The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Once you go to more extravagant events, like the parties Claude Bernard throws for his artists, you find an abundance of every delicacy and music to make you dance the night away. On such evenings you might spot Boulez and Rostropovich, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, the director of the Met with David Hockney, as well as bevies of extremely rich, dark-suited collectors. Other party-giving grandees hire august institutions like the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, terraces overlooking the Champs-Elysées or crumbling, uninhabited palaces in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré or my very own Marais for their lavish festivities, while the more low-key take over a whole restaurant or favour the marbled halls and onyx staircase of the Travellers Club, once the home of La Païva, the most celebrated grande horizontale (as courtesans were jocularly known) to delight and scandalise le tout-Paris of the mid-nineteenth century. And, not to be outdone, Claude himself will come up with such memorable venues as the Musée Grévin so that his guests mingle with wax effigies (occasionally of their very selves) with the result that, as the Cristal champagne works its magic, we can no longer tell the real from the fake, warm flesh from cold wax.

  I love the sheer frivolity of it all. The limp-wristed, floppy-haired gays dancing with one another in total abandon, lost to their own delusions as well as to the powders they have been snorting. Their older admirers standing round, watching them with amusement and envy. (One of them, a sprightly eighty-year-old Armenian I often see, told me: ‘Young man, if I’m still active today, it’s because I eat fifty grams of caviar every morning.’) The cool artists are mostly above it all, but they join the fray to show off a quick, perfect Hustle or Funky Chicken, their flares flicking in all the right directions, while the passionately political artists, with great manes of hair and dubious blue jeans, throw themselves into grotesque parodies of outmoded Twists and Frugs. Then all the girls are eager to dance, the shy ones only too happy to strut their stuff once you’ve joked and cajoled them onto the floor, swaying less and less stiffly until they lose their inhibitions under the strobe lights and powerfully scented smoke. And every now and then I find some fleeting conquest that I carry back to my gossamer web like a big, fat, sexual spider.

  I dance and laugh, above all I laugh, I throw my head back and laugh, like a taunt, like a dare. How long it can go on I have no idea, I laugh and laugh, until one evening a middle-aged lady I know well because I have become a useful spare man at her dinners, takes me to one side at a party and says: ‘I love to see you laugh so much, Michael, but sometimes I worry you laugh too much. For your own good, you laugh too much.’ And that makes me laugh even more, that makes me positively roar with laughter as I down one more glass and whirl off, my head split in manic merriment, back into the dance we are all dancing and that is soon dancing us.

  A tune has been going round my head all morning, forcing its way through the champagne fumes until I recognise it as ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, a song from a Noël Coward album I used to listen to. Well, I’m a long way from being rich, I simply stagger from one poorly paid article to another, but I probably am bewitched because I live like a rich girl in this huge apartment with its pictures and cheap but well-chosen flea-market furniture and all the fancy dinners and receptions I go to. Perhaps I do laugh too much, but I’m not laughing now that I’m back at my desk, with the blank page peeping shyly over the black barrel but no sign of the ‘great work’ to come. All I have been able to cobble together is an idea that has come out of long evening talks with Alice for a book about artists’ studios, which we both think of as the most interesting, revealing and magical spaces we know. Alice has been collecting extraordinary photographs of the studios belonging to the most successful nineteenth-century artists, which show them working in vast, tapestry-hung spaces with mashrabiya screens, potted palms, naked Arab models, and such popular studio props as live or stuffed animals, medieval suits of armour and arrays of pikes and halberds. We are also putting together some of the more arresting contemporary studios, like Mondrian’s space in New York, as spare and neat as one of his geometric compositions, Picasso’s slew of memorable workspaces from rue des Grands-Augustins to ‘La Californie’ in Cannes, or the picturesque midden of images, rejects and refuse that Giacometti and Bacon seem to require on the studio floor to stimulate their imagination. And that is the word I have worked into the book’s title, both portentous and rather fey as it sounds: ‘Imagination’s Chamber: Artists and their Studios’. It’s the kind of phrase we used to dredge up in editorial brainstormings at Réalités, but it has the merit of having caught an American publisher’s eye, so that the idea has at least become a project rather than a mere late dinnertime fantasy.

