There are always soldiers in France and they usually look forlorn and bedraggled. It is always evening when I notice them; they are either just leaving the barracks or just returning. They have the air of absent-minded ghosts. Sometimes they pause in front of a monument and stare at it blankly while picking their noses or scratching their behinds. One would never believe what a powerful army they make when all together. Separate and alone, they inspire pity: it is unseemly, unnatural, undignified for a Frenchman to be wandering about in uniform—unless he is an officer. Then he is a peacock. But he is also a man. Usually a very intelligent man, even if he is nothing more than a general.
At Perigueux one evening, thinking of the softness of Maryland, I notice the vacant lot which seems always to surround a barracks, and across it, as if he were making for the Sudan, lumbers a corporal with an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He is absolutely dejected, his fly unbuttoned, his shoe laces coming undone. He is heading straight for the nearest bistro. I am heading nowhere. I am full of the enameled blue sky, one foot in Maryland, one foot in the Perigord. The misery of the poor conscript is soothing to me; it is just another already familiar aspect of the France I adore. No dirt, no stench, no ugliness can mar my serenity. I am having a last look at France and whatever is is glorious. . . .
At Orange, so tranquil, so full of lost grandeur, the historical recitative whistles through the whitened bones of somnolent ruins. The Arc de Triomphe squats with mute eloquence in blinding sun-lit isolation. Through a doorway, over a jug glistening with cold sweat, the past leaps out. One sees through the arch into the Midi. On flows the Rhone with a thousand furious mouths to expire in the Gulf of the Lion. “Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neuf.”
Somewhere between Vienne and Orange, somewhere in a village without name, we pulled up beside a curving street where there was a spacious, shady terrasse. A low hedge which followed the arc of the street and almost completely surrounded it. There, in a state of pleasant exhaustion, I gave way to a sense of absolute disorientation. I no longer knew where I was, why I had come, when or whither I would go. The delicious feeling of being an alien in an alien world filled me and drugged me. I was adrift and without memory. The street had no face. Church bells sounded, but as if from another world. It was the sheer bliss of detachment.
Heard enough, seen enough. Had come and gone again. Still here. Was flying and it seemed I heard the angels weep. No tongue wags. Beer cold, collar still floating. Was good.
“Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.”
Yes, and always. Always yes. Am here, was gone, and always, yes always, same man, same spot, same hour, same everything. Always same. Same France. Same as what France? Same as France.
Then I knew, without words, without thoughts, without cadre, genre, frame or reference, or frame of reference, that France was what it always is. Balance. Pivot. Fulcrum. This at-one-ment.
“Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie.”
Ticking away in the heart of a watch that will never stop. The arc that never closes. The hum of traffic in a world without, wheels. No name for it, no identification marks. Not even a trace of the vandal’s hoofs.
The mission of man on earth is to remember . . . Why did we laugh so uproariously when this phrase fell out of his mouth? Was it the way he looked when he uttered it, his mouth half full and the fork poised in mid-air like a prolonged forefinger? Was it too sententious for that quiet rainy day, for that sordid, inconspicuous restaurant on the edge of the 13th arrondissement?
To remember, to forget, to decide which it shall be. We have no choice, we remember everything. But to forget in order the better to remember, ah! To pass from town to town, from woman to woman, from dream to dream, caring neither to remember nor to forget, but remembering always, yet not remembering to remember. (Flash: Le Cours Mirabeau, Aix-en-Provence. Two giant Atlases, their feet buried in the sidewalk, holding the weight of the upper stories of a house on their bulging shoulders.) At night in a lonely Western town (Nevada, Oklahoma, Wyoming) flinging myself on the bed and deliberately willing to remember something beautiful, something promising out of the past. And then, for no reason, out of sheer Saturnian perversity alone, my ears are afflicted by a heart-rending scream. “Murder! Murder! O God, help me, help me!” By the time I get to the street the cab has disappeared. Only the echo of the woman’s screams animates the deserted street.
