PART TWO
1966–1976
6
Exile and Revolution
‘One of us has to go,’ I whisper to myself as I lie staring at the pock-marked floral wallpaper surrounding the bed. But however spot on Oscar Wilde’s witticism seems in the circumstances, it does nothing to cheer me up. The sheets I have been sleeping in turn out to be a yellowish nylon that crackles irritatingly as I shift around looking for a more comfortable position. Next door, through the thin partition, I can hear another bed creak regularly and attempt to block out what it signifies. My narrow room, with its cracked washbasin and rickety little table scarred by cigarette burns, must have harboured a hundred commercial travellers down on their luck, I imagine, and for a moment I try to transform the dingy space into a haven for fragile hopes and dreams. But it’s not working. There’s also an indistinct, sweetish smell I can’t identify. I wonder when the sheets were changed last. This at least gets me out of bed, which I should be doing anyway. I can hear the traffic getting louder in the street, or boulevard or whatever, outside, and I certainly don’t want to be late in getting to the office on my first day. I clamber into my charcoal suit and study my hopeful face in the mirror as I knot my tie and comb my hair, dampening it down to try to make it look less wild. I put a notebook and pencil in my inside pocket, thinking that’s what all up-and-coming journalists should have, and march purposefully over to the door. Then I realize what the smell is. It’s not so much the accrued odour of other bodies as the smell of hopelessness.
It’s not far to the Réalités offices on rue Saint-Georges. I already paced it out last night since I had nothing better to do. If I was keen to leave my squalid room then, I am keener still now, so since I have a good half-hour in hand I make a beeline for the café round the corner, stand at the zinc and order un express, lighting a Gitane to complete the picture of the young traveller effortlessly at home in foreign parts. But of course I’m not in the least at home. First of all I want to get out of that hotel for ever. Somehow I’d got it into my head that I was going to be given special treatment, since the magazine seemed so keen to get me, and be put up in comfort, if not in style. That’s why I travelled first class on the boat-train coming over, not just because I was curious to see what first class was like but to show that I was equally aware of my worth. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ll ever get the fare reimbursed. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time in grand hotels with Francis to take kindly to seedy establishments, though even in Barcelona, when every peseta counted, I always managed to find a pensión with a smidgeon of continental charm. Nor, come to think of it, do I care much for this café, with its neon lights blinking in the grey morning, or the surly patron behind the bar whose grubby nylon shirt reminds me of the bed sheets I’ve just left behind.
Nothing gets better when I go through Réalités’s gloomy portal and ask at the makeshift reception desk for the Edition anglaise.
‘Ah les Anglais,’ says the receptionist without enthusiasm. ‘Go down the stairs and keep going as far as you can go.’
The stairway smells more and more strongly of stale cooking as I go down into the basement, and from the long trestle tables and piled-up chairs I guess that this must be the canteen for all the staff working on the various editorial offices that take up the rest of the building. Neon strips are flickering here too on the low ceiling, lighting up the metallic serving counters that run down one wall. So far, so grotty, I say to myself airily, to keep my spirits up. At the end I spot another door, and as I get closer I can see a brass plaque with ‘Rédaction anglaise’ engraved on it. I straighten my tie, pass a hand over my still-damp hair and knock discreetly but firmly on the door. Nothing happens. No welcoming secretary or curious colleague jumps to. I knock again, a little louder, then try the door to see if it’s open.
The space inside is not unlike the canteen but smaller and slightly less smelly, with a half a dozen desks dominated by typewriters and a strew of books and papers. More surprisingly there seems to be a page-by-page dummy run of a whole new issue laid out on the floor. I tiptoe around it, taking in everything from a cover article on Courrèges’s plastic-and-metal dresses to an essay on miniature portraits attributed to Jean Clouet and a recipe for sorrel omelette by the Duchesse de la Roche-Guyon. There is also a reportage on the sumptuous interiors of a château in the Loire valley where the scintillating chandeliers, gilt mirrors and furniture inlaid with brass and tortoiseshell contrast strongly with the drab desks and torn railway posters of famous French landscapes pinned to the office walls.
After half an hour I am getting sufficiently restless to think of writing a note to say I’ll be back later, and I’m even reviewing what chances there are for a speedy return to Tregunter Road when the door is flung open by Garith, the red-faced man who interviewed me, and a slimmer, younger chap who glances over at me amiably.
