by Paul Bowles
She disapproved of liaisons between the young men she was interested in and members of the opposite sex. Thus when I returned to Paris and thought I’d go around to the Rue de Fleurus and visit the Misses Stein and Toklas, I telephoned.
There was cold at the other end of the line.
“So you’re back in Paris,” said Gertrude Stein.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you go to Mexico? I think that’s where you belong. You’d last about two days.”
That was the end of the conversation. She was a Californian: Mexico was her idea of a truly lethal place. I did not see her again until the following summer.
Strange, but it’s impossible to remember where I ate my lunches and dinners. I was not interested in gastronomy; I was striving to make a small amount of money last as long as possible, without suffering from indigestion. It seems to me that there was a quite good, medium-priced restaurant in the Rue Bonaparte where I often went.
Two years earlier on my first visit to Paris, I had fallen in love with the Métro. It got one around the city without the rush and roar of the New York subway, which seemed always to be engaged in a race against time. On the subway one compulsively looked at one’s watch; on the Métro one looked for DUBO-DUBON-DUBONNET instead. The smell of the New York subway was one of hot metal laced with harbor sewage; the Métro gave off a distinctive odor that escaped from the stations into the street. I had never smelled that particular scent anywhere else, and for me it was a symbol of Paris. Years later in a Tangier droguerie I discovered a disinfectant which came in three perfumes: Lavande, Citron and Parfum du Métro.
Bernard Fay, who lived in the Rue St. Guillaume, occupied a chair in Franco-American relations. What his political ideas were I have no idea, but as a result of having exposed them he was imprisoned for several years after the Second World War. It was at his house that I had met Virgil Thomson who, inasmuch as he lived at 17 Quai Voltaire, had been responsible for getting the studio there for Harry and me. Virgil also saw to it that I met various people whom he thought I ought to know, such as Marie-Louise Bousquet, Pavel Tchelitchew and Eugène Berman, whom everyone called Génia. He took me one day to see Max Jacob, a strange little man with a head like an egg. Henri Sauguet was there. But I had never read a line of Max Jacob’s, nor heard a note of Sauguet’s, so that these introductions were somewhat beside the point.
There were two places where I loved to go: the Bal Nègre in the Rue Blomet, and the Théâtre du Grand Guignol. I’d never before seen blacks dancing, and was of course highly impressed by their proficiency and grace. The repertory at the Grand Guignol was necessarily limited, and one had to be careful to choose a program that was not composed entirely of pieces one had already seen. Often during a performance there would be a disturbance among the spectators, and a person would be taken out by nurses in white uniforms. I never believed in the authenticity of these heart attacks and epileptic seizures. The plays did not seem horrible enough to provoke such reactions, although I was assured that the effects were bonafide, since the theater attracted invalids and neurotics. I thought it was all great fun, including the dramatic removal of the hypersensitive spectators.
Whenever a friend came to Paris and suggested that we eat together, I would choose La Mosquée, not because of its culinary excellence, but simply because the food and the ambiance were Moroccan. (I still dreamed of returning to Fez, which I’d left only a few months earlier.) And now that I recall it, it seems to me that the couscous was not at all bad. Certainly it was better than what one can get nowadays in a restaurant in Morocco. I’m told that now, more than half a century later, La Mosquée’s food has deteriorated, but this is not surprising, considering what has happened to everything else.
One day at a friend’s flat in Montparnasse I was introduced to Ezra Pound. He and I went out to lunch in the neighborhood. He was tall and had a reddish beard. I recalled a poem of his I’d read in a little magazine several years earlier; it was an excoriation of old people who he apparently thought owed it to society to die before they became senile. It was a cruel little poem. I had shown it to my mother, who said: “Obviously that man doesn’t know much about life.” Several times during lunch I was on the point of asking Mr. Pound if he still felt the same way about the elderly, but I held my tongue because I thought the question would embarass him. At the time he was one of three editors of a literary magazine called The New Review, the other two being Samuel Putnam and Richard Thoma. He had an appointment with Putnam that afternoon, and suggested I go with him.
