We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  —Thunder! Lightning! Fire!

  She moves her free hand in a circle, tracing the progress of all things in a great meaningless loop and she raises the arm of the corpse, the fingers of which have been set to form the Egyptian hieroglyph for “hand”.

  In the hallway there is a great pounding and shaking on the wooden floorboards, as if a gymnast is taking the run up to the horse in preparation for a vault. It is so loud that you turn, and through the crack in the door you can see her dancing: a lithe and lugubrious fish from the waist up, a stamping and angry tribesman from the waist down. She bangs her feet as hard as she can, rattling the ornaments precariously balanced on the picture rail, and makes sinuous and alluring convulsions of the chest and neck. In this distraction you fail to notice the approach of the corpse, the breath of which you suddenly feel on your cheek, fanned by her wings into his dead and golden phallus.

  This is all so much nonsense.

  If you wished to resolve the meaning of this dreamscape you could certainly make an attempt — the etymology of words is so wide-ranging that, with a dictionary, a thesaurus, and enough time, an explanation can be made of any string of random images, once they are transcribed. The same goes for the contexts of things, which can be piled up then sifted through as an archaeologist sifts through the dirt at an excavation site. Which is not to say that things have no meaning, since you know what these things mean by feel. The dream provokes in you guilt and anxiety, and you know that she is the source of it.

  If anyone examines dreams they only do so because they know there is a requirement to do so, and they know this because they understand the relevance of the dreams already. The examination is an excuse, confirmation of ideas you do not have the courage to avow for yourself, so you look to the ineffable world to provide a backbone that you do not yourself possess. You will turn to a painting to tell you what you know of the world, to music, to a book, and in there you will pick and choose those things you recognise, and from them build a shield against your own prejudices and certainties, create armour for your intuitions, as if they are too weak to live on their own; like a crab that has shed its carapace, you will seek out a discarded shell and live in that.

  The corpse is on your lap now, or you are on its, and one of you is ventriloquizing the other, though neither of you knows quite who is doing what. She is back behind the curtain, and even in the dream you know that you are satirising yourself — symbolism of this kind is so obvious, so transparent to you, that it can only be a product of those dreams you have as you approach the morning, dreams that are losing their form, losing their dreaminess, and into which your conscious mind is beginning to encroach, blinking and curious, to find where it is the night-time self lives, and it is bringing with it all the self-consciousness that typifies waking life, all the taboos, all the defences. It is taking the piss out of you, as you sleep, and you wake at that realisation to find that you left the radio on the night before, that it is past eight, that others in the house are up, and that it is raining hard outside, enough to empty the streets of the breakfasting tourists.

  Your mouth is stale and your teeth want licking, but you are dry with the dehydration a person feels when they have drunk up all that was in the house. Your bladder is holding it all, tight against the waistband of his pyjamas. The young Parisian bucks would find an erection down there, their engorgement shutting off the valve preventatively, but you will have to make the crooked-backed, cold-footed journey to the end of the corridor soon, regardless of how your head is, or whether, if you laid back down and turned on your other side, you could return to that room and see behind the curtain whether it was she who was manipulating the old man’s corpse.

  Where is she now? You should know, but it’s easy to let things slide when you are as busy as you are.

  First things first. You slip the dressing gown from the hanger where it hangs wedged in the door of the wardrobe, and slip it over your shoulders, slip your feet into your slippers and mince across the room. We are all old now, and there is no sympathy for anyone, but when you return you will go to the dressing table and take out paper and a pen and write to her, at least.

  Or you will not.

