by David Plante
Stephen asked me, at the hotel reception, if I wanted my own room, and I said no, I’d be happy to share a room with him.
I put my clothes away neatly, and he throws his all over the room.
I’ve spent the day alone, and will spend the evening alone, as Stephen had to go to Geneva, he didn’t explain why. Francis Bacon had asked me to have dinner with him and his friends, but as it turned out plans had before that been made for him which he couldn’t break. I can’t see where all the horror comes from in him: he is physically so soft, and always so polite, with strands of hair combed carefully over his forehead.
Alone this afternoon, I took a long walk. When, six or seven years ago, I lived in Paris as a student, the city was all soot black and water-streaked, and many walls were pockmarked with bullet-holes from the war. But now that it has been cleaned up it is all pink, and in the electric street lights it seems to sparkle here and there, which may simply be reflections in newly cleaned windows that are not closed by shutters. I walked around the parts of Paris that are familiar to me, and I kept wishing I could show my Paris to Nikos. My Paris? It is very strange: streets and shops and cafés here once had all kind of associations, and now I don’t sense them, and I know it’s because I can’t associate them with him, except to wish he were here. I wore the cap Nikos gave me because he said it’d be cold in Paris.
I went to see a church that I love, Saint Severin, so old all its pillars and walls lean a little in different directions, and there I lit a candle, a big one, for Nikos. It is a Greek Orthodox church. Then I went up the Boulevard Saint Michel and down the rue des Ecoles where I lived right across from the Sorbonne, an American student imagining he could be, simply by being there, Parisian. I ate at a small Breton restaurant I used to like very much on (Stephen would say ‘in’) rue M. Le Prince, which has dark wood wainscoting and serves cider and crêpes. I ate potage, then veal and spinach, and drank a whole brown pitcher of cider. And I hurried to a cinema to see Ten Days that Shook the World, which I thought was the best film I have ever seen. The first scene shows an immense statue of the tsar, and suddenly hundreds of people appear with ropes to pull it down, so an arm falls off, a leg, and then suddenly all the ropes disappear, and all the people also, and the statue continues to fall apart. Then I walked back to the hotel.
I am tired, as I didn’t sleep well on the train, though we had berths in a carriage that was disconnected from the rest of the train at Dover and put on the ferry and reconnected to another train at Calais.
What shall I do this evening? I hate going to a restaurant by myself. Why isn’t Nikos here? Why did he insist I come without him, with Stephen? Paris is so unfriendly. The rudest city in the world is the most beautiful. On my walk, asking for directions, or in the restaurant for lunch –
Which makes me think: I once said ‘lunch’ to Stephen, and he corrected me by saying ‘luncheon,’ and I presumed that in England lunch is a verb, ‘to lunch,’ like ‘to dine,’ and ‘luncheon’ is a noun like ‘dinner.’
– everyone was so rude, and I almost exploded with anger, as Nikos hates me to do, so, thinking of him, I remained composed.
I love him and think of him all the time. It’s five o’clock here, four there. He’s in his office at the Embassy, having to deal with Greek over-complications, which he can’t stand. I wish he could get another job. What did he do at lunch time (which is an American way of not saying ‘luncheon’)? What will he do for dinner? I hope he’s not frightened to stay alone in the apartment. I want to be with him and hold him and kiss him and love him –
I think the candle I lit for Nikos in Saint Severin must still be burning.
Stephen has come back. He came with a lot of Swiss francs, and asked me where he should hide them in the room, but I didn’t say, and didn’t watch where he did hide them. He’s having a bath, and then we go to the Francis Bacon exhibition.
Now hours later –
About to go to sleep. Stephen already asleep in the other bed.
At Francis’ exhibition, George, very drunk, took me in hand, and, all in Cockney, told me which paintings were of him, and did I recognize him? I didn’t, really, but he said he saw himself in them, in the way Francis painted him. One was of him as a mutilated lump of flesh sitting on a toilet.