We boarded a bus and stood on the back platform all the way to Fontenay-aux-Roses. I remembered that Gertrude Stein had said she couldn’t have him at her house any more because he was so clumsy and careless. If he went near a table, she said, he knocked over the lamp. If he sat down, the chair broke under him. It cost her too much money to have him as a guest, so she made 27 Rue de Fleurus off-limits to him. I asked her if she thought he minded being excluded. “Oh, no. He has plenty of other people to explain things to.” She called him The Village Explainer, which was fine, she said, if you were a village.
My literary activities in Paris that winter were confined to the search for missing issues of certain defunct and moribund magazines of which I wanted to have a complete collection. This took more time and energy than one might expect. The publications of particular interest were Minotaure, Bifur and Documents, a short-lived review edited by Carl Einstein. These were not to be found at the stalls along the quays, but in small second-hand bookshops scattered across the city, so that in my search for them I was obliged to do a good deal of walking. This however suited me perfectly, as there was nothing I enjoyed more than wandering on foot through the less frequented streets of Paris, which I continued to find mysterious and inexhaustible.
The regions which I particularly loved to explore were far from the Opéra, far from the Place de la Concorde or the Arc de Triomphe, all of which seemed too official to be of interest. On a gray winter’s day the humble streets of Belleville and Ménilmontant struck me as infinitely more poetic; I could spend hours exploring those quarters, taking snapshots of courtyards piled with ladders and barrels (taking care that no person was included in the picture) and getting temporarily lost, rather as one does in a Moroccan medina. The food in the restaurants of these parts was not much to my liking; I recall the very red and sweetish horsemeat they served, generally with gritty spinach.
But there was one “official” building which delighted me: this was the Trocadéro with its wide staircases going down to the Seine. Am I wrong to associate it with Lautréamont? Surely it was ugly enough to have aroused his admiration, with the two unforgettable life-size rhinoceroses. Apparently these were removed at the time of the building’s cosmetic surgery. I can’t help wondering what happened to those two enormous animals. Do they still exist somewhere, or have they been destroyed? It seems to me that the French might have cast two more identical statues and placed all four of them at the corners of the Tour Eiffel, with which they had something in common.
Lest I be suspected of harboring perverse tastes in architecture, I should remark that I admired the Palace of Versailles. The openness of the landscape spread out before it, stretching away into the distance, provided an antidote to the occasional feeling of claustrophobia I had in Paris. I assumed that I shared a more or less universal admiration for the place, so that I was really shocked when one afternoon I saw four English tourists stand looking up at the wide façade with an expression of derision on their faces, while one woman said, in a broad Cockney accent: “Talk about ugly!”
One night I was invited to dinner at Tristan Tzara’s flat. It was somewhere on the way up to Montmartre – perhaps the Rue Lepic. He had a beautiful Swedish wife, his salon was full of African sculptures and masks, and there was a splendid Siamese cat. In spite of (or possibly because of) their generally insane behavior, I’m particularly fond of these animals.
The food seemed excellent to me, but they apologize
d for it. They had a temporary cook, explained Tzara, since their usual cook had left earlier in the week in a state of great agitation, saying that he would under no circumstances set foot in the Tzara establishment again. It all had to do with the cat, which had never been on good terms with the cook. Perhaps the man had neglected on occasion to feed it. In any case he did not want it in the kitchen when he was working, and thus pushed it out with his foot, an insult which the cat, a huge male, obviously considered unforgivable.
The cook slept in a servant’s room at the back at the apartment, and always shut his door upon retiring. But one night he failed to shut it completely, and the cat silently pulled it open. Making certain that the man was asleep, the animal crouched and sprang, landing on the cook’s throat, which it began to rip open with its powerful hind feet. Clearly it had every intention of doing away with its enemy. The cook was taken to hospital, and in the morning he appeared at the door of the Tzara flat to deliver his ultimatum: if they wanted to keep him as a servant, the cat had to go immediately. He would not enter the apartment until they had got rid of it. They refused to do this, and the cook went away, threatening to start legal proceedings at once. I asked how the cat got on with the present cook. “Oh, she’s a woman,” said Tzara. “He doesn’t mind women.” The cat was sitting on a bookcase next to an African mask, watching us while we ate. Even though I had a strong desire to go over and caress his head and scratch his jowls, I was careful not to approach him at any time during the evening.
