment, marks his small triptych apart like a voice that immediately commands attention. Esteban pales, Downing in his bright fantasies is reduced to a pleasing mosaic, and Mason’s tough coarseness loses relevance. Only Dado stands up, yet the cruel line of his human disasters wilts besides Bacon’s full-throated roar, like a hyena beside a lion. Bacon puts me in mind of Lear on the heath, willing the elements to do their worst as he stands dispossessed under the dark, cracked sky that spans the universe. The heads face me as I try to write at my desk, and whenever I look up, they stare me down. While most of the other things I have hung around sink gratefully into the patchy white walls, Bacon remains indomitable.

  By the same token there should be a cacophony of loud bellows, knowing discourses, sarcastic cackles and subtle whispers in my book alcove, which is where I feel most at home. If I can’t of course have Mantegna and Titian, Van Gogh and Degas on my walls, I can have Shakespeare, the Jacobean playwrights and the metaphysical poets, Proust and Eliot, on my shelves. There is no electric light in this obscure annexe, because I do not need it. Like a blind librarian, like Borges, who is well represented in my literary pantheon here, I know the feel of each spine and the order in which my writers have been placed. Joyce and Beckett occupy their own niche, with Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress between them, Flann O’Brien and Aidan Higgins (Balcony of Europe) nearby, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, then for no very good reason Kafka, Thomas Mann and Borges side by side, Stendhal and Flaubert together, followed by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Jacques Dupin and Jaime Gil de Biedma, my two living poet friends. Danielle’s Meurtre has Artaud to one side and to the other Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (plunging me back into that strange Amazonian world I glimpsed when I first arrived in Paris). Like the pictures on the wall, these groupings have come about spontaneously and, although they would look random to any casual observer, they satisfy me.

  With the books and the pictures, the space is beginning to accept me as the new occupant. Now that the sand-coloured carpet stretches immaculately up to the polished platform where the bed stands, I was proud of how spotle
ss the room looked and much put out when friends came round for drinks and one of them, perhaps not altogether accidentally, spilt a big glass of red wine on the floor; another then poured white wine on it which fizzed impressively, leaving a large crescent-shaped scar behind; this continued to annoy me for several days until I persuaded myself that the stain not only made the space more lived in but acted as a warning against the tyranny of perfectionism, which has such a hold over me that, if I feel I cannot attain it in any particular domain, I prefer to do nothing at all. This in turn might explain why, with my table perfectly readied, the Olivetti recently cleaned and the piles of typing paper lying crisply expectant beside it, no writing has taken place. Moving flats, getting the water heater repaired and choosing a seductive new quilt for the bed have become far more pressing issues, as well as greatly less demanding. But the time will come when, all decoration done, with my beard neatly trimmed and my nails filed, I will have to focus once again on those barren white sheets I nevertheless feel impelled to fill with words.

  Meanwhile, there is a new wooden terrace to be laid over the slightly sloping lead roof located outside the French doors, there are blinds to install throughout the flat, more cups and plates to buy from Habitat, which recently opened here and where I have spent so much time over the past few weeks they must think I’m an undercover inspector sent from central office… For a little longer I can avoid the confrontation with myself that the pristine typewriter paper promptly engenders, its blankness reflecting every feeble movement of my mind.