‘So sorry there was no one here to greet you,’ the younger man says, shaking my hand. ‘My name is David Warrilow.’
‘Setting an example to the others already?’ Garith exclaims, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘That’s the spirit. Show ’em up for the Beaujolais-swilling louts they are, too hung over to get themselves in on time. You really must crack the whip more often, David. Only the officers are pulling their weight in this bloody outfit.’
With that Garith disappears through another door I hadn’t noticed into his own small office. He reopens the door a moment later.
‘Just remind them when they do turn up that this isn’t some charity for down-and-out drunks and other riff-raff,’ he shouts, even redder in the face. The door slams to, only to reopen once more. ‘After all this is meant to be a goddamn magazine, and if you can’t control the troops, David, your position is at risk. Don’t you bloody forget that, old boy,’ Garith goes on, warming to his theme. ‘Your job depends on it,’ he concludes with a cackle before kicking his door to.
One by one the other members of the team troop in and slide behind their desks. There is some banter about who went where the previous evening, then we are all given various French texts to translate, then translations to edit and various photos to write snappy captions for. I focus on the work to blot out any other thoughts. It’s not difficult, and I quickly get the hang of it. After a couple of hours’ concentration, with all typewriters going, the room begins to resemble a hive of editorial activity. Then a siren goes off, somewhere outside, like an air-raid warning, but it’s actually signalling midday. At the same moment Garith’s door flies open.
‘I suppose, to greet the new recruit,’ he says, jamming a trilby on his head, ‘I’ll have to take the whole bloody lot of you out to lunch. But remember,’ he warns, wagging a finger, ‘no more than a litre of wine per head, and I want everybody back here at fourteen hundred. And that’s an order.’
As we file out, there’s speculation as to which local restaurant we’ll be taken to. I wouldn’t know the difference between Chez Renée and Le Bistrot du Coin, so I just nod thoughtfully. I’m beginning to wonder what sort of person Garith will be like to work for as we re-emerge at street level and think the best plan might be to get an idea about him from David Warrilow, who seems to act as a kind of buffer between Garith and the rest of the staff.
‘Don’t worry about Garith,’ David says kindly, apparently guessing what’s on my mind. ‘He’s not your everyday magazine editor, but you’ll be fine. He just takes a little getting used to.’
Things have looked up a bit. When I explained to David Warrilow how I hated the hotel, he invited me to stay with him in his rather grand apartment on the Boulevard du Montparnasse until I found a place of my own. In the evenings we’ve been going round the big cafés. David seems to know, or at least to recognize, all sorts of people. He introduced me to the sculptor Zadkine, who’s always at the Rotonde, and then at the Sélect we spotted Aragon and Ionesco. I was particularly pleased one Saturday afternoon, when I pushed up as far as the Closerie des Lilas, to see Samuel Beckett, who was clearly keen
not to be spotted and kept holding his head in his hand, but you couldn’t miss that face, which is just like the photos except milder and more approachable. I longed to tell him how much I admired his work but every phrase I came up with sounded impossibly banal and before I could find some halfway adequate remark a passing American tourist with a rucksack spotted him too and hailed him loudly, saying ‘Are you Samuel Beckett?’, then went over without the least embarrassment to talk to him.
I’m experiencing something of the same shyness about Giacometti. From the day I arrived in Paris I’ve been carrying Francis’s introduction to him on the Paris Match pages around with me like a talisman, and I’ve been to Alésia to identify the studio building where Giacometti lives and works. You couldn’t miss that either. It’s set back from the street and looks semi-derelict, with a rusty corrugated tin roof and a big dirty window. It’s easy to know it’s his studio because ‘Giacometti’ has been painted in little white letters on the glass pane of the door. I’d love to meet him, too, but the idea of just turning up and knocking on his door seems a terrific cheek. I can just imagine how welcome it would be, as he’s wrestling with a new sculpture, to have some unknown young foreigner, another person from Porlock, on his doorstep. I went back there the other day and once again I couldn’t bring myself to knock, so I just walked round and round the area, clutching the letter, trying to screw up the courage and feeling more and more useless. To make the idea of actually visiting Giacometti even more tantalizing, I’ve found some extraordinary photos of what the studio looks like inside – an amazing grey cave filled with either towering or tiny skeletal figures amid a chaos that reminds me of Francis’s, except that this one is as colourless as dust. Perhaps I can find another way of introducing myself, in a café or at a gallery opening. Otherwise the place will remain a mystery to me, as so much else in this cold, forbidding city.
