The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  In this fledgling new decade no front page is ever free from the latest update on the AIDS epidemic, and Le Monde runs regular in-depth pieces detailing the way the disease is likely to spread and spread. It’s commonplace now to compare this terrifying scourge to the Black Death. All the predictions are dire, but the stories you hear from friends about the personal suffering involved are even more terrible than the most lurid press exposés. Wherever you go in the city, you notice the occasional emaciated young man and realise that he is a victim doomed to die and be grieved for by a shattered partner as well as by his family. For all the media interest and the growing public hysteria, the illness is still shrouded in mystery. How is this plague transmitted – by bodily fluids alone, or could it be caught from the most casual contact, like a handshake or drinking from the same glass? Hair-raising stories about sexual excess and extreme sadomasochistic rituals seep out of the gay world, with its bar backrooms and bathhouse rituals, and as they circulate, they prompt outbreaks of homophobia; and even the most accepting amongst us have been known, when dining with gay friends in their apartment, to wipe a fork or a tumbler surreptitiously under the table with our napkin.

  The disease is on everyone’s lips, so to speak, creating a climate of generalised fear and revulsion, pity and despair, but its full impact doesn’t hit me until I get the news that Jaime Gil de Biedma has just died. I’d seen him once more since our dinner in Paris. He was surrounded by his closest friends in his flat in Barcelona, and although he hadn’t changed much physically he now talked about death with terror, breaking down, although his friends repeated, rather as we had done in Paris, that it was only a virus for which a cure would be found very soon. I’d been to see Tàpies to discuss an edition of engravings that he might do to accompany a special section on his work that we were planning for Art International. Tàpies had been enthusiastic about the project, so I arrived in a buoyant mood and was all the more shocked to find Jaime hysterical with fear. During the year I’d lived in Barcelona, Jaime took on a protective role as what he jokingly called my ‘Spanish uncle’, and it’s true that my life improved in numerous ways – most of all by spending long evenings in his brilliant company. I learnt Spanish and a great deal more by committing his poems to memory, and he was the first poet I was able to talk to about everything, but above all about writing and literature. With Jaime gone, a whole chapter of my life doesn’t disappear, but it has been cut short, abruptly and prematurely crystallised in time.

  But Jaime is just the first of what is turning out to be a lengthening list of lost friends. I’d heard rumours that my former colleague at Le Monde, François Villon, was unwell. I’d seen him several times over the years since the ‘Edition anglaise’ had collapsed, usually at significant events like a new play – Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, for instance – or a big museum opening. He had moved around, no doubt changing lovers as frequently as he changed jobs, but he had the same boyish charm, saying to me that whenever he saw me he was reminded of La Fontaine’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant. He was the grasshopper who had sung all summer and had nothing to show for it, while I represented the industrious ant, labouring away to produce Art International. I’ve heard along the gay grapevine that he’s ravaged by the disease and has almost no money left, but no one seems to know how to get in touch with him. Antoine Mendiharat, who has been running the Galerie Berggruen since Heinz Berggruen himself retired, is also badly affected as well as a couple of painters I know. They are all handsome, talented, elegant lovers of life, and in this unstoppable hecatomb they are being cut down one by one.

  Our advertising income has surged since Mariella gave us the launch party. There’s no doubt that money begets money. I think this is something I should take more to heart: I didn’t quite look the part of the prosperous publisher that evening at the George V since my suit was rather shiny and shabby, even in comparison to the outfit our factotum, Eli, had come up with for the occasion. It’s true that I don’t have to wear a suit often, but I’ve solved the problem by finding a shop in the Marais that sells cut-price ‘designer’ suits. I now have a sharp, midnight blue number, which I can alternate with a more relaxed double-breasted Armani in dark grey flannel; as a tailor I know in London confided in me, ‘Our old friend, the DB, is back with us’, so I think I’m on the right track. Ida Barbarigo, who spends half the year in her native Venice, has spoilt me with armfuls of natty ties by Italian craftsmen, and Mariella has lavished Cartier pens and cufflinks from a jeweller in Piazza di Spagna on me, so I can dress up any outfit I choose with a certain panache. There are plenty of occasions for that. Apple did an evening with the magazine at the American Embassy, and the Martini drinks company hosted a party for us on their terrazza overlooking the Champs-Elysées. The Wildensteins invite me to lunch at their Institut on rue la Boétie, with its huge private galleries of art and furniture; the lunch is very grand, with a liveried servant standing behind each chair, and very flattering, but I’m not sure why I’m there so I simply smile a great deal and savour the extraordinary vintages served and the vistas of fine paintings and furniture. Mariella has also been very prodigal in her invitations to lunch and dinner in the great Paris institutions. I’m already slightly familiar with the ritual of the grand restaurant from having been to the Véfour, Taillevent and the Tour d’Argent with Bacon. Mariella chooses rather more discreet places, but all these highly expensive purveyors of luxury resemble each other in the sense that the evening is conceived of as a Gesamtkunstwerk, where the welcome, the décor and the service are so sublime that you virtually forget whatever it was that you ate.