The mission of man on earth is to remember. To remember to remember. To taste everything in eternity as once in time. All happens only once, but that is forever. A toujours. Memory is the talisman of the sleepwalker on the floor of eternity. If nothing is lost neither is anything gained. There is only what endures. I AM. That covers all experience, all wisdom, all truth. What falls away when memory opens the doors and windows is what never existed save in fear and anguish.
One night, listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof of our shack, I suddenly recalled the name of the village to which I had made my first excursion: Ecoute s’il Pleut. Who would believe that a town could have such an enchanting name? Or that there could be one called Marne-la-Coquette or Lamalou-les-Bains or Prats de Mollo? But there are a thousand such endearing names throughout France. The French have a genius for place names. That is why their wines too have such unforgettable names—Château d’Yquem, Vosne Romanée, Châteauneuf du Pape, Gevrey-Chambertin, Nuits St. George, Vouvray, Meursault, and so on. Before me is the label I salvaged from a bottle we finished the other night at Lucia, chez Norman Mini. It was a Latricières-Chambertin from the Caves des Ducs de Bourgogne, Etablissements Jobard Jeune & Bernard, Beaune (Côte d’Or), maison fondée en 1795. What recollections that empty bottle calls up! Especially of my friend Renaud who had been a pion at the Lycée Carnot, Dijon, and of his visit to Paris with two precious bottles of Beaune under his arm. “What a horrible French they speak here in Paris!” was the first thing he exclaimed. Together we explored Paris, from the Abattoirs de la Villette to Montrouge, from Bagnolet to the Bois de Boulogne. How wonderful to see Paris through the eyes of a Frenchman beholding it for the first time! How exotic to be an American showing a Frenchman his own great city! Renaud was one of those Frenchmen who loves to sing. He also loved the German language, which is even more rare for a Frenchman. But he loved best his own language and spoke it with perfection. To understand the nature of that perfection I had to wait until I heard him converse with Jeanne of Poitou and again with Mademoiselle Claude of the Touraine country. Finally it was with Nys of the Pyrenees. Nys of Gavarnie.
Gavarnie! Who gets to see Gavarnie? Perpignan, yes. Chamonix, yes. But le cirque de Gavarnie? It is small, France, but crowded with wonders. At Montpellier one dreams of Le Puy; at Dômme of Rouen; at Arcachon of Amiens; at Troyes of Amboise; at Beaucaire of Quimper; in the Ardennes of the Vendée; in the Vosges of Vaucluse; in Lorraine of Morbihan. It makes you feverish to move from place to place; everything is interconnected, perfumed with the past and alive with the future. You hesitate to take a train because while you doze you may miss a bewitching little area you may never have the chance to see again. Even the dull spots are exciting. Is there not always an Amer Picon to greet you, or a Cinzano, or a Rhum d’Inca? Wherever you see the letters of the French alphabet there is good food, drink and conversation. Even when it looks grim, somber, forbidding, there is a chance you will meet some one who will enliven the scene with talk. It may not be that cultured-looking old gentleman with the walking stick, it may be the butcher or the femme de chambre. Go towards the little fellow always, towards les quelconques. It is the little flowers which make the most ingratiating bouquets. The precious things in France are usually little things. What is adorable is what is mignon. The cathedrals and châteaux are grand; they demand prostration, veneration. But the true Frenchman loves what he can hold in his two hands, what he can walk around, what he can encompass with a sweep of the eye. You do not have to crook your neck to see the wonders of France.
I was speaking of Mon
sieur Renaud’s exquisite French. Just as to enjoy the bouquet of certain rare wines one must have the proper ambiance, so to hear French at its best one needs the atmosphere which only the jeune fille of the provinces knows how to create. In every land it is the beautiful woman who creates the illusion of speaking the language best. In France there are certain regions where the spoken language achieves the maximum of beauty and enchantment. Claude was a prostitute and so was Nys, but they spoke like angels. They used the clear, silvery speech of the men who fashioned the French language and made it immortal. With Claude there were reflections as pure as the images which float in the Loire.
