The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Paris has only a handful of really famous brasseries, and although the Coupole easily tops the list, there can be no doubt that Brasserie Lipp comes next. It’s smaller, more chic and discreet, as well as more French, in the sense that its regulars, mostly well-known Parisian politicians and intellectuals, instinctively opt for its clubby feel over the Coupole’s more democratic, cosmopolitan appeal. The manager here has become a byword for recognising the people who count, seating them ceremoniously on the ground floor, and those who don’t, who are packed off to the much duller room upstairs; the system works so well that if anyone really famous comes through the door a good table can always be found however thronged the restaurant appears. Thus Parisians, no doubt with ancestral memories of Louis XIV’s court coursing through their veins, can gauge their social position and overall allure from whether they are seated at the centre of the room, at the sides, towards the back, or upstairs – a situation that gives rise to those less well seated glancing enviously at those who smugly occupy the most treasured tables. This play of superiority trickles down to the waiters, who are obsequious to the happy few and insolent, if not surly, towards the others.

  This very Parisian game gets my back up, I have to admit, firstly because I would be automatically consigned to the obscure regions upstairs if I came here without some recognisable benefactor like Francis Bacon or his dealer Claude Bernard, and secondly because I couldn’t really afford to eat here by myself anyhow. This doesn’t of course prevent me from doing full justice to the épaule d’agneau or the blanquette de veau once they’ve materialised before me, but the courtier-like manners of the staff irritate me deeply. One thing I will say for these snooty folk, however, is that they are as deferential to a well-known artist, even if scruffily dressed, as to an immaculately attired film star. So when I bumped into Dado the other day in Saint-Germain, I had no hesitation in suggesting we have a drink at Lipp, although Dado as usual looked like he’d been sleeping rough and wouldn’t have got past the door of most ordinary cafés in the area. It was mid-afternoon and the restaurant was virtually empty, but whereas we might have been parked at a table out of sight, given Dado’s reputation as the Yugoslav ‘wild man’ of art, we were settled right at the centre. I ordered a couple of beers for us and a Coke for Malcolm, Dado’s equally feral-looking twelve-year-old son, who then went off to explore the deeper recesses of the silent brasserie. Dado and I got into our usual conversational mix of tall stories and gossip about mutual acquaintances and the art world in general, ordering more beer as the afternoon shaded into early evening. From one or two slanderous remarks he had made about his dealers, I gathered that Dado was going through a hard time financially, and although he would pay for any meal or drinks that we’d shared when he was in the money, I made a point of asking our waiter to bring me the bill, only to be astonished that it came to well over what we would have paid if we’d had an abundant dinner there. When I remarked on this, the waiter simply jerked his head towards Malcolm, who apparently had been so starved at home that he’d hoovered up most of the hard-boiled eggs, packets of pretzels and slices of cake that Lipp traditionally leaves out on its tables as snacks for afternoon drinkers.

  Dado has been saying for some time that he’s going to do a portrait of me. It would be a huge privilege to sit for him not only because I admire his endlessly inventive imagery but because it would be a lasting tribute to our friendship, which I appreciate enormously since it combines lots of fooling about with real professional interest: he likes talking to me about his work, for which he wants serious, critical acclaim, and I like writing about it in reviews and catalogue introductions, for which I’m paid. On the other hand, I don’t really want to end up as just another of Dado’s misshapen ‘monsters’, with a dribbling penis and a ghastly, lascivious smile. For some time now I’ve been trying to confront him head on about what I see as his overly systematic distortion of everything he portrays: that distortion, I try to convince him, would have far greater effect if it were used more sparingly. Dado dodges and weaves when I tell him this, but at least I’ve got him to promise that he’ll do a ‘formal’ portrait of me, as realistic and accurate as he can make it – what we end up as calling my ‘pompier’ portrait.