Stephen introduced me to many people, including Sonia Orwell, the widow of George Orwell, and the novelist Mary McCarthy and Mary McCarthy’s husband and Philippe de Rothschild, and told them all, giggling, that he and I are going to the South of France to plant trees together in the garden of his and Natasha’s house. He was very amused that someone named Plante would be planting trees with him.
I suddenly wondered if Natasha, whom, after all, I have never met, knew that I was going to her house with Stephen to plant trees in her garden. She gave him instructions for the planting, with a drawing, which he showed me. Where a row of cypresses are to be planted are a row of dots.
We are on a train, heading south for Avignon. It is raining, and everything is grey, dun, pale green outside – and very flat.
When I woke in our hotel room I found that Stephen had left for an early appointment. I met him at the Grand Palais. We went into the Hommage à Picasso exhibition, which was not yet put up completely, so we walked about cables and crates scattered on the floors. We saw drawings that Picasso did when he was thirteen, and from there to now masses and masses of drawings, paintings, etchings, sculpture, pottery, tiles, as if he never for a moment stopped, and, at eighty-five, has not stopped. He must be the most impatient man in the world to create, create, create as much as, or more than, anyone has ever created, and I wondered if the way he works has a lot to do with impatience. Stephen said the exhibition made him twenty years younger.
No artists we know, especially Hockney, could be painting what they paint without Picasso. Certainly Francis could not paint the way he does without Picasso having first distorted the figure, though, as David H. says, Picasso never mutilates the figure the way Francis does. Stephen said the Picasso exhibition made Francis’ exhibition look pale. I said that he couldn’t compare, that it was unfair to any artist since Picasso to compare that artist to him. Stephen nodded, the way he nods, blinking also, when you say something he evidently agrees with but that seems at the same time to bemuse him.
We met John Russell, the art critic, in the exhibition, and he was also enthusiastic, but I sensed in his enthusiasm the isolation, almost the loneliness, of the critic.
Stephen and I walked back to the hotel, and on the way he insisted on buying a camera to take pictures. In the hotel lobby were gathered Sonia Orwell, Mary McCarthy and her husband whose name I can’t remember, the Baron de Rothschild, Francis, and John Russell. George was too drunk to come. We all went to lunch in a restaurant in Les Halles. I was wearing Nikos’ cap, which, as we were taking off our coats, Sonia grabbed from my head to put on hers, laughing. She said she must buy one, and I wondered if she was implying I should give this one to her, but I didn’t say anything. Nikos did tell me to be careful of her, and I was. When we all sat at the table, the cap was passed around from person to person to put it on and joke.
David in Nikos’ cap
I sat next to Mary McCarthy, who was cold at first, then warmed up, I think, when, after having asked her if she thought of writing about Rome and she answered no, I asked her if she had read Eleanor Clark’s book on Rome, a great gaffe, because I suddenly realized that Eleanor Clark was married to Edmund Wilson, who of course was once married to Mary McCarthy. But, though I may have read about these relationships, I forget what I’ve read when I meet the person in fact, as if the person I’m meeting in fact can’t really have had anything to do with the person I’ve read about. She didn’t say she had read Eleanor Clark’s book, but she laughed. When she raised her wine glass, her small finger, slightly crooked, extended in a feminine way, I was struck by how masculine her hand was.
She asked me where I’d been to college, and when I said Boston College, she said, ‘You wer
e educated by the Jesuits.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. She said, ‘I was educated by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart,’ and added, as if I might not know and she wanted to make it clear that my being educated by Jesuits in no way put me at an advantage, ‘the female equivalent of the Jesuits.’ ‘They are, yes,’ I said.
Having been listening to us, Sonia, across the table, said, ‘Mr. Plante, I was brought up a Catholic too.’
Philippe de Rothschild, bald and stout, was very animated. As if he were playing tricks, he parodied certain philosophers, and Mary McCarthy was the only one to become engaged in the talk. She said, ‘You’re an idealist,’ and this made Philippe de Rothschild stop.
He asked Francis if he would design a label for a special de Rothschild wine, and Francis, with a shrugging laugh, said yes, of course.
