Our innocence was appalling. We smoked our heads off on the plane, got totally lost at Charles de Gaulle and arrived on the Left Bank quite giddy from the Métro: the crowds, the stares, the guy who apologized for pissing on our shoes as we crested the escalator. Somebody had told Austin that it was possible to stay at the Irish College, a couple of streets south of the Panthéon. (This institution, founded by an Irish priest in the sixteenth century, is now the Centre Culturel Irlandais.) But we had not thought to phone ahead and find out if there was accommodation available, or how much it cost. The nun who opened the door on Rue des Irlandais eyed us like we were idiots, but took pity and found us a couple of rooms. I recall a bare refectory the next morning, and trying to extract ourselves from conversation with a seminarian, or a young priest, whom we callowly despised. And on my way back to my room, spotting the writer Anthony Cronin — biographer of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien — scurrying to his own small room at the end of the passage. Cronin was at the time cultural advisor to the lavishly corrupt Taoiseach, Charles Haughey.
The days went by in a frenzy of seeing, almost all of it from the street. Our funds, it turned out, did not stretch to museum tickets, and so instead we trudged around gawping, only half intent, and stumbled on places of interest as much as sought them out. Awful to relate: we got the Métro to Père Lachaise to see the grave of Jim Morrison. But at least we also took in Jacob Epstein’s tomb for Oscar Wilde. We trekked up to Montmartre, and the Sacré-Coeur, and happened en route upon the house on Avenue Junot that Adolf Loos built in 1926 for Tristan Tzara. (At the time, I had no idea who Loos was, but I’d discovered a volume of Tzara’s Dadaist manifestos in the local library in my mid-teens, and been thrilled by his collage methods of making Dada poems, and by his winning facetiousness: “Work yourself up and sharpen your wings. […] Punch yourself in the face and drop dead”.) Austin had borrowed a camera from a friend’s father, and we took black-and-white photographs of each other smoking in front of Rodin’s statue of Balzac at the junction of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail.
What else? We found a flea market where Austin bought a 12” copy of “Lemon Incest” by Serge Gainsbourg, and I bought some sort of mouldy leather satchel that lacked a shoulder strap and was anyway too small for practical use. Outside a bookshop I spotted a selection of issues of L’Arc, the literary and philosophical journal edited by Stéphane Cordier between 1958 and his death in 1986 — I bought the issues devoted to Freud and Surrealism, and a 1977 number on “La crise dans la tête”. Back at the College, we arranged these items, and a carton of Gauloises, on the small desk in Austin’s room, and photographed them. Who knows what we were trying to prove. In the evenings, we went looking for the cheapest restaurants, and at least once emerged giggling with amazement at our own ignorance: we had thought anchovies were vegetables, and been surprised to find our pizzas so fishy. And each night on our way back to Rue des Irlandais we stopped at the Mayflower, a touristy bar on Rue Descartes, to drink Belgian beer and talk about what to do with our lives. Austin had given up his art-school ambitions for a more practical degree in healthcare, but I — I wanted to be a writer.
I wanted to be a writer because I had been reading Roland Barthes, and not I think because of anybody else. In the library where I’d found Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, there was a copy of Image-Music-Text that I had borrowed when I was fifteen, made neither head nor tail of, but persisted and took out again a year later, after my mother died. This time I was seduced: by Barthes’s style as much as thought. He was the reason I went to university, the reason I would soon, in my third year, start actually to do some work, begin dreaming of a life in which academia was the route to becoming the writer I hoped to be. (It wasn’t, of course.) Barthes had only been dead for a decade. On Monday 25 February, he attended a lunch with François Mitterrand, who was not yet president and liked to surround himself regularly with advanced writers, artists, thinkers. After lunch, where he had expected to be bored, Barthes set off to walk home alone to his apartment on Rue Servandoni. Around a quarter to four, he went to cross the street in front of the Collège de France, and was knocked down by a laundry van. He lingered for a month after the accident, and died of “pulmonary complications” on 25 March. He was sixty-four.
