I’m writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task is to re-enter, by means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. The desire to make a representative document began only with the involuntary incident in the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I’ll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I’m at the round table under the linden tree, in a sweet green helmet of buzzing. Each of its pendulous flowers seems to be inhabited by a bee. They don’t mind me – they’re rapturously sucking nectar. I’m at the core of a breezy chandelier of honey. I’m sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbour, I was seized by a kinship; how very slowly, in a weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it’s a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I’ll work with that. I’ll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.
I’m writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.
In the cold autumn of 1984, when I was twenty-three years old, I decided to change my life. I flew from Vancouver to London with the plan to seek a new citizenship, continue to Paris, settle, and look for work. I carried one overpacked rip-stop nylon duffle bag, a sheaf of documents, and my typewriter. I found a hotel room near Victoria Station in what purported to be a Polish veterans’ hostel, or that is what the sign said, where the cheapest of the remaining rooms, at eight pounds a night, was in the basement, with the word Storage written over the door. Perhaps the proprietor referred to it as the garden level. I did not mind because beside it was the bathroom, which had a very deep and long bathtub and a good supply of hot water, making it the warmest place in London that cold month. This bath was the antidote to the chilly museums where I passed my days sketching and writing in my diary, and my vain meanderings in Bloomsbury in search of the tea room where H.D. transformed herself to an Imagist in 1912. The second and important richness of the room, beyond its proximity to the bath, was the breakfast brought singingly to my door each morning by the Polish hotelman. Incredulous, I listed the contents of that tray in my diary: a tall glass of orange juice, a mug of very hot coffee, a demitasse of milk, a bowl of sugar, two eggs perfectly boiled, two slices of ham, a glass of marmalade, a plate with four slices of buttered brown bread and half a baguette, a tinfoil-wrapped candy, four chocolate lady’s fingers, and a piece of cream-filled cake. So I would put three pieces of brown bread and all the sweets aside for my supper, returning from my day’s wanderings with some cheese and lettuce to make sandwiches. He would place the tray each morning on a small table covered with a yellow plasticized cabbage-rose-patterned cloth, which oddly matched the room’s small hooked carpet, yellow also, dingy, and incongruously ornamented with a brown cartoon bear. The wooden stand beside the narrow blue metal bed held a crucifix, a King James Bible, a spool of blue thread with a needle ready in it, and a 22p stamp. There also I kept the few books I travelled with – used paperback copies of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees, and a beautifully bound volume of Beat translations of classical Chinese poetry called Old Friend from Far Away. Why these books? Chance, I suppose. I was ardent and inexperienced in my reading, earnestly drawing up lists of necessary future studies at the back of my diary, and as I read I seemed to float above the difficult and clever pages, in a haze of worshipful incomprehension. I imagined that simple persistence would slowly transform this vagueness to the hoped-for intelligent acuity, and in a way I was not wrong, although it was not true acuity that I later entered into, but the gradual ability, similar to the learning of a new handcraft, to perceive the threads linking book to book, and so to enter, through reading, a network of relationship. I might call this my education; save my gambits in parks and museums, I had had no other. Later this network would become an irritant, like a too-tight jacket, a binding collar. To counter this sad diminishment in my credulity, and to enter again the pleasurable drift, the sensual plenum of my youth, where even incomprehension was mildly erotic, in my middle age here in the cottage I have started to read French. I began with high-brow pornography, developing a taste for Pauline Réage, and eventually I moved from pornography to linguistics, and thence to poetry, led by Émile Benveniste and his theories of rhythm and semantics, to the works of Baudelaire. I was stunned by the sheer elegance of Benveniste’s thought and puzzled by his absence from the North American canons. He led me to a fresh thinking of the movement of meaning in poetry; I abandoned the cult of the sign. I have had absolutely no irritating institutional knowledge to trouble my French reading, which is necessarily very partial and flawed. But I have with time lost the immature sense of self-incapacity, so useful in my earlier studies as a disciplining constraint. Always there would be something else that needed to be consulted before I could understand the book in hand. Always my path to that other text was slow, dependent on chance, libraries, and time-consuming love affairs. By the time I had laboriously located the errant reference, my own position had shifted. So my self-education took on an unintentional rigour. Now, with gusto, in the other language, I enter the cavalier abandonment of effortfulness.