As if, suddenly, no one knew what to talk about, Sonia brought up Stephen taking me to the South of France to plant trees, and there was some joking around the table about Mr. Plante planting trees, with advice from various people on how to plant them. Stephen seemed to like this joking.
John Russell, attentive to everyone and smiling a bright if tight smile of pleasure, again appeared to be isolated, if not lonely, in the midst of the party.
Philippe de Rothschild, who said he must go, left, but came back to tell us he had paid the bill, which, he said with great surprise, was remarkably cheap.
Before the rest of us broke up, Stephen asked Francis if he and George would like to come stay with us in the South of France, and Francis, with that shrugging laugh he has, said yes. He won’t come, I thought. I also thought: my God, I hope he doesn’t come, because if he does how are Stephen and I going to find the time to plant the trees? Stephen has already told me he has great fears that Natasha will arrive next spring to find three withered trees leaning toward one another on the horizon, all he and I were able to do. He also said he was counting on me to get all the trees in the ground so that Natasha will in fact find everything she asked for done. I think Stephen imagines I’m filled with common sense and stick-to-it-iveness, more than he is, and what he is counting on is that we get the trees planted so that Natasha, if she knows about us being together, will not complain that he brought me with him just to have a good time. So I’m determined that we do get those trees planted, and I am trying to emphasize my common sense and stick-to-it-iveness. But how will we be able if we are spending our time with Francis and George, if they come?
As Francis was leaving, Mary McCarthy asked him if he would come with her to visit the studio of a friend of hers who painted owls, and Francis said of course, of course he would, there was nothing he’d like more than to see a studio filled with paintings of owls. Francis left with John Russell and Mary McCarthy’s husband.
After he left, Mary McCarthy said, ‘I’m interested in those owls because they look just like Edmund,’ and she smiled her hard smile, all her teeth showing as in a stark rectangle.
She, Sonia, Stephen and I went to the rue de Rivoli for coffee. Sonia, maybe a little drunk, talked a lot in a high voice, to no one and to everyone, often in French. She spoke so quickly, I couldn’t understand most of what she said. Mary McCarthy left. Stephen said he wanted to see Ten Days that Shook the World, which I had talked about. Sonia asked if she could come with us.
I suddenly had this feeling: that Sonia was interested in – more than interested, excited by – my friendship with Stephen.
Sonia loved the movie, and so did Stephen, who recalled having seen it in Berlin when he lived there in the thirties.
Stephen and I returned to the hotel, where we found Francis and George and others drinking in the bar. Annoying everyone, I think, Stephen insisted on taking photographs, but, as must happen with every mechanical device Stephen has ever in his life attempted to use, he couldn’t get the flash to work, and then, as I’m sure always happens to Stephen, it suddenly did work.
Francis said, with a laugh, that he would never, ever design a label for Philippe de Rothschild’s bottles.
I left them to go up to our room to rest. After a while, Stephen too came to rest.
At eight-thirty, a car came for us to take us to dinner at the de Rothschilds’ house. The car drove through a strange quarter of Paris, among factories and what looked like warehouses, and stopped in a dismal little street. Stephen and I got out, went through an iron-grill door, then through another door, then another, as if there were deep secrecy at stake, and finally into a magnificent pavilion with an illuminated garden beyond showing through French windows.
I kept putting my hands under my arms to dry them in preparation to shake hands, as my palms were sweating.
Philippe de Rothschild told me he had just a short while before moved into this house, and when I said, ‘Bonne chance,’ he grabbed me by the shoulders and kicked my shins and laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and said, ‘Merde.’ ‘That’s better,’ he said. I had the sense from him of his being totally friendly with me because I was his guest, but that, the moment I ceased to be his guest, he wouldn’t think for a moment that there was any reason to see me again.
He introduced me to his wife, the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild, tall, with a very aristocratic nose, an American who was not identifiable as an American. She was just courteous toward me.