  You haven’t written for years, haven’t thought about her ten minutes past waking. On the way to take a piss you will be called to from downstairs — perhaps news you have been waiting for, perhaps a personable good morning from someone who deserves a personable reply, perhaps an irritable “what time do you call this?” — whatever it is it will overwrite the obligations of the dream world, replace them with things that are more certain, less internal, things that are practical, and you are awake now, and shouldn’t you attend to these things first? You forget that which does not press hard enough on your attention. The bladder will not allow itself to be forgotten, the stomach, the bowel; all of these things know how to blackmail you into doing what they wish. Other people too, a business partner, the rain, the wind, Paris, all of these things are here, in front of you, unavoidable. It is no surprise to anyone that your purview is not infinite — you cannot contain everything in your consciousness at all times. You can scarcely remember your telephone number, or the way to the bank, or whether or not you have watered the flowers, and there are some things that can only be properly addressed once all the pressing things of the world have been silenced behind closed eyes, and in the respectful hush that falls on a person in their own house after their bedtime.

  Defunge

  Richard Marshall

  Beckett’s grave was the last place I visited when last in Paris. I took the air there willingly, more so than elsewhere, according to the doomed verbs and mists and disjecta, nothing much to write home about but nevertheless in the lowest deep a lower deep, like an undertaker’s, or lapidationist’s. It must have been January or late December, both with their crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains written out in the moment, a little Paris snow to last a little more as a finish, a last time living for the theme I’d given the place, an original French to cleave constituents apart, which were, truth be told, melancholic mixed with overzealous. All alone and without commiseration, it was a vivid nothing between the lunulae, a moment grave-swaddled and parenthetic, to be honest. What was I wanting? Well, I was playing fast and balls with desires and lacks. So the moment at the grave went off half-cocked. I wished to see Paris gone, from the old stand where it loomed in a proportion of vast invention, as he’d say how it is, a Paris erect and rigid in the deepening gloom completely cut adrift from any reality other than that which it manifests by its mere presence in language, rightly or very wrongly as you might suppose. Fuckit, the whisky bears a grudge against the decanter. In the darkening late afternoon as if all colours ebbed and ashen I didn’t feel like rejoicing, to my knowledge, nor speaking up, not being deaf, and never gave way to reverie or meditation. I had crammed up with things, all 735,840,000 heart thumps when first time round, a youthful twenty, years before, with the intention of meeting him, an abortion in the end at the dimmening window of Les Éditions de Minuit office 7, Rue Bernard-Palissy and no elegance of diction would relieve me now, him gone and my own winding sheet writhing somewhere in its cupboard, every day less moribund. Before the graveyard deadlight I’d taken a day traipsing to the convulsive spaces, spits, glasses, matches, sands, beers, floors, doors where Bataille, Beckett, Giacometti once came and goed, hung about in the grey ripe cold outside the Bibliothèque Nationale, froze before the École des Chartes before striding like I might attain a life goal by a kind of short-circuit to 3 Rue de Lille and then to 259 Rue Saint-Honoré, where Bataille and Beckett as pure figments of sun corpseless heads shadowed net curtains of black crêpe drying on black trees. Ghosts. I drank a bit in profound apathy of death thinking of the Chinese jar and the perpetual movement in its stillness, half thinking of getting out to 59 Rue Saint-Étienne in the village of Vézelay where Bataille dead to the world kept house unknown, but opted not to leave Paris, I being perhaps a little unconscious by then. I toured round
looking for addresses for each of the trio, each address a pause which gives you pause, Balthus’s studio at 3 Cour de Rohan where Bataille holed up, then Beckett’s early inexistent centre of a formless place, minimally less on the way to inexistence as he put it, 16 Rue de Condé for starters. I barely thought I might go out to Ussy to the east and never did. Instead, after more beer to hasten my misadvantages, I shilly-shallied at the École Normale Supérieure on Rue d’Ulm, but was barred from getting in to Beckett’s room on the first floor overlooking the road by an official who gave me hardly a glance before shooing me off. I got the view from it anyway by reading; “the bare tree, dripping; then, behind, smoke from the janitor’s chimney-pot, rising stiff like a pine of ashes; then, beyond, beyond the world, pouring a little light up the gully of the street that westers to the Luxembourg…”. And felt the satisfaction of cheating the authorities with this. There were other blanks I registered: the café Cochon de Lait in Rue de Corneille was no longer there, nor so the Hôtel Corneille on the very same road. I flew around through the cold to Joyce’s flat at Square Robiac, to the top of the Hotel Trianon at 1 bis Rue de Vaugirard just around the corner from the Rue de Corneille. As fast as can reasonably be expected, and saying no more than needs be, I went to Beckett’s first address in the city — 12 Rue de la Grande Chaumière — and then to the Hôtel Libéria at No. 9 from where Beckett first ventured out to speak with Giacometti. Such was this long circuit, like love requited as Neary has it, it included the place where Beckett was stabbed by a pimp along the Avenue d’Orléans (now Avenue du Général Leclerc) then off to Broussais hospital where he recovered. What next in the corpse light? To a studio at the top of No. 6 Rue des Favorites before vagitating to the outside vantage of his seventh-floor flat in an apartment block at 38 Boulevard Saint-Jacques with the prison in its brevity across the way. Mid-afternoon I endured more oblivion outside the Salle Wagram or “Multicolor”, Avenue de Wagram, where he’d gamble, and then later outside where Beckett would play his billiards at Les Trois Mosquetaires on Avenue du Maine. Perhaps a little later I found the Falstaff on the Rue de Montparnasse, the Rosebud just around the corner on Rue Delambre and the Closerie des Lilas on Boulevard de Montparnasse, before setting down again for more drinks out of the cold in the yellow dimness of some antepenultimate café. But I forget the order and the details are shaky. And so then the final leg: first plunging inside the Petit Café PLM in the Hôtel Saint-Jacques on the boulevard of that same saint, a curiously bleached and impersonal place in which he oversaw his last hurrahs and murmurings. But not quite the very last. Life has to begin as well as end, was all Hazlitt could say to cure our fear of dying. I was more or less drunk by the time I reached the Tiers Temps nursing home at 26 Rue Rémy-Dumoncel, on the way passing the Giacometti studio at 46 Rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse, where Beckett and Giacometti tried out a tree for Godot. After lurking about in the abyssal cold outside the place where Beckett in spite of all turned blessed as the dead that die, that the rain rains on, that the sun shines on, etc., I started out to the cemetery for a final glimpse of Paris. The sun extinguished and dropped and a last thought in the freezing gloam was his: “…to be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then that a man shows what stuff he is made of. To know you can do better next time, unrecognisably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with”. I went on with it.