  Back at the office at rue des Archives, the champagne bubbles are merely a memory and luxury becomes a snatched moment to think one’s own thoughts between checking accounts, chasing late payments, negotiating personnel problems, overseeing circulation boosts and paying bills. A fraction of our time is allocated to planning new issues, as if they were merely the satin bow we wrapped around our product whose basic purpose is to include as much advertising as we can and be distributed as widely as possible. I fight to give the right care and attention to content. Could we persuade Anita Brookner or Julian Barnes, Gilles Deleuze or Gabriel García Márquez to contribute? Shall we include a new poem in every number? Could we devote part of each issue to an artist we believe in, then ask that artist to make a limited edition of prints that we could sell to benefit the magazine? Should we interview leading collectors to hear their views (this could hardly fail to interest the commercial galleries)? Or have a general discussion on the role museums play in the art world? But very soon the practical realities take over, and we find ourselves caught up again in such prosaic problems as finding new advertising reps in Germany and masterminding a subscription drive across the United States.

  Consequently, the ivory-tower thinking that first got me fantasising about what being the publisher and editor of Art International would mean gets less and less of a look-in. There’s an ad rep, for instance, whose expenses regularly outperform the advertising revenue he brings in. After an executive meeting between me, Jill (who is now working full time) and our American associate, his head rolls; but can we find anybody to replace him advantageously? Is our secretary pregnant, and about to claim the lavish conditions that our Socialist government awards all mothers-to-be, or has she simply overindulged in the pâtisserie department? Should we provide the number of coat hooks per employee required by the new French labour laws while respecting the five weeks of holiday for all employees that was recently voted in? Should we move the WC out of the kitchen, which is not a hygienic (albeit perfectly Parisian) arrangement, and take it and its plumbing to another part of the apartment? The answer to most of these questions is ‘no’, because we have neither the time nor the money, but we are aware that at any moment we might be ‘controlled’ by a competent authority that advises to the contrary, fines us punitively, and perhaps even closes us down. By producing a high-quality international art magazine from the heart o
f Paris, we should like to think that we add a teeny-weeny bit of lustre to French culture, even though France and that mysterious, threatening entity, the French State, have done damn all for us beyond allowing us to work ourselves to the bone in a climate of distrust and levying disproportionate taxes on our meagre salaries.

  There are some triumphs as we stumble from issue to issue, such as convincing certain galleries to take the occasional double-page spread and send us a correspondingly fat cheque. There are also disappointments galore. A museum director is so furious about our not having reviewed a show he curated that he threatens over the phone to come from Australia – from Australia! – to punch me personally on the nose. An American artist long resident in Paris follows me down the street repeatedly chanting, ‘you came to see my show and wrote fuck all about it!’ A well-known Marxist art critic accepts to write an article for us, but then charges a stingingly high, bourgeois fee. A consignment of magazines gets held up at the US customs: since the American galleries don’t see the ads they’ve taken to announce their new shows, they don’t pay for them. Other galleries complain about their placement in the magazine, with one of them livid about being vis-à-vis a gallery they apparently hate, and don’t pay. We do a Tàpies issue with a Tàpies print at a special price for subscribers: several are ordered and shipped off before we find that the cheques sent have bounced.

  Our staff holds up well, mainly because everyone is conscious of participating in an unusual adventure and accepts low wages and long hours. I try to take some of the rough edges of these conditions off by having Eli prepare lunch for everybody; this works for a while, then it becomes clear that we all prefer to get out of the office atmosphere by having our lunch, or a walk through the Marais and a sandwich, outside. I am proud of our little team, but I sense that the time will come when they won’t accept slave wages in return for a noble calling and the odd glass of champagne in a posh hotel any more. I’m proud, too, of our patronne, Mariella, who continues to support us. She regularly sends her chauffeur to bring Jill and me over to Neuilly for tea. We talk about our various plans for the magazine, and at a certain point, usually when the maid comes in to offer us drinks, Mariella says: ‘You have all been doing a lot of writing. Now it is my turn to write’; and she takes out her cheque book and settles a generous sum on the magazine.

  Mariella also invites us to some of her more intimate soirées, which consist mainly of lesbian ladies of very ancient Italian lineage, contessas, duchessas and principessas all. It’s a lovely, easy-going, amiable atmosphere where there’s plenty of teasing but never any malice. At one dinner, a lady called Verde – I love the idea she’s called simply ‘Green’ – produces her smart, dark blue Smythson address book to look someone up; she searches in the international section but finds only a single entry there: for Susan Sontag: ‘la divine Susan’, as one of our sapphists calls her. I join in the laughter, making the most of having met ‘la divine’ once with Francis Bacon and been a privileged male visitor to Le Katmandou, Paris’s exclusive lesbian nightclub.

  The Gulf War is being blamed for everything that’s going wrong in the world, since unlike other recent wars it appears to have depressed, rather than boosted, the economy. We’ve got used to being told that the outlook is bleak, even though nothing much appears to have changed for us here in Paris. But now, however buoyant it seemed a few months ago, even the art world appears to be suffering the consequences. The first expense that galleries cut back on, of course, is the amount of advertising they take, and our glossy ad pages have shrunk dramatically from one issue to the next. I’ve asked our reps to look beyond the galleries for advertising and we’ve managed to get a couple of auction houses and art fairs to buy space. But the ‘recession’ word crops up time and again; and the magazine, like some monster I’ve invented, swallows all the money we can shove down its gullet before hollering for more.