She said she loved the new style of clothes for young people, and had been struck by a photograph she had seen in a newspaper of a group of young men wearing these clothes. She asked a footman to get it from her bedroom. He did, and she showed it to me: three or four very beautiful young men, all, as evident from the caption identifying them, from aristocratic French families. A deep sense of exclusion from their world came over me, but then I wondered if she showed me the photograph to put me at ease for the clothes I was wearing, the brown-and-white-striped Carnaby Street suit Nikos bought for me, which was inappropriate for the dinner party.
The other guests were Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet, and a Russian couple who had come recently from Moscow. Stephen explained to me later who they were: Elsa Triolet’s sister Lili Brik, once the mistress of the early Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and her husband, Osip Brik, who was one of the founders of Russian Formalism. Elsa Triolet was small and thin, her hair short and loose, and Lili Brik small and plump, wearing a stark black dress, her hair in a large, smooth chignon held by a net. We were asked into the dining room, where Pauline de Rothschild assigned me to sit at the top of the table on a grand gilt and velvet chair. Stephen was seated at the opposite end of the table. I said I was embarrassed to be given such a position, and after we were all seated Philippe de Rothschild made a face at Pauline de Rothschild, who apologized and asked me if I wouldn’t mind changing. I stood. She asked the husband of Lili Brik, sitting on one of the more modest chairs along the side of the table, if he wouldn’t mind changing, and he too stood. I thought she meant that he and I should change places, but footmen came and one took my grand chair away while the other took his chair away and, while we stood away, exchanged them, and I sat back where I had been but on a modest chair and he sat where he had been on the grand chair.
The de Rothschilds were trying to arrange to rent a mansion in Russia for the summer. To do this seemed to them as matter-of-fact as Lili Brick and her husband coming from Moscow to visit in Paris.
There was talk about references to the Rothschilds in literature, and I said I remembered that in Dostoyevsky’s A Raw Youth the main character says his great ambition is to become as rich as a Rothschild.
In the drawing room after dinner, talk about Ezra Pound, whom Aragon said he detests. Stephen told me later Aragon detests almost everyone. He was very rude to Stephen when Stephen said, yes, Pound is horrible for being Fascist and anti-Semitic, but there is something tragic enough about him that all the horrible things he did take on the dimension of tragedy, and Stephen was drawn to the tragedy of Pound. He said the last time he had seen Pound he had found him in a grave depression, not interested in his poetry, thinking his whole life had been a w
aste. Aragon jingled his keys impatiently, looked at me and made a face of French intolerance.
I told Aragon how much I admired Le Paysan de Paris and asked if he minded talking about the Surrealist movement. Not at all, he said. He hated Breton. He said the movement had its value, yes, but it was never meant to wipe away the past in favor of something revolutionary. He himself had always read Hugo even when the Surrealists were disowning him. He said, rather bitterly, that the movement was dead, and he saw no point in trying to revive it, as he thought people now in the sixties were trying to do, with drugs and hallucinations.
Then, suddenly, the room was filled with rapid, crackling, flashing talk. I had come thinking I would be intimidated and unable to say anything, and I was intimidated, even frightened, but just because of this I made myself participate. And as I found I was communicating, I became excited and maybe spoke too much.
At the end of the evening, Aragon read a long poem he had written for Mayakovsky, and read it very dramatically. I was very moved, and told him so and for a moment I felt we had a contact.
He asked Stephen about me, ‘Est ce qu’il a déjà publié un livre?’
‘Pas encore,’ Stephen answered, ‘mais il en publiera.’
Aragon turned away.
Stephen and I stayed a little while with Philippe and Pauline de Rothschild after the others left, and I felt a charm from them that, if I had counted on it, would have made me think we had become close friends.
In the car back to the hotel, I told Stephen that my fear of French cultural superiority might have something to do with my being a provincial Franco-American who grew up speaking a crude, seventeenth-century French I was aware was not, as an aunt used to refer to it, the real French French of France. But, Stephen said, he has always been frightened by French superiority, and speaking especially with André Malraux, minister of cultural affairs in France, always frightened him. Yet, he said he didn’t think the French so intelligent; they’re simply calculating, coldly logical, and definitive. I was sure he was thinking of Aragon.