It’s an odd feeling to be living in a place where you know next to no one. I’ve been to Paris before, of course, on schoolboy exchanges, then again, not that long ago, with Magnus, when we stayed for about a week in a small Left Bank hotel that seemed a favourite with American writers who discussed how their books were progressing with each other on the landing before they returned to solitary rooms and staccato bursts on their typewriters. We read Lautréamont in a paperback edition, where each page had to be cut to reveal its secrets, without fathoming why the Surrealists had become so entranced by him, drank litre bottles of cheap red wine and ate egg and chips with lots of baguette in student restaurants so packed that the windows got completely steamed up. But those were cosy short visits, holidays, not the unfolding of day after day stretching out towards an unknown horizon.
David has been incredibly kind and let me have the run of his spacious apartment in Montparnasse. I know I must find something of my own and not outstay my welcome, but he’s very easy and hospitable, and it makes a huge difference to have someone to go around with. He’s also very elegant. The other evening we were looking around for somewhere to have dinner near the Halles and I saw a restaurant that looked like the perfect, authentic Paris bistro. I noticed David looking a little less convinced but we went in and were given a table and I suddenly realized it was a great deal more chic than I’d bargained for, a fact that was driven home when we took on board that the stylish lady dining on the banquette next to me was Marlene Dietrich (‘C’est bien Mademoiselle Dietrich?’ David murmured discreetly to the head waiter, who nodded with equal discretion). When we were given the menus, I was appalled by the prices and suggested we admit our mistake and leave, but David insisted we go ahead. As the meal progressed, it became quite clear that Miss Dietrich had been drinking. A glance between David and me had us shamelessly eavesdropping on what she was saying to the patient French couple sitting opposite her. I imagined it would be some fabulous anecdote involving stars of the same unbelievable calibre but all we heard, time and again like a mantra, was ‘My husband never let me eat hot dogs.’
Part of David’s decision to stay in the restaurant might have been that his real interest lies not in running a magazine but in acting, so he would have found the surprise presence of Marlene Dietrich particularly alluring. He began in some fairly conventional plays as a student in Reading, but now he is interested in tackling more experimental roles, whether in English or in French, of which he has an enviable, almost bilingual command. Since I was marginally involved in theatre at Cambridge, this forms an added link between us.
David is well established in Paris now and, when we are not simply relaxing with a beer at the Rotonde, listening for the nth time to ‘Satisfaction’ barking out its sexy plaint from the jukebox, he includes me in areas of what seems to me to be his very sophisticated social life. One evening he suggests I come with him to a dinner with a group of French actors he knows. I tag along, without thinking much about it, and find myself at the far end of a long table at another, rather superior restaurant on the rue des Ecoles called Balzar. The other guests all know each other and appear, perhaps predictably, self-assured to the point of ennui. I greet my dining companions to left and right as I sit down but no one returns the compliment. Conversations engage up and down and across the table. David is far away at the top and flashes me the occasional smile. There seems little point in asking anyone around me any questions because they all seem beyond such basic social interplay. I focus on my bitter herring which is followed by a tough entrecôte. Any moment now, I feel sure, someone will sense I’m a bit out of my element and draw me into the general conversation. I look round expectantly, hopefully, but encounter a wall of indifference.
The meal continues, my frustration turns into panic. If no one so much as recognizes my presence, I do not exist. If I do not exist, I think, making my way through a baba au rhum with silent fury, then I die. The timidity that seemed justifiable before Beckett and Giacometti now seems intolerable, a burning insult that I should sit among people who will not even deign to recognize my existence. If no one will draw me out, I shall present, even exhibit, myself, even though no doubt I am the youngest person present and the least worthy of notice. If you do not talk, I tell myself, in the heaving emotions that the end of the meal breeds in me, you will cease to exist, in the very land of existentialism: speak or forever hold. For the past hour I have been working on a complex phrase, involving a significant past subjunctive, that describes my almost having met Beckett, whose work has featured prominently in the cross-table talk. I refine it endlessly, adding and taking away, until the bones stand out, pure and faultless, and in a momentary silence round the table I blurt it out loudly. The complex, bolted phrase hangs awkwardly in the air. Everyone turns to look at me for an instant, without surprise or interest, then the conversation resumes unchanged.