Where had I read about Barthes’s death? Fleetingly I suppose in newspaper or magazine articles, because biography was not at that time a part of the secondary academic literature on Barthes. I had not yet read his autobiography-of-sorts, Roland Barthes, nor the diaristic pieces in Incidents, which was not translated until 1992. There was Italo Calvino’s 1980 essay “In Memory of Roland Barthes”, with its recollection of meeting Barthes on the street with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, “in the manner of those who were young before the war”. But that sort of detail was scarce; Barthes’s life and his demise remained aspects of dim legend, worlds away. So that when I told Austin about him one night at the Mayflower, it seemed apt and amusing, in this city that was not yet real for us, to race drunkenly round to Rue des Écoles, and on the steps in front of the statue of physiologist Claude Bernard, start shouting at passersby: “Où est le sang de Roland Barthes?” During the day, sober, I had made Austin hang around Rue Descartes, home of the Collège International de Philosophie, in the absurd hope we might spot Derrida, then its director, going about his business.
Paris then was for this very timid, awkwardly ambitious boy not yet the Paris of adult dreams or delusions, let alone a real place. In the past three decades I have been back perhaps a dozen times as a tourist. And many others for work. I have even made friends. I’ve given talks at the Pompidou, read my books at Shakespeare and Company, pored over the mineral collection of the Surrealist writer Roger Caillois in the stores of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. I’ve sat in Sophie Calle’s kitchen with the artist and her taxidermy collection, and on the photographer William Klein’s couch while he pointed at me and said: “Well, Delphine [Seyrig] was sitting right there when she told Alain [Resnais] she’d be in his film…” The anxious orphan of 1990 would not believe it, even if he had heard of half those people. I think about him and his friend every time I pass through the city, and especially the ways innocence, timidity and a limiting pretension — our total failure to get up to very much in Paris, or get beyond our rituals and reference points — set us up for more daring flights and actual adventures.
Belfast to Paris
Robert McLiam Wilson
Irish writers in exile? Seriously, who do Irish writers think they are? Nobody was kicking me out of Ireland (nobody was begging me to stay either). No Irish writer is exiled anymore. We’re just low-skilled immigrants with pretensions. And cardigans.
Anyway, I’m from Belfast. It can be hard to say what country that’s actually in. Northern Ireland is a comedy routine, a two-minute sketch. My homeland is the laughable landmass, a nub of an island. Me, I was born in a cartographical cartoon.
But despite all that, I feel rather proud of coming from Belfast. Not so long ago, European Union research found that the Northern Irish were measurably the ugliest people in the EU and, in addition, the most inveterate and committed masturbators. I am not making this up. You can check. There is something about that which makes me weep with patriotic pride.
What a strange place it is. It is the politically-obsessed country with no politics. The land of warm, friendly natives with a millennium of violence behind them. The enchanted, literary isle where no one has heard of Pushkin. Ireland is a country of paradox that cannot endure contradiction. What’s not to love about that?
Well, quite a lot, actually.
It is surpassing hard for an Irishman to write about Ireland without lapsing into very vulgar language indeed. So may I put it like this? We, the Irish, the faithfully infidel Irish, we’re really annoying. Aren’t we though? Can we admit this stuff now? We’re dicks.
As an Irishman, there is something that strikes you the moment you set foot on the Continent. Ok,
maybe not that very moment, but certainly when you wake up the next morning. Jesus, you think to yourself, I can just walk to Vladivostok. The sudden realization that you are part of a continent brings your central nervous system to a halt.
You Brits are island-folk. It’s written in your DNA. You smell of it. And it changes everything about you. But you are some considerable way less insular, less islandish than we are. Compared with us, you are very Big-Time-Charlies indeed.
Belfast to Paris. You’d think that settling down on a big old land-mass might have expanded my horizons a little. Not so much, it seems. The typical expat experience is like a certain kind of guy changing girlfriends. The new one can do no wrong. The old one is the repository of all the world’s faults. While everyone around him struggles to see any true difference.