  Not long ago I thought I’d found a solution when Francis came to rue des Archives to sign the lithograph we’d printed of Three Studies of the Male Back. Francis nobly spent the morning signing the sheets (so numerous that at one point he looked up blankly, saying: ‘I can barely remember my own name’). Eli outdid himself by producing a huge poached salmon for our office lunch and we celebrated with champagne, thinking that our coffers would now be replenished for a while, but shortly afterwards I discovered that publishing prints is only part of the equation: selling them demands a familiarity with the international print market that I neither have nor can spare the time to acquire. So beyond giving sets to various friends who have helped on the magazine in some way, we cannot record much success on the sales front.

  I feel uncomfortable that, since Jill and I are very much in residence at the studio on rue de Birague, Francis has to stay at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères or the Hôtel Lennox, even if he protests that he feels more comfortable there because he’s had several health problems recently and both hotels have a doctor on call. The studio has been a godsend these past few months: tensions in the office have risen in direct proportion to our dwindling finances, and Jill and I are only too glad, after a day’s work that usually lasts well into the evenings and the weekends, to escape to a different atmosphere. It’s strange to be cohabiting with Francis’s ghostly presence in the studio. Mostly we are unaware of him and we go about our lives and our hungry lovemaking spontaneously. But a smear of orange paint on the wall or the jumble of creased photos around the easel sometimes bring him back entire, and then odd phrases from conversations we had years before ring in my ears like prophecies. Jill is much less conscious of Francis, of course, but she complains like him about the weird noises that come from the flat overhead. When I tell her that Francis says it’s like ‘marbles being dropped on the floor the whole time’, she laughs and says ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like.’ Jill’s other complaint is how little sleep she gets, since I come to with a start around 4 a.m. on most nights and darkly ponder the most imminent problems facing us at the magazine. Sensing I’m awake, Jill then sits bolt upright, and I pass on my concerns before dropping off again into a baby-like slumber which she watches over enviously.

  We’re both quite clear that the rue de Birague is no long-term solution. I want Francis to stay and paint there whenever he chooses, and Jill wants a comfortable flat where we can enjoy married life and prepare for the arrival of children. So whenever we are not dancing in the flames of a fresh financial, editorial or staff crisis, one of us sneaks out to view apartments for sale.

  Flanked by glibly gesticulating estate agents, we have seen everything from standard bourgeois horrors to whole houses in the suburbs, but the only property to have appealed to me is an extraordinary first-floor flat with intricately decorated beams in an eighteenth-century building on rue des Minimes (where Anne still has her studio, long rented out), a couple of streets north of the place des Vosges. A pair of pilasters, now embedded in the façade of another house on the street, is the only vestige of the convent which the Minimes, a Franciscan mendicant order, built here in the early seventeenth century. The two most influential thinkers in the country, René Descartes and the young, sickly Blaise Pascal, met at the convent in 1647 to discuss their divergent views; a heated argument ensued, the story goes, but Descartes later returned to minister to Pascal. I am smitten by the idea that Jill and I could live on such an historic street, in such an outstanding apartment, even if I’m pretty certain, despite the agents’ protestations, that its beams were entirely repainted during the nineteenth century. I make an impetuous offer, and to my delight it is accepted, only to be rejected the following day because a higher offer has apparently been made. Incensed, I make a further offer, although I realise it is beyond my means and it will cripple us financially for years to come, forcing me to sell all the pictures I have kept over the years. Again the offer is accepted, only again to be rejected. O tempora! O mores! I tell the agents, spitting disdain in my most faultless French, to bugger off.

  And yet, without my consciously real
ising it, the place des Vosges has become the undisputed centre of my world. For years it was the Marais as a whole, and it never occurred to me that any one part of the area dominated or even characterised my vision of it. Princely palaces and gardens adorn every approach here, whether down stately rue Vieille du Temple, along architecturally serene rue des Francs-Bourgeois or the more homely, more ethnic rue des Rosiers, where the noble buildings now accommodate both synagogue and hammam. But the King, Henri IV, would have had precedence over all aristocrat presumption, and he was well served. Nowhere else in the Marais has quite the draw of this royal square, for all its apparently modest red brick and regularity. Where the great Marais palaces exude grandiloquence and vanity, the place des Vosges radiates the solidity of real power.

  Here we are at the still centre of a universe, with the design of the garden reflecting the ordered harmony of the arcaded building that encloses it on all four sides. The garden is not so much a complement, as the gravelled and planted grounds complement the Hôtel de Sully or the Hôtel de Rohan-Soubise, as an integral part of a whole. This was a far more advanced version of Le Corbusier’s highly suspect, heartless ‘machine for living’, because it was all of that as well as a machine for persuading and ruling, even though no monarch ever actually took up residence in its precise serenity.