  Dado likes the big room at Archives and asks me to sit in front of the French doors that lead out to the terrace. We have a preliminary session, with Dado holding a large sketch pad on his knees, his mischievous eyes peeping and peering at me from beneath the great mane of wiry hair that covers his forehead. I watch his hand racing over the page, as I’ve seen it hundreds of times as we sit and talk, in bars or during lunch: that hand that seems to have a life of its own, observing and inventing, going off on riffs of its own as Dado talks about Haydn or Buffon, the corpses he saw strung up in the trees outside Cetinje when he was a young boy, the amorous exploits of our friends or the dead rat his dog, Stromboli, brought back. Then, after a surprisingly short interval, Dado looks up with a grin and says: ‘I think I’ve got it. I’ve got that pompier portrait you wanted.’

  I go cautiously round the back of him and take a look. There it is, somewhat idealised and a bit lost on the big, vertical white sheet, but a very good, rather stern and distant head of me.

  ‘I’ll take it with me and work up the background,’ Dado says, snapping the big pad shut.

  A few days later we decide to meet for lunch. Dado likes the exotic mini-Chinatown within walking distance of the Archives, and when we go there he really seems to believe he is in China, getting as excited as a child when he spots a red lantern or ideograms on a store front.

  ‘I’ve brought you the portrait,’ Dado says when he arrives. ‘You just need to get it framed.’

  He hands the sheet over. I am still there as before, but my head has been eaten away so that only bits remain, while the rest of the sheet, which Dado has turned horizontally, is a riot of impish child-monsters (his own children, I think) and a cast of walking dead, some flying through the air, others prostrate.

  ‘You thought you could get me to go pompier, didn’t you, Peppiatt?’ Dado cackles gleefully, digging into his egg-fried rice. ‘It’s all too late for that, my friend. I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and I can’t do it any other way!’

  Although I had other plans for Dado – to persuade him to distort from within a certain normality rather than radically distorting the whole – I’m glad to have the portrait, and to show my appreciation I hang it on the wall to one side of where I’ve put my ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard’ by Bacon. I thought Dado would appreciate this delicate gesture, but the next time he comes to Archives, it sends him into a sudden fury.

  ‘You can’t put that little piece of shit next to a Bacon,’ he shouts at me threateningly. ‘You’ve got to have something bigger and better than that.’

  I knew Dado had a tremendous admiration for Bacon, and I’d tried to get them together at a party given by my older girlfriend, Alice, while realising that, charming and urbane as Francis was in most social situations, you could never tell how he would react to another painter, particularly if that painter had any degree of success.

  ‘Francis,’ I’d said. ‘I’d like you to meet my great friend, Dado.’ I didn’t want to get things off on the wrong foot, so I didn’t say ‘the artist Dado’, only adding lamely, ‘Dado lives out in Normandy.’

  To my relief, Bacon was courteously attentive to Dado, asking him detailed questions about Normandy, the climate, and even about the crops after the long, hot summer we’d had. Dado replied eagerly, emphasising how early harvesting had begun, until we both realised that, although he was bound to have seen Dado’s work, Bacon had pretended Dado wasn’t a painter at all, but a Normandy farmer briefly abandoning his fields to spend the evening in Paris.

  Dado took all this in his stride, but the fact that he didn’t have a major composition next to the Bacon – as if the two of them were being unfairly compared in my room – stuck in his throat. At the end of the week, I got a call from Chenue, th
e art transport firm, notifying me that a picture was about to be delivered. Dado had pulled out all the stops, sending me a vast oil collage of ingeniously disfigured and dismembered figures tumbled together in a brightly coloured cascade against a serene summer sky.

  I cleared the wall opposite the Bacon triptych and hoisted the Dado into position, just behind my working table. Now they could stare across the space over my head, each willing the other to drop its pitiless gaze.