  I have begun to sketch out a text to accompany these seductive pictures, but it’s already apparent that the theme would be served best by extensive captions, or one long running caption, because there is no ‘history’ of artists’ studios as such – however closely they reflect changing styles and preoccupations in certain periods – because they evolved essentially according to each artist’s needs and whims. I struggle nevertheless to show how the studio records the artist’s changing status in society (and thus in his own eyes). And whenever coherent argument peters out, I go off-piste to describe such specific, colourful scenes as the diminutive Toulouse-Lautrec poised on a stool as he paints the ‘Queen of the Cancan’ in a dilapidated makeshift atelier in Pigalle, or Jackson Pollock caught in swooping mid-drip over a canvas on the floor of his Long Island barn in the marvellous photographs taken by Hans Namuth. But the text, however lively I can make it as I jump from an anecdote about all the artists, like Chardin and Fragonard, who once had studios in the Louvre Palace, to another describing the atelier-boat Monet rigged up to paint the Seine at close quarters, can never really compete with the illustrations, which say it all better and more quickly.

  Intermittently I go back to the novel I was trying to spin out of my relationship with Francis Bacon and the Paris art world as a whole, but although I’d traced to the end the way the main relationships ebbed and flowed, the state of grace where everyday life suggested all the details I needed has completely vanished, and I curse myself for not having kept up the pressure and written the whole thing, however awkwardly and approximately, while the magic was there. All I can think of now, as I thumb through the inert typescript, is to start again, telling the story afresh, without any attempt at reinventing what I have seen and experienced. Francis, his work and the whole aura that surrounds them are literally ‘stranger than fiction’. And that of course is where the problem really begins. The reality is so strange, so powerful, that it takes on a mythic quality which would sound preposterous, even unreal, if you attempted to convey it directly. The impact Francis has can only be suggested, not ‘recorded’, to use a term he likes; otherwise it shrivels into a kind of drunken, nihilistic bombast (although he also descends frequently into that). Francis has said it would take a Proust to tell his life, and I take his point; but he may well have to make do with me, not least because I don’t see a Proust keeping up with the nightly roistering and meandering monologues until dawn. When Francis and I last discussed Proust, I said, ‘Proust only lived in order to write,’ and Francis replied, ‘Yes, it was the last saintly life, wasn’t it?’ – an exchange which made me laugh later when I imagined poor, delicate Marcel out on a Bacon-like bender. So I’m not going to let the proscription implied stop me, since I suspect that Francis would disparage anything that was written about him unless he could control it, like those incredibly fluent, word-perfect interviews David Sylvester has been doing with him.

  I thought that the studios book would soothe my writing frustrations but it has actually inflamed them. I’m happy enough to be writing it because it will presumably become a published book, but it’s not the book I really want to write, and a couple of recent encounters have made me wonder whether I’m a writer at all. Not only am I unlikely ever to have an ‘oeuvre’, a ‘complete works’, as such, but I don’t even know – if anyone actually cared to ask – what I
want to write. And for real writers that never seems to be the case. I have met a couple recently, and I suspect they have never had to confront the kind of doubts that beset me. I’ve admired Graham Greene since I read Brighton Rock, like most of my contemporaries, when I was about sixteen, and I’ve read most of his other books since. So there wasn’t any hesitation when Anthony Palliser, a friend of mine who’s been doing Greene’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, suggested I come along for drinks with him, even though I knew I would probably be ‘starstruck’ and tongue-tied.

