by John Baxter
When I was at university, we nearly put on a Christmas–themed summer revue. We were planning a sketch show to tour the country in July and August and were racking our brains for a theme when we got very excited about making it a Christmas show, with all the sketches about Christmas and a festively decorated set. . . . The show was to be called “Deep and Crisp and Even” and have a big picture of a snow–topped pizza on the posters. But none of our usual touring venues would take it.
I can understand why. To blot out visions of a snow–covered Christmas took an effort of will not everyone was prepared to make. While a few adventurous souls might celebrate Christmas in Australia with a picnic of lobster and fruit salad within hearing range of the surf, our family, faithful to the European tradition, sat down, perspiring, to roast turkey, brussels sprouts, potatoes, stuffing, and plum pudding with brandy butter.
When the queen broadcast her message on Christmas afternoon, we gathered around the TV to listen. A decade or two earlier it had been the radio, and grandfathers and a few older uncles even stood in respect. Such reverence for the lost British Empire, now reborn as the Commonwealth—Empire Lite—wasn’t rare among that generation, many of whom still spoke of Britain as “home” even when they were born in Australia and had never visited England.
In those days, when theaters and cinemas played “God Save the Queen” after every show, it was an act of reckless courage not to rise to your feet and remain motionless until it finished. If you got through the door at the back of the cinema before the anthem began, you were exempt from this duty, so there was a scramble to leave before the prefatory roll of drums. One irate filmgoer wrote to a trade paper, “Last night, at my local cinema, I stood at the end of the screening for the national anthem. When I turned to leave, I found that the other patrons and even the staff had gone, and I was locked in.”
Like the severed limb that still itched, the sense of a winter Christmas survived no matter to what corner of the world one was exiled. Be it in tundra or jungle, the traditional Christmas dinner would be eaten; the tree decorated; and the carol concerts, midnight mass, and readings or productions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol all take place. The seasons and their rituals cut deep.
California’s embrace of the new had lulled me into thinking France would be the same. Instead I found it deeply respectful of the past, suspicious of the present, and downright skeptical about the future. Above all, it paid no attention to the rules governing the rest of the world. “The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault,” wrote the social critic Adam Gopnik. My new neighbors and in–laws listened to only one voice: that of what they called le patrimoine—“the heritage”—the accumulated glory of France.
6
The Seine in Flood
Paris 6me. January 2018. 3 a.m. Rain all week, a silent drizzle, shining the metal roofs of the city grayer; a rain invisible at night but audible in the tattoo of fat drops falling six stories from the gutters to smash on the courtyard cobbles. Out of sight but less than a kilometer away, the Seine rises, invading the bankside promenades.
FEBRUARY 2018, AND THE SEINE HAS SELDOM BEEN HIGHER. OF the bridges under which scores of barges and pleasure boats pass daily, only a narrow space remains above water. Beneath the Pont de l’Alma, the seventeen–foot statue of a Zouave, a rifleman from a North African regiment, stands resolutely on guard. When the waters are high Parisians say, “The Zouave’s feet must be wet.” Today, they lap his beard.
Friends overseas email, “Are you all right? Have the floodwaters reached you yet?” Wondering if they know something I don’t, I go out on the terrace and look down six stories into our street. No water there except on the wet pavement, where sanitation workers hose it down in their twice–weekly tour.
After lunch, I take a walk down to the river. Streets on the southern, or left, bank of the Seine are at little risk of being flooded. Rising from the river to the long ridge of Montparnasse, the ground here is mostly the sandstone that has been quarried for centuries to build the city.
People on the right bank are not so fortunate. A flat river basin, its clay soil and a high water table make it prone to flooding. Engineers constructing the Opéra in the 1860s had to run pumps day and night to keep the foundations dry. When they stopped, water seeped in, inspiring the legend that a lake lay under the building across which a mutilated musical genius—the phantom of the Opéra—poled.