The walls of the studio at 17 Quai Voltaire were decorated with several large monochromatic drawings by Foujita. These belonged either to our landlady, Mme. Ovise, or had been left behind by a previous tenant. In spite of the presence of beautifully rendered Siamese cats in certain of the pictures, these works of art seemed unworthy of the studio, which I felt needed something more arresting. Harry was of the same opinion. The Galerie Pierre, which was nearby (probably in the Rue de Seine), was holding an exhibit of “constructions” by Joan Miró. These were made of wood, plaster, and bits of rope, somewhat reminiscent of parts of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, but conceived with an eye to please. Harry visited the Galerie Pierre and came back with three of these Mirós. They livened up the place, and made me feel that I was really in Paris and that it was the year 1932. The Foujitas had suggested another era – the preceding decade. (When one is twenty years old, a decade is a long time.) We put the Foujitas into a closet.
Scarcely a fortnight later I came home one afternoon to find that the studio seemed unusually dim. It took only a few seconds for me to realize that the Foujitas were back in their accustomed places on the wall, and that the Mirós had disappeared. The maid would not have done this; it could only have been the concierge or Mme. Ovise herself. I rushed downstairs to speak with the concierge. At first she had no idea of what I was talking about (or pretended to have none.) This was because I described the missing Mirós as pictures.
Eventually she did understand, saying: “Monsieur means those old pieces of wood that someone had put on the wall? I threw them out. I thought monsieur would be glad to be rid of them.”
A search of the cellar was undertaken, and the constructions, to which I kept referring as works of art, much to the concierge’s bewilderment, were found in a corner with a pile of kindling wood. They were not in prime condition, and had to be taken back to the Galerie Pierre for repairs. It was finally Miró himself who rebuilt them.
Paris! City of the Arts
Holiday, April 1953
PARTICULARLY I REMEMBER the winters in Paris – not with pleasure, not with displeasure – just the blank impressions, meaningless but powerful, of the hushed, intense cold that lay over the Seine in the early morning, the lavender-gray daylight that filtered down from the damp sky at noon; even on clear days the useless, impossibly distant, small sun up there above. I remember arranging my walks home from work so that I would get to the Tuileries in the wistful dimness of twilight.
To be seventeen and in Paris, free to do as one liked – that was an ideal state of affairs for any aspiring artist or writer a generation ago. It was ideal even without money. Perhaps especially without money. If you had money you were somewhat suspect, since it was almost an axiom that money and artistic ability could not belong to the same person; in that case, therefore, you were expected to help keep alive those who had only artistic ability.
But at seventeen one has energy: one can walk a few miles to save bus fare, one can run up six or seven flights to a room under the roof, one can live on a meal a day if one is not working, by staying in bed most of the time and eating bread. I went for months without a bath, washed my own clothes, was gnawed by bedbugs every night, and put up with a hundred inconveniences (any one of which, had I had to endure it in America, would have been downright hell) and loved it all, because I was in Paris.
I suppose it was because I felt that everybody was there. I was sharing the town with them all. Picasso was just going into his rag, bone and hank-of-hair period; Gertrude Stein was busily preparing to publish her own works in the Plain Edition; Stravinsky was writing the Symphonie des Psaumes; Joyce was in the middle of his Work in Progress; Diaghilev was there with his magnificent troupe. Then, too, it seemed to me that the struggles and scandals that went on in the art world there were of supreme importance: in a way it was like living within sight of the front during a war in whose outcome you were vitally interested. The Surrealists were regularly staging pitched battle in their own night clubs: the presence of a few policemen was almost a necessity at any artistic manifestation. It was the culmination of an era of aesthetic violence, in which the basic desire of the creative artist was to shock.