  Not-Beckett

  Toby Litt

  In a high hall, Oxford, the American biographer (great biographer) Hugh Kenner (is that worth saying?) was speaking — of Oscar Wilde, I think. I don’t remember what else he said during his lecture; I was thirty rows back, among the other undergraduates, perhaps the back row. And I was doubtful, wishing for Derrida or dead-Barthes or other “theory”, not biographical fallacy. But at one still vivid point, in a raised voice, with reverence — this was 1987, or 1988 — Kenner said, up toward the ceiling, “There is one great Modernist, alive,” pause, “in Paris.” Or perhaps the forgotten lecture was on Ezra Pound, about whom I was especially doubtful (apart from his dead-on editing job on The Waste Land) (by deceased Modernist T.S. Eliot, but written by him in a living-dead state). There was another pause, after “Paris” ceased echoing, a pause for everyone so close to the parquet floor — who already knew he meant Beckett — to form each their own image of what living Sam was up to, that Parisian moment. Afternoon. Writing or not-writing — most likely not-writing. And if not-writing, which for Beckett was more active an activity than writing is for most writers — if not-writing, then in a café, with a coffee, photogenic, as in John Minihan’s great photograph of him. Kenner insisted, during that silence, which (for me, at least) lasted for the next five years: we were in Oxford, not Paris; we were not Modernists, we were post-Modernists; and above all, we were certainly not, and were never going to be, Samuel Beckett.

  Above is what I wrote, before Googling. Where I found I was not wholly wrong. Hugh Kenner gave the F.W. Bateson Memorial lecture, in Oxford, on 18 February 1987. But this is what his first words were: “To commence with good news: the Last Modernist is well in Paris where he lives under the name of Beckett.” Last, not Great; Last to mean great. I misremembered the rhythm. And he spoke the vivid name, rather than letting an educated room infer it. But clearly, thirty years later, I haven’t forgotten the angle of the wound. We were — I was not-Paris, not-not-writing, not-Beckett.