Those who leave their country are generally in a state of dudgeon, high or otherwise. Dudgeon. How I love that word! Dudgeon is the expat manifesto, the exilic philosophy. The difference between a writer and the whiny, bibulous expat propping up the local ouzo or grappa bar is that the writer expects that people will rather admire his dudgeon. That stuff might have worked for Byron or Voltaire but it cuts no ice in the Internet Age. Deep in the émigré soul is this giant, childish sulk. It makes us pretty stupid. And it is, predictably, a hostage to fortune. For what happens when the new country makes that same journey into weary familiarity?
More dudgeon, that’s what.
The brand new exile marvels tediously about how much better the new place is than the old one. Oh, the light, the food, the glory and grace of the people and their ever elegant subjunctive. I did plenty of that when I first came here. And Paris has much that Belfast never had. The air is often warm. There is sometimes perfume in the breeze. You can watch teenagers reading Plato or Spinoza on the Métro. Delightfully, almost everyone smokes.
The city is, undeniably, pretty special. If you want to know what an eighty-year-old lady in four-inch heels looks like, come to Paris. We have thousands.
It’s a big city with a constant migrainous buzz, a teethgrinding tinnitus of traffic and tumult. But on a good day, the roar and chatter can disappear suddenly, leaving your ears to ring in the silence while you overhear whispered intimacies at café tables and the faltering steps of a man walking past, miraculously balancing a huge rolled-up carpet on his head. Or those two perfect children playing with a spinning-top in a sudden splash of sun on the pavement. Your heart lifts at the loveliness and then the city buzz starts up again and the migraine returns.
Meanwhile, you are also having an adventure with a foreign language. Which seems to do something unsettling to the laws of time. For it takes ten or twelve years to sound like a five-year-old. The upside being that everyone finds you adorable.
For a while.
But forget the croissants and the passé simple, it’s really all about geophysics. Like you, I come from a country with no sky. I’d never seen the moon go through all its phases. Not in one single month. In clear-skied night-time Paris, it was almost the first thing I saw. I watched it change from a hint to a slice, a fingernail to a lemon-rind. Then this miraculous big ball that shone brighter than I knew was possible. That kind of thing changes the way you think, it changes the colour of your eyes. What else had I missed, crouching under my damp roof of Irish cloud!
People have such ludicrous notions of some fairytale Paris. All baguettes, moustaches and cinq-à-sept. And Parisians, a little like the Irish, while they despise the myth, are really quite content that it should be believed.
That first flush of expat love never entirely fades but soon enough, you start noticing stuff, inconvenient stuff.
I’m sorry but I have to stop here. I need to break the fourth wall for a moment. I hope you will understand why. I wrote all of that more than a month ago. And now I need to speak to you from the heart. Without artifice, without comedy or charm. I need to speak to you not as a writer but as a man. As I’m sure you know, something dreadful happened here recently. And I wrote all that before.
And a month ago, I continued in the same vein, querulous and mocking. I gave Paris and Parisians some good old grief. I talked of their bizarre hatred of pigeons, their unforgivable music and their prissy language that no one speaks. Lots of funny, cheeky stuff. How even Parisians don’t like Parisians. You’d have liked it. I’m pretty good at funny and cheeky. But I can’t do that now. Quite clearly, I cannot do that now. Not yet, at any rate.
But that was not all. When I tell you that this was originally called “An Irishman in Pre-War Paris”, perhaps you’ll understand. It was unbroadcastably, unforgivably prescient. I wrote that Paris absolutely throbs with tension and threat. That I had not known what menace truly was until I came to Paris. I wrote that the city was a circled wagon-train in an old cowboy film. That the poor and multiple minorities lived in the suburbs and that those suburbs were a thick ring of rage around this theme park of a city. I wrote that I had already been attacked more in Paris than I ever was in Belfast. I wondered if it had something to do with my face. I wrote about sincere, committed murderers and about lighting fuses and standing well back. I wrote about a secret civil war. I used those words.