It’s mid-morning and there’s a haze hanging over the office where everybody’s head is bent over their pale-green typewriters. I think of it as the hangover haze. Both David and I were out too late and drank too much, and Garith has just come storming in, a trilby perched on the back of his head, exclaiming he had ‘one hell of a bloody head’ and slammed his door. He’ll be out again soon asking if anyone has some Alka-Seltzers. Only the men seem to be in this condition. Both of our women editors are calm and collected. Denise, our languorously sexy secretary, is more likely to have had a good night out, but she shows no sign of strain as she fields the morning’s phone calls. I almost never get a call at the office and I’m surprised when I see her waggling the receiver at me and saying, ‘It’s for you, sweetie-pie.’
‘Is that you, Michael?’ a voice on the other end asks. Suddenly an entire other world comes flooding back.
‘Yes, absolutely, Francis,’ I say. ‘How lovely to hear from you.’
‘Well, it’s marvellous to hear you. Now, I’m coming over to Paris on the night ferry and wondered whether you might be free to have dinner with Michel and Zette Leiris tomorrow evening. I’ve managed to get a table at the Grand Véfour which, if you don’t know it, can be rather good.’
/> ‘Yes, of course, Francis. I’d love to. Perfect. Yes, I know. It’s just off the Palais-Royal gardens. Lovely. See you there at eight.’
I replace the receiver, sit back in my chair and savour this new perspective. I’d more or less assumed that I would hear from Francis only if I told him I was back in London, even though I’m aware how much he enjoys coming to Paris and thinks of it as the absolute centre of the art world, the place where Picasso and Giacometti, the only two living artists he admires, have made their reputations. But I know he also has a circle of important literary friends over here, and I’m not only pleased but overawed to have been included in this dinner, not least because the restaurant is so grand I only know it from pressing my nose against its windows to look at its decorated ceiling, then gasp at the prices listed on the flowery menu posted in its own little gilt box outside. It will certainly be a change from the office-canteen lunch and the Vietnamese noodle-soup dinner that provide my usual daily fare. One thing I’ll be able to relay to Francis is that Connaissance des Arts, our sister magazine, has just chosen him as one of the top ten living artists worldwide. I know Paris is the place he’d most like to succeed in, because he thinks the French are more demanding and discerning than any other nation when it comes to art. And he’s clearly keen to see more of Leiris, who has not only got a huge reputation as a writer but has been close to and written about so many important artists, from Picasso and Giacometti to Masson and Miró. I suppose he wants me there because I’m pretty much bilingual now and I can help out at certain moments in the conversation, since Michel can read English but doesn’t speak it fluently.
It’s strange that Francis has picked me out. Obviously he likes the idea that I admire him and that I’m a good listener, and probably he’s still intrigued by the possibility that there might be something between us one day, since he’s convinced all men are really homosexual, as he often says, and it’s only that some of them don’t realize it. I find nothing even latently queer in myself, having been most attentive to a couple of former girlfriends from London who’ve visited me here and currently having my eye on a French girl who works in the Réalités layout department. But I do find it odd that I gravitate so often towards homosexuals. Perhaps it’s because they’re more flattering or have more time for me, or simply because they’re more interesting. They combine male and female characteristics differently, and sometimes that seems to create a more complete person. Francis, for instance, can be as tough as old boots one moment, perhaps from the generations of soldiers in his blood, then as coquettish as any courtesan the next. And it’s often very difficult to tell who’s queer and who’s not. It’s slowly dawned on me that David is that way inclined, too, so to avoid any ambiguity I have accelerated my search for somewhere to live and I’ve found a little bed-sit in Alésia a stone’s throw from Giacometti’s studio. Someone at Connaissance des Arts told me the other day that Giacometti actually died a few weeks ago in Switzerland, so even if I had knocked on his door he wouldn’t have been there to answer. I still walk past the studio, thinking what a lost opportunity that turned out to be, since I might have met somebody Francis says was really exceptional rather than spending all my spare time with other English-speaking journalists. I’ll ask Leiris tomorrow what the studio was like inside, because I know he used to visit Giacometti regularly. Anyway, my day has brightened, my hangover almost lifted. That’s good enough for now.
Francis Bacon in Your Blood Page 12