  We met first of all at Greene’s fairly comfortable, nondescript apartment high up in an equally banal Haussmannian building near Parc Monceau. I’d heard that he’d left Antibes for Paris to get away from the publicity he stirred up by accusing top officials in Nice of ties to the Mafia; apparently he’d been getting death threats as a result. The idea that I was about to meet a famous writer brave enough to denounce the Mafia in the press made me so apprehensive (famous painters intimidate me far less) that I had trouble understanding most of the banter that Greene initiated once we’d been introduced, including a joke he made that seemed to suggest that Orson Welles’s main activity was masturbation; Greene’s pretty, pert mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, remonstrated with him about this with hoots of laughter. We had a first drink, and I took in that Greene was quite patrician-looking – tall, slim and stooped – with bright blue eyes that contrasted with a noticeably red nose; he also had that clipped style of talking that you used to hear on BBC news broadcasts. We went on from Greene’s flat to visit another of Anthony’s friends who had an outstanding cellar (the main reason, I think, for Greene’s joining us), and some serious sampling got under way. There was no question of talking ‘shop’ with Greene, who told several affable stories about his travels (notably one about being surrounded by gesticulating crowds in a British Embassy in Africa, and asking the ambassador: ‘Are they for us or against us?’); but since he seemed to write so fluently himself, I rather dreaded that if I mentioned my persistent difficulties, he might very reasonably suggest I try an altogether different activity. If I had been free to stay, I think we would have spent the rest of the evening getting drunk on increasingly rare wines, but I’d agreed to have dinner with my close artist friends, Zoran Music and Ida Barbarigo.

  ‘Pity you have to go to your friends,’ Greene said to me amiably as I left, holding aloft a glass of the latest choice vintage we had been tasting. ‘But after this, will you be able to drink their wine, I wonder?’

  A couple of weeks later I went to a dinner at an art collector’s house and found myself seated next to Henri Michaux, whose unmistakable India ink paintings that look like crowds in desperate, confused flight hung all around the dining room. My interest in Michaux began years ago, when I came back to London from Spain and attempted to translate his strange prose poems for Tambimuttu’s Lyrebird Press; then Francis Bacon told me he’d bought one of Michaux’s drawings, which no one else in London seemed to know, and I shone briefly because I was able to give him some idea of Michaux’s writings. I never found out what happened to the translations, but I’ve been hooked on Michaux ever since, and I’ve written a long essay about him, his drawings and his writing for Art International. This flimsy expertise hardly bolstered my confidence as I pulled in my chair, and once again the idea that I was so close to an outstanding writer made me want to bolt, like one of Michaux’s own panicked figures. To cover my nervousness, I started regularly dabbing my lips with my napkin as we talked, and to my alarm I saw that Alice, seated at the opposite end of the table, seemed to be doing the same but with very deliberate movements which I took to mean that I had something on my cheek, so that I started blushing and scouring my cheeks for any spinach or sauce that had strayed there (it is a measure of my discomfiture that I later found out I had imagined the whole thing). Michaux, meanwhile, was asking me questions about Gertrude Stein’s repetitive phrasing, and the influence it must have had on Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance, which seemed to interest him; and my embarrassment grew, because the little I knew about Stein centred on her art collection and the salon she held (relying on a description I had heard long ago in London from the unreliable Sir Francis Rose, also known as ‘Lord Chaos’).

  I was about to write off the whole encounter with Michaux as a failure when the conversation turned to his forthcoming exhibition in Japan. One guest started asking whether Michaux would go for the opening, while another mentioned how fascinated Michaux would be by Japanese culture, and yet another began to warn about the fatigue that would result from such a long flight (Michaux being well into his eighties). Michaux got visibly annoyed at this point, cutting them all short by saying curtly: ‘I’m not going to Japan, and I wouldn’t go even if it was five minutes round the corner. Is that clear?’ He then resumed the conversation with me which broadened out to include writers whose work we both knew (Borges, in particular), and I told him that I’d bought a first edition of his Plume, a yellowed, crumbly paperback with uncut pages that seemed to enclose the moment in the 1930s when he wrote it.

  Meeting such literary heroes does nothing to reconcile me with my own lacklustre efforts. Discontent grows, seeping into every corner of my life and corroding any satisfaction I take in my new décor. A former girlfriend always refers to me now, without malice, as ‘notre playboy critique d’art’, but her remark stings because I can quite see what she means. Even Dado hints at my lack of literary success when he puts it about cheekily that I’m planning to open a gallery, Peppiatt Fine Arts, in my big new flat; but he has a point, and if I got into that game I might at least make a bit of money. Here I am, uncluttered in my life, with no responsibilities, with all the time and space to indulge my own needs and pleasures, but in the end never achieving what I want most. The girl in the bed, I reason, will never make up for the unwritten book. Yet I seem to lack the basic confidence, the basic determination – or, more damningly, the basic talent – to achieve this shining but endlessly fugitive goal.