Then I wrote this. Which I quote in full:
There is such enmity here, such readiness. It can feel like war. Anyone who says I’m exaggerating simply doesn’t know the city. You can’t spend all your time objecting to racism or hatred in Paris. You wouldn’t have time to feed the cat or brush your teeth. Whisper it, tell no one… but France is a country that is increasingly and silently at war with itself. On the secret battlefield of its dark mutterings and suppressed hatreds, Paris can feel like the front line.
That was then and this is now. I’m taking a risk in quoting it. Because I wrote all that when I had no real reason to write it. Certainly no justification. After the horror at Charlie Hebdo, I read the thing again, and I felt sick. Because this is about as serious as it gets.
I know what writers are. Writers are creatures of matchless stupidity and lunatic vanity. When something like this happens, they welter in their own irrelevance and impotence. Then they claim that every word they ever wrote predicted whatever horror or trauma has happened. I hope I am not doing this. I’m speaking to you as a man not as a writer. And as a human being, sometimes, just sometimes, you don’t want to be right! Sometimes, that’s the last thing you want to be. There are times when you want to be astoundingly, embarrassingly wrong. I hope no one can doubt that.
There are two things to be said from this. First — if someone as idiotic and shallow as I am can spot this stuff and point it out, it’s kinda bad news for those who couldn’t. If it seemed so uneasily apparent to this Mick dimwit, why weren’t the smart people talking about it? Were they on holiday?
And secondly, when I had finished this a month ago, I was, for the first time in my so-called career, worried. I was anxious about how it might make me seem. I’d never worried about that before. I’d never worried about anything before. But there I was, lying awake at night, biting my nails. Worrying. Would I appear exaggerated, alarmist… even a little bit… you know what I mean… dodgy?
Actually, I think, the central question is why couldn’t I sleep? It’s about truth. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t help feeling that this was a truth I really shouldn’t tell. An uncomfortable truth. A deeply inconvenient one.
Which is odd. Because everyone pretty much knows the depth and width of their own good faith. I know I do. And all serious people ask themselves questions about it every single day. If you fail to tell a truth you see or hear because you are worried how you might seem then you are the exact opposite of Charlie Hebdo. Free speech is absolutely binary. It’s either total or it does not exist. And the opposite of truth is not lies. The opposite of truth is euphemism.
It’s now more than a week later and my rage and despair has become a hangover, it’s a bad taste in my mouth. What do I feel now? What do you care? And frankly, you don’t wanna know. But I’m gonna tell
you anyway.
I feel experienced. That’s the gift of my Belfast birth. I feel experienced. Parisians are being searched when entering shops? I was doing that stuff when I was eight. There are cops and soldiers everywhere? When I first left Northern Ireland, I found it grotesque that there were not. I hate my experience. It disgusts me.
I also feel tenderness. For them, my sweet French friends. I watch them march and stand, light candles and look bewildered. I hear them call me up and ask me if what they’re feeling is normal. And I can’t answer them. Because I can’t remember that far back. I can’t remember a time that felt anything like the first time.
But they should have their badges, their marches and vigils. It’s a consolation and a distraction. I understand that they feel that they have to do something. If marching makes them feel better then march, by all means, march. And I really don’t want to say what I am going to say.
It will make no difference at all.
It will not be they who decide when this will stop.
I was a child when the first such campaign happened in Belfast. I still remember the giant posters. SEVEN YEARS ARE ENOUGH! Even as a child, I laughed.
Yes, I feel overwhelmed with tenderness for the French (and hey, that’s not always how people feel about them, believe me). I hope they never have my experience. I hope they never hear a bomb explode a mile away and turn to someone and say “sounded like Montparnasse…?” and then immediately go back to what they were doing. I hope they never learn the trick of switching on the news when the sport comes on just to avoid the body count in their city that day. I hope, I truly hope that they never end up sounding like me.
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