For artists, would-be artists and those numberless people for whom association with art of some sort, and with those who practice it, is a necessity, Paris is much more than a splendid city of boulevards, cafés, shops, bright night spots, parks, museums and historical monuments. It is a complete continent in itself, every region of which must be explored on foot. I wonder how many thousands of miles I myself must have covered, walking in the streets there, from the Bois de Vincennes to the Buttes-Chaumont, from Auteuil to Charenton, always seeking to penetrate, understand, participate in the sense of mystery that enveloped the city, looking for lost quarters that nobody knew, unearthing strange little alleys that were like nothing I had ever seen before, and many of which still remain intact as images in my mind’s eye. Infinite variety in a harmonious whole, the certainty of discovering something new and poignant each day -such things give the artist who lives in Paris a sense of satisfaction and spiritual well-being. I think it is they, rather than the more tangible benefits Paris provides, that make it the principal gathering place for artists from every part of the world.
In the past those tangible benefits have doubtless been greater than they are today. There was a time when it seemed as though the entire Left Bank existed primarily for the artist. He was the one who was at home there, the rhythm of life was set by him, and the hotel rooms, cafés and restaurants were accessible to him for a sum he could usually manage to raise. Not so today, with food prices at astronomical levels, and Paris in the grip of one of the worst housing shortages in Europe. Now the average artist’s life has little in common with the traditional vie de bohème of the attic studio lit by a candle stuck into a wine bottle. It used to be shabby; now it is grim. The studios are not for him; they have been moved into long since by prosperous bourgeois who consider it chic to live in places with an “artistic” atmosphere. Even the servants’ rooms at the tops of the apartment houses are too expensive for him. He is literally being forced from the center of Paris out into the slums, and his life has become pretty desperate. When he eats he cooks the food himself in his tiny room, and he often has to carry his water up several flights in a pail from the tap in the courtyard below.
It is not surprising that recently there has been inaugurated a kind of “return to the soil” movement. A number of people practicing the various arts ge
t together and rent a small house out in the suburbs. This they can get without key money. (Key money has nothing to do with rent; it is an extra bonus you must give the proprietor for the privilege of moving in, and the key money for an average studio in Paris is in the neighborhood of one thousand dollars.) Then they divide up the house to suit their requirements, plant a vegetable garden and settle in, using bicycles when they want to get into town. The garden is a great aid to the budget. This kind of life is a far cry from the traditional idea of the life of an artist in Paris, and it is conceivable that such a movement could eventually have far-reaching aesthetic repercussions, perhaps in line with the recent tendency to forsake abstraction and non-objectivism for representational painting. In any case, the average artist in Paris (and of painters alone it is estimated that the city now has approximately 46,800) is not faring too well these days.
Art students are even worse off, because in order to attend the academies they must live in the middle of town in furnished rooms, and they must depend more upon restaurants for their food, despite the fact that they generally have very little money left by the time they have paid their rent. There is a student foyer for them, near the Beaux Arts, where they can eat meals composed principally of soup and starches for 70 francs (about twenty cents), and that is a help. But the academies, which are useful above all as training centers for pedagogues, do not hold students with true creative talent for very long: these break away and work on their own, in collective studios and in their rooms.
Marc Raimbault is a good example of such a student. He is twenty-three. When he first came to Paris two years ago he was enrolled as an architectural student at the Beaux Arts, but that was only a ruse designed to get him away from his family in Poitiers, who would not hear of his becoming a painter. Now he lives as he likes, pursuing a life completely to his taste. It is a precarious life, to be sure, and often a difficult one; both ingenuity and hard work are required to keep going on the meager allowance his family sends him. Only when the former fails, however, does he resort to the latter, which consists in walking at three in the morning from Montparnasse to Les Halles and spending five or six hours unloading crates of vegetables from the trucks that come in from the country. It’s not that he dislikes hard work, but it takes a lot of time and energy, and he wants to pull all that he has of both into the one thing which interests him – painting. His rent is not too high: he has managed to get a tiny room in the Rue Boissonade, in the apartment of a nice old lady who crochets scarves for a smart shop on the Right Bank. She used to paint landscapes in watercolor herself, and likes to think of herself as an artist, and so she rents him the room for very little.