I slept in that dark room in London for several weeks as I waited to procure a British passport. I had learned that I was eligible for this identity thanks to the accident of my father’s birth in London. I am aware of how implausible this seems from the perspective of contemporary politics, but in 1984, with the appropriate paperwork in hand, a Canadian daughter of a British-born father could expect to receive British citizenship in under three weeks. Just before the Second World War, my paternal grandfather, a young radio genius fresh from the Saskatchewan farm, had travelled to England from Canada with his new wife to take a job in early radar technology. My grandmother had told me that she arrived in England already pregnant, continuously seasick during the Atlantic crossing on the empty coal freighter in which she and her economical husband had narrow wooden berths. Could that be so? I recall her telling me that when the empty ship docked in Liverpool, they had had to disembark by way of a flexible ladder thrown down the side of the steel hull from the high-riding deck, and when she arrived on the dock, the front of her new pastel-coloured travelling suit was deeply soiled. My grandmother was proud and precariously fashionable; this image hurt us both. They made their way from the entry port to the capital. And so my father was born to his young Canadian mother in a suburb of London, and so I visited this city nearly fifty years later to make claims to my identity, by means of various paper documents proving my father’s birth, my parents’ marriage, and my own legitimate, fully breach birth in Toronto during the crisis of the Bay of Pigs. I make the point regarding legitimacy since that was the purpose of the paperwork I presented to a woman in a cubicle of the passport office late one afternoon – to show the administrative traces of a patrilineal thread of blood linking me to this inhospitable island. When asked during the perfunctory interview, I had explained that I was applying for my British citizenship in order to live in France, and that I urgently wished to leave Britain. She didn’t seem to mind. I received my new identity.
It was at Paris on the first of Novemb
er; I had embarked on the tour mandatory in the subtler education of any worthy young man, two centuries previous. But I was a girl in 1984. Always I was to be askew, belated. I arrived by train very early in the morning and the hotels were not yet open in the Latin Quarter. Madonna was on all the kiosk posters. I preferred Gena Rowlands, or Fanny Ardant. The aproned waiter poured the little jug of hot milk into the coffee cup with a flourish, at the table. In the parks and squares the chestnuts were splitting their green cases. The air was sharp and tannic. This was the city I had invented for myself by reading. I had an address scribbled on the last page of my journal: 52 rue Gay-Lussac – Hotel Avenir.
How will I explain the taste and aroma of slightly overripe Mirabelle plums? I am eating a chilled dish of them now beneath the linden as I recollect that first room in Paris. I was a girl because I had not yet decided on my destiny. But I had recognized something about its setting. Now I understand that I was haunted by the problematic ratios of sex and art, of anger and sadness. I’ve never solved them. My researches then lacked consistency and were too literal. I would sit on trains and write in my hardback journal about the mythologization of maternity in relation to the frustrated inner feeling of calling or ambition (intuitively, I’d rather have had a calling than an ambition; ambitious girls were cruelly judged) as I permitted my ankle to brush and linger next the caressing ankle of the sullen boy sitting across from me in the second-class compartment. I would seek cheap city rooms in order to look out from their windows at unfamiliar surface effects and the shade the angles made. Having a soul, I thought, is about looking out. I would look out, and then write again in my diary. I exoticized Old World neglect. I was looking for a neutral place where my ambition might ripen, unhampered by scorn. Such a room could be found in the Hotel Avenir for seventy francs a night, or twelve dollars Canadian, in the currency of the time, which had the satisfying merit of being payable entirely in thick, brassy ten-franc coins.
Steve Lacy’s horn cuts lingeringly across a tannic landscape. I’m listening to Monk’s Dream. The cold sweet plums carry the smallest possible hint of musky leather. The toughened skin gives a little beneath the teeth before it bursts to a boozy exuberance. I’ve reopened the old journals.
Baudelaire said art must be stupid. I know what he means. Art must be as stupid as a plum. As stupid as an ankle.
In that first hotel in Paris, a previously respectable but by then faded establishment near the Luxembourg Gardens and the boulevard Saint-Michel, a place I would later recognize in a documentary photograph of the burnt-out cars near the boulevard in the month of May 1968, the narrow room on the fifth floor was reached by a frail elevator used only by guests, never by the tired hostess. Each morning she would descend the steep staircase entirely obscured by a rumpled mound of used sheets. Mine was the cheapest, smallest room, which in Paris would always be on the top floor. The cotlike bed presented a challenging topography; I would shift my skinny hips to seek the sweet place between the wadded mattress lumps. At the foot of the bed was a narrow table, and above the table a window looked into the dim inner court. Street views were more expensive. This shady window communicated with a facing window of the hotel or apartment house that shared a shaded inner ventilation well used by the concierges to air their mops and rags. In keeping with the hotel’s convention, I call it a court, but with no grandeur. It was more properly speaking a chute, or a more spacious than usual vent. The air of this inner court was sealike.
Through this window, across the humid court, I saw a boy sitting also at his own table, a dark-haired boy in a white shirt turned turquoise by the dim light, bent a little at his typewriter.
Of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid, a nearly imperceptible flick of the mop just beneath the surface of the water, an idle flutter of the hand. Very stupid; outside all good sense and discretion, because the poem must be indiscreet or not at all. It should just trail aimlessly in the hospitable water. Floating on the sea or swimming. It must be the sea, no other water. Waves, but not stormy waves, the slight rocking movement. This floating is like a hotel. Nothing interrupts sensation; the body is supported and welcomed by a gentle neutrality. Especially the sea on an overcast morning of light rain, the encompassing pleasure enveloping the skin, salt water and soft water, I will take a bath, I will write all morning in a hotel, I will lack nothing, the soft coarse sheets wind around me, I float in the possibility of drifting unattended, the freedom of floating, no weight, no companion, just the hospitality of the encompassing element. A slight coolness is enough to bring the attention to the sensation of water on skin, of worn cotton on skin. Or perhaps in a café in the village in summer, the bells ringing, the irregular waves of conversation, occasional scraping of chairs on stone pavement, but mostly floating, in the sea or in a hotel. The superior hospitality of the threadbare hotel, the minimal frisson of slight discomfort, as in cool water, which augments the feeling of the skin, the feeling of being only skin, punctuates the sensation of being in the minimum calmly, as in an element. The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of any exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.