If the memory of certain femmes de joie, as they are justly called, is precious to me it is because at their breasts I drank again those strong draughts of mother’s milk in which language, landscape and myth are blended. They were all so gentle, tolerant and wise, employing the diction of queens and the soothing charms of houris. There was purity in their gestures as there was in their speech, at least to me it seemed so. I was not prepared for the subtle graces they exhibited, knowing only the crude, awkward, over-assertive mannerisms of the American woman. To me they were the little queens of France, the unrecognized daughters of the Republic, spreading light and joy in return for abuse and mortification. What would France be without these self-appointed ambassadors of good will? If they fraternize with the foreigner, or even with the enemy, are they therefore to be regarded as the lepers of society? I hear that France is now cleaning house, that she intends to do away with her houses of prostitution. Absurd though it be (in a civilization such as ours), perhaps this “reform” will produce unexpected results. Perhaps these unfortunate victims of society will now infect the hypocritical members of the upper strata, imbue the pale sisters of the bourgeoisie with spice, wit and tang, with a greater love of freedom, a deeper sense of equality.
It is so common, so hackneyed, to see in the films a drab, narrow street in which the pathetic figure of a prostitute stands waiting like a vulture in a fog or drizzle of rain in order to pounce upon the forlorn hero. One is never given the sequel to this pathetic scene; one is left to suppose that the miserable hero in immediately shorn of his lucre, infected with a dread disease, and abandoned on a verminous bed in the small hours of the night. They do not tell us how many desperate souls are rescued, by these rapacious sisters of mercy; they do not indicate what led this “leprous vulture” to follow such a calling. They do not compare this direct, honest pursuit of a livelihood with the slimy, deadening tactics of the women of the upper classes. They do not dwell on the desperate courage, the thousand and one little braveries—quotidian acts of heroism—which the prostitute must enact in order to survive. They portray these women as a breed apart, infect, to use the native word for it. But what is truly infect is the money sweated from their hides which goes to support the churches and war machines, filthy little sums sieved through pimps and politicians (who are one and the same) which finally becomes a golden dung-hill used to buttress a decayed and tottering society of misfits.
When I look at the map of France, at the names of the old provinces particularly, there is evoked a veritable galaxy of celebrated females, some noted for their sanctity, others for their easy virtue, or their heroism, their wit, their charm, their high intelligence, but all illustrious, all equally dear to the French heart. One has only to reel off such names as Bourgogne, Provence, Languedoc, Gascogne, Saintonge, Orléannais, Limousin, to recall the role of woman in French history, French culture. One has only to think of the names of familiar French writers, the poets in particular, to recall the indispensable part played by the women they loved: women of the court, women of the stage, women of the street, sometimes women of stone or wood, sometimes a mere wraith or a name to which they became attached, obsessed, inspired to perform miraculous feats of creation. The aura which surrounds so many of these names is part of a greater aura: service. Service to God, service to Love, service to Creation, service to Deed . . . service even to Memory. No movement of consequence was ever initiated that did not include the person of some magnetic, devoted woman. Everywhere you go in France there is the inner story of feminine inspiration, feminine guidance. The men of France can accomplish nothing heroic, nothing of permanent value in whatever realm, without the love and the loyalty of their womenfolk.