  News of Dado’s portrait and the huge collage has gone the rounds of our little, inward-looking art world and seems to have sent out sparks. Raymond Mason, who has the ambiguous distinction of being the ‘best-known British sculptor living in Paris’, has suggested doing a drawing of me, and so has Avigdor Arikha, the fiery Israeli artist I’ve been visiting in his studio not far from Montparnasse with a view to writing about him. I always take the bus up the rue Saint-Jacques when I go to see Arikha because it’s the ideal way to see the city and to imagine, as I do on this particular stretch, what it would have felt like to be a medieval pilgrim setting off from the Tour Saint-Jacques, reaching the brow of the hill at Val-de-Grâce, and knowing as you began the long road to Compostela that you wouldn’t see Paris or indeed any familiar sight again for many months.

  My visits to Arikha’s studio are hardly a pilgrimage, but I’m intrigued by the idea that he wants to do my portrait. He’s made several starts, but if he can’t bring something off successfully in a single sitting he scraps the result and waits for another occasion. This is hopefully it. Arikha is sitting on a three-cornered stool, squinting repeatedly at me, then at a large sheet of white paper pinned to a board on his aluminium easel. He is so close that our feet touch. To make sure I don’t move, I fix my eyes on a bump on the grease paper covering the lower half of the lunette window that fills the studio with natural light – the only light that Arikha works by. His face is plagued by nervous tics as he squints and squints again, groaning frequently as if in protest against the difficulties he is encountering. Then he takes an eraser, rubs out part of the drawing and starts again, fast, in an almost comic fury, twitching, changing his spectacles, then producing a reducing glass through which he stares at me while scoring the paper in a flurry of pencil strokes, as if panicked that the moment will pop and evaporate like a soap bubble before he has finished. The grease paper I’m staring at has turned into a mass of flying white dots that hurt my eyes, but I’m happy, floating in this immobility and thinking of all the things that give me the greatest pleasure, to which this – having a moment of one’s own stopped and perpetuated by a feverish, skilled artist – now belongs, when Arikha suddenly cries out: ‘Let’s leave it there. I know it’s torture for you and you can’t take it any more.’ I get up, somewhat reluctantly, and go behind him to find myself in a perfectly executed and recognisable portrait, although looking out at the world with a ferocious stare which surely belongs less to me than to Arikha – who then signs the drawing and generously hands it to me.

  We’ve barely talked since I arrived, but after all the tension Arikha has undergone to produce my portrait (he reminds me of Ingres, one of his great heroes, who used to burst into tears as he worked) I think he wants to have a bit of a chat to help him unwind. He says he’s been seeing a lot of Ron Kitaj, who arrived with his wife Sandra several weeks ago in Paris and who’s been going to the Louvre every day to study the masters. I tell him that I helped Kitaj find a flat here and that we’d been to see the art historian Jean Clair together. To amuse Arikha, I also told him that I’d introduced Kitaj to a great admirer of his, a museum curator who’d come over specially from Oslo to meet him and who was visibly smitten when Kitaj recalled a phrase he’d picked up while working his passage on a Norwegian freighter as a very young man. I’d asked the enraptured curator what Kitaj had said. ‘He is so modest and yet so cultured,’ the curator told me. ‘He can say “kiss my arse” in Norwegian!’

  Arikha laughed more uproariously at this than it really deserved, pleased to have a little diversion, and he reminded me of the phrase when we next bumped into each other at the opening of a Miró exhibition at Galerie Maeght. I’m always on edge at these grand occasions when the cultural bigwigs form their own tight circles, leaving me out on the fringes, desperately looking for someone to talk to. Being seen with a painter as prominent as Arikha comes as a boon, allowing me to relax and take account of the extraordinary good luck I’ve had to wander into this strange world where, although pretentiousness and cut-throat ambition abound, we’re still basically more interested in the search for truth than in worldly success. And suddenly I see Miró himself, the very modest star of the evening, blinking in the bright lights and ill at ease with being at the centre of attention until he espies his old friend Sandy Calder in the crowd: the two of them fall into each other’s arms, the little one disappearing into bear-like Calder’s embrace. They look like two old children, like one of those funny couples of opposites you used to get at school, a big bruiser and a titch, a naughty boy and a goody-goody swot. There is something very touching in the sight, as if for these two celebrated artists, with all their careers and commissions behind them, nothing had changed: they were still suspended in those distant, golden dreams we all experienced in childhood, still fascinated by the elusive mystery of life. Someone standing next to them as they come out of their hug begins to clap, then a few others join in until the whole gallery is applauding, and time suddenly stands still.