In the communicating window close across the dim court, adrift also in the hospitable element, not glancing upward from his heavy black book, his serious typewriter mirroring my own, the image of the studious youth seated at his writing composed itself in my self-image. Only this morning, eating plums, consulting that old diary, which by a peculiar fate I have preserved all these decades since, do I rediscover that the first hotel was called the Future. I know that he also looked outwards across the court to notice me sitting at the foot of the bed to work at my own table, frowning over my Penguin Classic, writing in the brown leather-bound and marbled volume, too heavy, too formal, too contrived for my cheap nylon travelling satchel: belated, nineteenth-century. I know this because I received his gaze and returned it. This exchange would slowly ripen in me, tenacious, voluble, through all the travels that were to follow, the movements between and within cities, from hotels to museums and libraries, from table to bath. Eventually, through a clandestine but thorough metamorphosis of my sentiments, the mutual gaze of the inner court at the Hotel Avenir would transmute within me to become the concussive authorship.
Time in water is pliable. The greenish mop scent drifting upwards weedlike, the boatlike creaking of the wooden shutters, the liquidity of the smoke of the Baudelairean boy with his sharp, aquiline nose and close-cropped dark hair across the court in the communicating window, the quivering shadow and refracted light: in fact, the inside court was a sea in the way it combined so many separate things in a subtly swirling, rocking motion to make of them a single encompassing element. The shared gaze through the humid court inaugurated in me a series of concepts I could not at that time fully recognize, with my lazy habits, my vague tendency to drift only on the substance of another’s desire, desire found in the lazily skimmed pages of books, the desire of a boy in gardens or on boulevards or on stairwells or in seminars as I clasped my Penguin Nietzsche, worn soft by incomprehension.
I had received the image of the Baudelairean boy through the medium of the moppish air of the hotel of the future’s inner court. Such is a girl’s destiny, this scant enclosure of fumy potential that later will reveal itself as the elemental core of her life. She will sit at tables eating overripe plums and burning incense, frowning a little, her sleeves rolled – no, her jacket unbuttoned at the top to show the saffron-coloured neckscarf. The narrow grey inner court of the future hotel will have become her sealike matrix.
When Courbet painted the young poet reading at his work table in 1848, the year of the Revolution so acerbically caricatured in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the year the boy gesticulated with a revolver on a street corner calling for the assassination of his stepfather the Colonel Aupick, the year of his first translation of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, in his moment
of socialism, having just lost his inheritance, was living on rue de Babylone in the 7th arrondissement, perhaps in the room of his mistress, Jeanne Duval. This was one of a long series of rooms, either hotel rooms or borrowed apartments, occupied for varying brief periods from the age of twenty-three, when his family had seized his fortune by court order, then doled it back to him through their notary in direly inadequate monthly increments, until his death at forty-six. After a brief period of luxurious and extreme expenditure – garments for his mistresses and for himself, baroque furnishings and draperies, perfumes, wines, hashish, and antique paintings, most of which later proved to be forgeries – his scandalized bourgeois family had him declared a legal minor by the courts. From this moment until the end of his life, he lost all the legal and financial rights of his majority. He could not own, nor vote, nor marry. The poet spent twenty-three years of his life actively fleeing creditors, working clandestinely, moving on in the night, often assisted by Jeanne Duval. I am astounded that under these extreme conditions he was able to write anything. Here in Courbet’s portrait he seems to be sitting on a carmine-coloured divan and is wearing a matching lap rug. A bare wooden table is pulled close to balance on its lip the open weight of the thick black volume that the young man, pipe in mouth, is reading with intense focus. He is smoking. Two other books are stacked on a ribbon-tied dark green mottled cardboard folder of the kind still available in most French stationers’ shops, and as part of this studious still life, a long feather pen slashes diagonally, palely upwards from the inkwell into the putty-toned shadow. The opaque plume has captured the late slant of light; so has the creamy splayed deckle edge of the open book. Similarly lit is the poet’s delicate left hand, resting at his side, expressive even in its immobility. I recall the Goncourt brothers, in their journals, mentioning glimpsing Baudelaire some ten years later in the Café Riche, a stylish place for publishers and the last regency drunks, as they said. It was shortly after the damning 1857 obscenity trial of Les Fleurs du mal: ‘his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean, like a woman.’ The two judgments, one against his legal majority and one against his book, determined the form of the poet’s adult life.
The Baudelaire Fractal Page 2