  Paris, Isidore Isou, and Me

  Andrew Hussey

  I met Isidore Isou only once.

  This was in April 1999 when I was working on a biography of the Situationist writer Guy Debord. I needed to speak to Isou because in the 1940s Debord and Isou had been close friends, with the former in the role of disciple to the latter. For a short while Debord had been a member of the avant-garde movement founded by Isou called lettrisme (or “Lettrism” in English). They had quickly fallen out, however, and despised each other since. “Debord was like a Nazi,” Isou told me, “Worse than a Nazi.”

  Debord shot himself through the heart in November 1994. But this suicide only made things worse for Isou. Debord became posthumously famous for his book The Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967 but now considered a text that prophesied the contemporary world of iPhones and social networks — the new “civilisation of the image” as he put it. Isou was jealous that Debord was now also being written about outside France, mainly in Britain and America. His work appeared on university syllabuses and his ideas were claimed as a major influence on all forms of countercultures, from the near-revolution of May ‘68 to punk rock and rave culture. For Isou, however, Debord was no great thinker; he was no more than a drunk, a plagiarist and a betrayer. Given the level of hate that had simmered away between them for nearly fifty years, I was amazed that Isou had agreed to speak to me at all.

  Isou was then seventy-four years old. He had been in bad health for some time and had been unable to walk for several months. He lived in Paris in two small rooms at the top of a building at 42 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. He had been here since 1965, never leaving the Left Bank except for a few trips to Israel. Legend has it that he had paid off the mortgage by selling a sculpture given to him by Alberto Giacometti.

  The apartment was simple and austere: a table, a chair, a bed, no paintings or other images on the walls. The bathroom was used to store paintings; the bath itself contained several medium-sized works. Isou preferred to use a public bathhouse. The three rooms of the apartment were laid out like a long corridor, with windows overlooking a courtyard. This was the common pattern of cheap Left Bank hotels, which was what the apartment had once been. Rather than a place to live, this was a place to consume ideas and books which passed through the apartment as fast as Isou could devour them.

  The apartment was also dense with books and newspapers and I noted straight away that Isou was reading simultaneously two huge volumes — the first on Kurt Swchwitters; the second a compendium of Dadaist texts. Isou had not left his apartment
for two years and received no visitors apart from a nurse and his friend Roland Sabatier, a filmmaker and artist, who had tight control over the still active group of lettristes in Paris.

  The room was baking hot, becoming unbearable as the afternoon lengthened. Isou was taking medication for a degenerative condition that led him to drool and slobber on occasion, making him hard to understand at times. The black propaganda from Debord and his supporters was that Isou was totally mad, but it soon became clear — as Isou kept making sense and even cracked jokes — that this was not the case. Happily, we soon left Guy Debord and the tedious intricacies of avant-garde rivalry behind. Instead Isou began to tell me another, altogether more compelling story. It was the story of his life, which he had never talked about before, and certainly not to anyone outside the charmed circle of lettriste devotees.

  All of that was nearly twenty years ago and it has taken me that long to get round to writing Isou’s story, which is the book I am working on now. I left Paris after 1999, published my book on Debord and then some others. Although based in the UK as an academic, I also spent a good part of the intervening years travelling, writing and teaching in North Africa, mainly in Tangier. In 2003 I came back to Paris on a sabbatical, and in 2006 settled here for good. It was not long after this that I started to pick up the threads of Isou’s tale, listened to the tapes I had made of our meeting, and started to realise that here was a story that was both old and contemporary — as old and contemporary as Paris itself.

  It goes like this. Isidore Isou has largely been forgotten or ignored by cultural historians. This is partly because he believed something which was absurd and impossible. He was a fanatic who held the fantastical belief that he was the Jewish Messiah sent to lead all Humanity to redemption. His most tragic belief was that through the philosophy and practice of lettrisme he could find the secret of immortality.