Looking at the Seine today, I can believe such myths. In yellow–gray spate, the water is inching up the stone wall toward street level. The previous year, the town hall posted online an alarming computer simulation of what would happen if it spilled over. Not only the metro stations and underground parking garages would flood, but so would the basements of the Grand Palais and the Louvre.
It had happened before. In January 1910 the Seine rose eight meters, only three more than today, invading even the lower streets on our side of the river. The river didn’t need to brim its banks. Once rain filled the sewer and stormwater outlets, pressure from the river acted as a pump, sending water spouting out of manholes and drains. Markers on older buildings indicate the level reached by la crue de la Seine du 28 janvier 1910: anything from knee to shoulder height. There’s an element of bravado in such memorials. You think your river floods? Take a look at this!
The Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma.
The Zouave by Georges Diebolt on the Pont de l’Alma. Photograph by the author.
For a time, the writer Anaïs Nin lived on a houseboat, La Belle Aurore, moored on the right bank. Enamored of water and journeys, Nin fancied herself on a cruise without end, with new adventures forever floating downriver toward her. “Once inside the houseboat,” she wrote, “all the voyages began. Even at night with its shutters closed, no smoke coming out of its chimney, asleep and secret, it had an air of mysteriously sailing somewhere.” But weather is no respecter of literature. Today, her former mooring is lost under a racing torrent.
Confined between stone walls, the Seine here is unrecognizable as the same river it is upstream, where the water is free to find its own level. Novelist William Wharton, who also lived on a houseboat—moored at Le Port–Marly, about twenty kilometers outside the city—returned from a weekend away to find the river in flood:
The beautiful black or green Seine is a raging yellow muddy river now; it looks like the Amazon, with rippling waves as the water courses along its rampaging way. It has covered the island across from us so that it looks like one huge wild river with whitecaps all the way to the bank on the other side of the island. Our neighbors are running around like crazy people, fastening things down and cursing us for abandoning our boat.
Wharton and his houseboat survived, but each time the river runs high it carries fragments of shattered lifestyles downstream. During the high water of 2018, the staff of the riverside Shakespeare & Company bookshop warned customers to expect the
bizarre and revealing sight of the quays strewn with all the manmade flotsam and organic life that is usually borne through the city and downriver beneath the glaucous, roping waters, unseen by us surface dwellers. Stranded items spotted near the bookshop in June 2016 included an ornate wingback armchair, countless tons of riverweed, and a full peloton [platoon] of algae–furred bicycles!
The rushing torrent seemingly just under my feet, I cross the Pont des Arts, the fragile–looking metal bridge on stone piers that leads to the Louvre. Of the thirty–seven bridges that suture one half of Paris to the other, this one is most richly encrusted with emotion. It takes the form of cadenas d’amour: “love locks.” Couples write their names on a small brass padlock, attach it to a security barrier, and toss the key into the river. So many cadenas accumulated on the Pont des Arts that barriers tore loose from their weight. In 2015 the city removed forty–five tons of locks and replaced the metal mesh with glass, but the fad still flourishes.
Cross any bridge over the Seine and there’s a brief sense of hovering between worlds. To Guillaume Apoll
inaire, the bridges’ wayward characters and tendency to develop personalities of their own recalled sheep. In his poem “Zone,” he wrote, “Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating.” The image of indiscipline reflects the bridges’ ambiguous status; technically belonging to Paris, they are administered and maintained by the state as part of the patrimoine.
Filmmakers often use Paris bridges to imply links between different worlds. In Last Tango in Paris, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider independently cross the unglamorous Pont de Bir–Hakeim, which celebrates a little–known battle of 1942, en route to the soulless, bourgeois apartment where they have their erotic encounters. For Munich, Steven Spielberg imagined the same bridge hosting a produce market, where the Mossad assassin played by Eric Bana meets Mathieu Amalric to bargain for information while doing the weekend shopping. Bana, a keen cook in the film, advises Amalric on seasonal vegetables as they discuss political murder—shorthand for the banality of contemporary terrorism.
Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn pass under this and a dozen other bridges during their nocturnal rendezvous on a bateau mouche in Charade. The operator spices up that voyage by spotlighting lovers as they cuddle and grope along the stone–paved riverbank, the same one where Gene Kelly dances with Leslie Caron in An American in Paris to “Love Is Here to Stay” and Goldie Hawn defies gravity to float above Woody Allen’s head as she sings “I’m Through with Love” in Everyone Says I Love You. All underwater now. Fortunately romance isn’t soluble.
One of the stranger works of transpontine art was the 2006 collaboration between conceptual artist Sophie Calle and architect Frank Gehry. It took the form of a plastic telephone booth resembling, typically for Paris, a gaudy, exotic flower. It stood on the Pont du Garigliano, one of the less stylish bridges (though, because of its height of eleven meters above the water, popular with suicides). Inside the booth, a metal plate explained: “My name is Sophie Calle. You are standing in my phone booth. Only I know the number. I will dial it from time to time, but completely out of the blue, in the hope that someone will answer.”
Sophie Calle and Frank Gehry’s phone booth on the Pont du Garigliano, Le Téléphone. Photograph by the author.
Would Ms. Calle have placed such a box on London Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge? Did anyone ever participate in a conversation with her over that phone? It hardly matters. The booth celebrates chance and its multitude of possibilities, but also Paris, its bridges, and the capacity of both to welcome and nurture the unexpected.
Watching the Seine swirl around a bridge’s stone piers, one understands the erotic appeal of death by water that inspired American poet and onetime Paris expatriate Hart Crane. In his cycle “Voyages,” he wrote, “sleep, death, desire, / Close round one instant in one floating flower.” One night in 1932, he leaped from a boat into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never found.
The lure of Paris’s bridges feels strongest on the oldest, the so–called Pont Neuf, or New Bridge, which was new once, when work concluded in 1607 under Henry IV. His statue stands proudly at the point where the bridge transects the Île de la Cité. So often has it been disassembled for repairs that each stone is numbered, ensuring that it’s put back exactly as built.
Below and behind it, on a triangle of grass and trees called Vert–Galant, one is closer to the Seine than anywhere else in Paris. Once the Île aux Juifs, or Jews’ Island, it was here that Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, and his lieutenant Geoffroy de Charnay were burned at the stake in March 1314, and from where the ashes of Guy Debord, who formulated the discipline known as psychogeography, were, as he asked, consigned to the Seine.
Yet the presiding spirit of Vert–Galant isn’t any of these but a girl whose corpse was fished out of the river nearby, sometime in the 1880s. A cast of her calm, almost dreamy face, christened L’Inconnue de la Seine (the Unknown Girl of the Seine), inspired novels, stories, and poems. Proving that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, L’Inconnue enjoyed an unexpected modern reincarnation: in the 1950s Norwegian toymaker Asmund Laerdal chose hers as the face of Resusci Anne, the plastic figure used to demonstrate mouth–to–mouth resuscitation. Since then, more than three hundred million people have kissed those dead lips.
7
I Spy Strangers
Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia. October 1986. 9 p.m. 28°C. Slot machines subside in the Returned Soldiers Club and hands are laid on hearts as a recorded voice intones, “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” At the back door, the stink from a garbage bag gravid with rotting shrimp shells blends with the cloying scent of frangipani flowers.
THE SENSE OF NATIONAL DESTINY THAT DRIVES THE FRENCH HAS no equivalent in my native Australia. Its history as a dumping ground for Britain’s jailbirds, followed by centuries of colonial rule, induces a sense of inferiority that feels bred–in–the–bone. We’re taught from childhood to suppress all inclinations to self–importance. Few people are less graceful in accepting a compliment. In an extremity of pride at some achievement, we might at most mumble, “It’s all right.”