  It doesn’t take much to make me fall in love, and at times even less to fall out. The swell of a breast, the quivering glance – then the smeared makeup and the sad underwear. It’s a cruel game, making you play by its rules even though they are patently unfair, pushing you to take advantage when you know you should hold back. But by then you know only your own desire, the drumbeat in your blood, and you no longer see that the rules are playing you.

  Of course you always start with the best of intentions, a perfect gentleman paying the bills and opening all the doors. Then the scent of your prey sticks in your nostrils and runs through your veins. You crash through scrub in the chase and skid through clearings. Your bearings change, your senses change. Even your lust grows ambiguous. By the time you’ve cornered your quarry, you’re no longer sure whether you’re the hunter or the hunted. But it hardly matters because by now you have lost all purchase. You are in free fall.

  They all have names, but I have other names for them that I keep to myself: Musky Dusky, whose vulnerability I love and whose incessant chatter drives me to distraction; Jingly-Jangly who always keeps her clunky jewellery on; the widow, the ice maiden, the Amazon and the others, because my whole life now centres round luring as many as I can into my lair to find out what lies, illusions and furtive pleasures we can share. And it’s no easy matter, this life of botched seduction; it’s full of false starts and failures, eating up day and night and all my scant resources. It’s not even always my fault, my design: take the Parisian chiropodist whom I’d never even looked at until she propped my foot full on her breast and carefully clipped each nail, or the somewhat mature exchange student who complained what a burden her virginity had become. I treat myself to periodic pangs of guilt and mock myself for getting into predicaments too cheap to be celebrated in the cheapest pop songs (how I long to sing my own shameful lyrics!). But on I go, relentlessly driven to cheat, on others, on my steadfast girlfriend, Alice (whom I never love quite so intensely as when I’m in mid-fling) and, most of all, on myself.

  Yet all the Sturm und Drang comes like a thundercloud, lowering overhead only to dissolve and leave a clear sky behind for other storms to gather. And even the most fraught of these dramas, filled with intrigue, jealousy and threats, are mostly played out against a background of music and laughter. For Paris has never been so full of fêtes since I arrived: memories of the Belle Epoque and the twenties, the années folles, have merged into a more New Yorkerish, go-gettish optimism, and how dull and dreary, even provincial, London looks by comparison every time I visit. For the
re’s party after party every night in the City of Lights: a new exhibition or restaurant or nightclub opening, then parties aplenty just for the sake of parties. And whenever I feel flush enough, I drop into Castel’s club, where there’s a permanent party, simply to savour its atmosphere of elegant decadence, memorably summed up by Serge Gainsbourg, who once mused that ‘the most beautiful girls in the world have pissed chez moi what they drank chez lui’.

  Confidence, even a certain arrogance, is in the air. La France, we suddenly realise, has been quietly prospering for the past thirty years and is now proclaiming its gloire again, all the louder since it had grown a wee bit tarnished under German rule. In fact, a book has just come out celebrating what it calls the ‘trente glorieuses’ that have taken the country from strength to strength over the three decades since the end of World War Two. And if champagne isn’t flowing on every occasion, then Vive la France!, for there’s an ocean of other, more affordable wine to get by on. That’s certainly what I serve when I invite friends to regular celebrations in my new apartment, which has grown more sleek by the month with the damaged antique furniture I’ve sourced and the pictures that artists have given me, and it washes down the pungent, exotic curries I provide very nicely, particularly if the weather is good enough for my guests to spill over onto the planted terrace outside.