  I draw the chair up to my desk again. The morning sun is out, the windows gleam. Everything in my interior is in exactly the right place, at the right angle: the shower of petals that has fallen from a vase of white roses underlines the perfection of my place. Even though I am not going out, I’ve put on my pink Nehru shirt with the blue seersucker pants and white buck shoes I brought back from New York. I thought that dressing up smartly might encourage the words to fly from the jumble in my mind and settle in immaculate clusters on the page. The page remains blank. The morning is so silent I can hear my alarm clock ticking softly by the bed. My beard is trimmed and my nails are filed. More rose petals tumble down in an abrupt white rush. The page remains blank. Apart from my inability to fulfil my main function and to write page after page of faultless prose, everything is pristine and perfect.

  I myself am pristine and perfect. I am perfect, and perfectly futile.

  10

  The Reckoning: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe (1981–85)

  Another year has gone by, and summer is beginning to fade once more, but the Marais’ ancient façades, statues and cobblestone courtyards still bask in the sun, slowly releasing the day’s blonde heat as dusk falls. People are flowing back into the capital after their lengthy explorations of Basque coastline and Cévennes landscape, adventurers from far-off lands, astonished like the pilgrims returning from Compostela to find the old, grey-white city still standing. It is that suspended moment between illusion and everyday reality that I love and look forward to every year, when Paris comes back to life after its August torpor but before it shakes off the ease and tempo of the long vacation, when the only pressing concern remains enjoyment and pleasure. For a few days more, while the sun still shines, the illusion will persist, before the grubby reality of work, bills to pay and insufficient wages slowly and inexorably takes over.

  I have spent the whole midsummer walking round the deserted city, watching its bones brighten in the sunlight, relishing every sight of its empty streets, dusty
gardens and silent squares, which even the dogs, joining their masters on extended leave, no longer deign to shit in. Left to itself, I come to see, Paris grows less fearful, less constrained, requiring fewer undergarments to protect its nakedness. With the people away, it warms its flanks freely under the benign blue sky, slowly revealing all. Interiors abandoned for the season offer themselves whole through grimy windows to the most casual gaze, wrought-iron grilles swing effortlessly open onto carved stone staircases that possibly lead nowhere, ancient churches share the cool, even twilight of their nave and chancel, offering the best glimpse of God in the entire liturgical year. The eye roams as at no other moment, unimpeded by crowds and traffic, unchallenged by official hauteur or a concierge’s beady glare: it turns into a Doisneau or a Cartier-Bresson of its own, taking photos unbidden, reframing the everyday anew: a cat sleepily arching its back, the fretwork of shadows thrown by a tree.

  But after days of wandering from one closed bakery to another in search of a loaf of bread, of shaking my head in disbelief that the newsagent is taking four weeks’ holiday and the ironmonger five, I’m relieved to find the shops opening again, with their owners still mollified by their time in the sun. Not only do I not have to criss-cross the entire quartier to forage for the ingredients of a modest lunch, but many of my favourite stores have rolled up their metal shutters and are once more ready for business. Some things never change, and I still go back to my Auvergnate in rue Rambuteau for her well-aged Cantal cheese and York or dry-cured hams, while I can recommend the fishmonger on rue de Bretagne for his spider crab, line-caught seabass and slip sole. What I’ve missed even more during the summer are the bookshops that I haunt regularly, not necessarily buying much (I only want to own books I will reread) but browsing widely, finding out what’s come out and what I might have missed. And as I was flitting from one section to another of Galignani’s elegant, sky-lit space on rue de Rivoli, absorbed in the variety of new titles and subject to bursts of envy and twinges of regret as I saw this author had brought out yet another novel at Le Seuil, and that poet had received the ultimate accolade of an anthology or a ‘collected works’ with Gallimard, a slim volume caught my eye. It was entitled Cahiers, but I had no idea why I had focused on it so suddenly until I saw the author’s name: Danielle Collobert.