From shunning self–advertisement, it was a short step to believing we had nothing to boast about. This seemed confirmed by the quality of the celebrities who visited us. Rarely could any performer in his or her prime be persuaded to spend twenty–four hours on a plane simply to play our few meager venues. Local showmen complained, “We only get them on the way up or the way down.”
So when, in the 1980s, the University of Sydney asked for my help in attracting overseas buyers to a trade fair for documentary filmmakers, I was sure some incentive would be needed to coax executives from their Beverly Hills and Manhattan offices to our insignificant shores.
What better than our lifestyle, in particular our beaches? A visit to the relevant politicians proved surprisingly productive of both encouragement and funds. Accordingly, we were able to offer every distributor who attended a week’s holiday, all expenses paid, on Australia’s most popular natural wonder, the Great Barrier Reef.
Braced for a stampede of freeloaders who would grab the holiday but skip the fair, we watched in confusion as our guests diligently attended the fair but declined the bonus. All had businesses to run and were anxious to get back to them. If they wanted sun, sand, and seafood, all were available closer to home, at their condos in Florida. A sterner imperative dominated their consciousness: Who’s minding the store?
We were guilty of what sociologists were calling “cultural cringe,” an assumption that nothing in Australian culture could possibly interest a sophisticated foreigner. In our defense, the strategy was already being embraced by the minister who funded our initiative. Hoping to lure college graduates from northern Europe, his department produced some embarrassing posters showing their dream candidate—young, male, and white—standing on a beach in mortarboard, academic gown, and swimming trunks.
The film–fair experience made me cautious in dealing with the few European intellectuals who did make it to Sydney. If American businessmen scorned our natural inducements, how much more contemptuous would be these men, marinated in the art and thought of France, Germany, and Italy?
So it was a jolt when, meeting the distinguished French documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch off the plane to attend a conference on ethnographic film in the Pacific region, I had to help him retrieve the surfboard he’d checked through as excess baggage. On the drive to his hotel, he explained he’d learned to surf while making a film about the Gulf of Guinea and was eager to sample the point break at Bondi Beach.
Not long after, film director Josef von Sternberg agreed to be a guest of the Sydney Film Festival. Visiting him in one of the city’s most staid hotels, I found his suite filled with New Guinean tribal artifacts he’d acquired by cleaning out most of the city’s dealers in ethnic art. Seeing the thrones surmounted with human skulls and clubs edged with shark teeth, I couldn’t help recalling “Hot Voodoo,” an outrageous dance number in his 1932 film Blonde Venus. A lin
e of dusky chorus girls leads onstage a gorilla in chains who, on shedding its skin, proves to be Marlene Dietrich in a blond wig, sequins, and not much else. No need to cringe about antipodean culture in von Sternberg’s presence. He’d embraced it with vigor.
Umberto Eco, the Italian literary critic, novelist, and inspired language theorist, was the greatest surprise of all. After we’d seemed to bond during an interview, I gambled that the academics who’d asked him to their conference would be too awed to invite him to dinner, and so I did. He accepted with flattering enthusiasm.
Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus.
Unknown. Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. 1933. Paramount–Publix Corporation.
Suppressing the tendency to book at some Europeanized five–star establishment, I chose a harborside eatery whose tumbledown exterior belied its reputation for fresh seafood. Eco proved as jolly and unconventional as his roly–poly build suggested. Far from shunning Australia’s enticements, he confessed he’d only agreed to attend the conference if its organizers threw in a week on the Great Barrier Reef.
Umberto Eco.
Unknown. Umberto Eco. Paris Review. Wikimedia Commons.
He described with glee how, descending late one morning from his hotel room on an island resort, he expressed a wish for some oysters before lunch. “No worries, mate,” said the concierge. Handing him a small hammer, he directed him to the foreshore, where Eco could help himself from those that festooned the rocks.
At the time, Eco was best known for his first novel, The Name of the Rose, which shrewdly used the frame of a murder mystery to embody an inquiry into the nature of medieval religious thought. It became an international bestseller and a movie starring Sean Connery.