In visiting the famous châteaux of the Loire, or the formidable bastides of the Dordogne, it was not of the warriors, the princes, the dignitaries of the Church that I thought, but of the women. All these strongholds, imposing, stately, elegant, gracious, awesome, as the case may be, were but shells to harbor and protect the flower of the spirit. The women of France were the palpable symbol of that flowering spirit; they were not merely idolized, eulogized, worshiped in verse, stone and music, they were enthroned in the flesh. These vast musical cages, immune to everything but treachery, vibrated with feminine ardor, feminine resistance, feminine devotion. They were courts of love and scenes of valor; all the dualities modulated through their ribs and vaults. The flowers, the animals, the birds, the arts, the mysteries, all were permeated by the marriage of the male and female principles. It is not strange that the country which is so gloriously feminine, la belle France, is at the same time the one in which the spirit, which is masculine, has flowered most. If proof were needed, France is the living proof that to exalt the spirit both halves of the psyche must be harmoniously developed. The rational aspect of the French esprit (always magnified by the foreigner) is a secondary attribute and a much distorted one. France is essentially mobile, plastic, fluid and intuitive. These are neither feminine nor masculine qualities exclusively; they are the attributes of maturity, reflecting poise and integration. That sense of equilibrium which the world so much admires in the French is the outcome of inner, spiritual growth, of continuous meditation upon and devotion to what is human. Nowhere in the Western world does man, as creature and being, loom so large, so full, so promising. But nowhere else in the Western world has the spiritual aspect of man been so thoroughly recognized, so generously developed. This exaltation of man as man, of man as arbiter of his fate, is the very seed of the revolutionary spirit of France. To this we owe that strong sense of reality which is always experienced in their midst. It is what ennobles them in defeat and makes them unpredictable in crises. The courage and the resources of the French are always best displayed by the individual. The nation as a whole may go to pot, the individual never. As long as one Frenchman survives all France will remain visible and recognizable. It does not matter what her position, as a world power, may be; it matters only that this molecular-spiritual product known as a Frenchman should not perish.
I never worry about France. It would be like worrying about the earth. What is French is imperishable. France has transcended her own physical being. And by that I do not mean just recently, as the result of defeat and humiliation, or by passing from a first to a second-rate power. The transcendence I speak of began from the day France was born, when she became conscious, as it were, that she had something to give the world. The mistake which foreigners so often make, in judging France, is to confound the spirit of conservation with miserliness or niggardliness. The French are not prodigal with their physical possessions; they do not give readily of the things which nourish the body. They give the fruits of their creation, which is much more important. The source they jealously guard. This is wisdom, the wisdom of a people who love the earth and who identify themselves with it. Americans are the very opposite. They are lavish with that which does not belong to them, with riches they have not earned. They exploit the earth and their fellow men. They would plunder Paradise, if they knew how. Impoverished at the source, their bounty avails not. The Frenchman protects the vessel which contains the spirit; it makes him seem hard and self-concerned to the easy-going ones. But it is only the story of the wise and the foolish virgins. Eventually, when what now seems a menace becomes reality, it is to the French we shall be obliged to turn for sustenance and inspiration. Unless the French
too, which I doubt, succumb to the modern spirit. . . .
Despite the terrible experience through which the French people have just passed, despite the fact that everything is going from bad to worse and that France is no more immune than any other country in the world, despite all this there are Frenchmen today who refuse to surrender to the ignominious debacle taking place on all fronts. There are Frenchmen so anchored in reality, so certain even today of the indomitable spirit of man, that they stand before the world as the chosen survivors, I might almost say, of a planet already doomed to extinction. They have envisaged everything which is likely to happen, every dire calamity which indeed most probably will happen, but they remain resolute and undaunted, determined to carry on, as men, to the end of time. They realize that the example which France gave the world has been dishonored and disfigured; they are aware that the power to shape the world to their liking has been deprived them. They go on living, nevertheless, as though none of this mattered. They go on like forces which, wound up and put in motion, cannot cease exerting influence until thoroughly dispersed. They do not rely on government, nationhood, culture or tradition, but on the spirit which is in them. They have abandoned the props, burned the scripts. On the naked stage of the world they improvise their lines according to an inner dictation, acting without directors, spurning rehearsals, costumes, stage sets, taking no cues from the wings, observing no concern for the temper of the audience, obsessed with only one idea, to act out the drama which is in them. This is the desperate drama of identification, the drama in which the barrier between actor and audience and actor and author, too, is dissolved. The actor is no longer the agent of a vehicle created for him; he is the means and the end at the same time. The world is his stage, the play is his own, the audience is his fellow men. The idea which the name France once evoked magically now becomes a living element of reality which, to be accepted, must be played out. The whole French past has now become a theatre so magnified that it embraces the world. In it the Chinese have their part, as do the Russians and the Hindus, the Americans, the Germans, the English. This is the last act in the drama of nations. If it is the end of France it will be the end of all other countries too. That mobility, that plasticity of the French will assert itself even more eloquently in the moment of dissolution.
The Henry Miller Reader Page 30