The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Still, I’ll probably be fine because the editor of the English-language edition of Réalités who’s coming over to interview us applicants will be so overwhelmed by the number of candidates who’ve applied, all of them mad keen to get out of Blighty, that he’ll probably end up by picking someone at random. When I go for the interview, there are already several eager beavers awaiting their turn in an anonymous office in Charlotte Street. The only surprise is that the editor, Garith Windsor, who for some reason I’d expected to look French, couldn’t look more English, with a weather-beaten complexion and keen blue eyes. He also looks bored. He asks me a few weird questions, like ‘In marriage who loses the most freedom, the man or the woman?’, which might have come out of some old manual about how to determine a person’s innate character right away. I answer impertinently, saying did he mean ‘more freedom’, adding evasively that however much I like writing about art and literature I would find it very difficult to live in Paris because, although Parisians might know how to present themselves and be more intelligent and intellectual than us, I found the city cold and snobbish. This seems to amuse Windsor, who tells me more about the Paris he loves and the fabulous garçonnière overlooking a beautiful square in Saint-Germain-des-Prés that he’s rented for the past twenty years for a song. He’s amusing in an exaggerated, camp way. We both laugh and by the time the interview is over I feel as if I already knew him, as if I’d already met him before. And it was only as I wandered back through Soho, trying to sort my mind out, that I realised I probably had. It could have been in any of those bars and clubs I’d trawled through dozens of times with Francis Bacon. Our Mr Windsor had been a face in the queer Soho dark.

  This will make it even less likely that I get the job, I say to myself reassuringly. Not only did I tell Windsor how little I cared for his beloved Paris, but he certainly won’t want some new recruit going around and telling everyone in his office that he’d been spotted in a pansy bar. But then I discovered I’d been too clever by far, and my off-handedness must have invested me with some illusory quality that Windsor hadn’t found in all the other mustard-keen candidates. There was a phone call from his secretary in Paris, then a telegram confirming my appointment as assistant editor on Réalités. I was to start as soon as practicable in the New Year.

  My father is exultant. I am launched at last, and on a course moreover that he himself would have dearly loved – and no longer has to pay for.

  My new girlfriend seems as despondent as I am. We cling tightly together, making urgent plans as to how we might continue our thwarted love. I can’t believe that events are going forward on their own momentum, altogether beyond my control. The nightmare is beginning, and I try to blank it out. I don’t want to move anywhere. All I want is to stay clipped to my beauty’s gracefully tapering limbs forever.

  From the moment I board the boat train at Victoria, with a battered suitcase full of Becketts and Joyces, Kafkas and portable Nietzsches, I know I can only go with the flow. What I’d pushed firmly to the back of my mind since the end of last year has actually happened. Just like the train gathering speed as it passes the rows of dingy back gardens, events are sliding unstoppably forward, propelling me into the unknown, into the foreignness I always craved but which has taken on the less exotic aura of a regular job, in a city moreover I associate not with easy Mediterranean pleasures but with icy chic and sneering superiority. If life has turned the page, I haven’t: I am still cosily ensconced in my post-student existence, sharing a basement flat in Chelsea with two old Cambridge friends, seizing every amorous opportunity that comes my way.

  Although it’s exciting to be plucked out of one life and dropped into another, I feel angry and confused. There are only a handful of facts I can cling to. Today is Sunday, 30 January 1966: a bitter, grey morning, and I have just left my wonderful girlfriend behind, perhaps never to see her again unless she can be lured away from her family and her steady secretarial job. Other news today – I hesitated at the station whether to buy a French newspaper, then settled on the more familiar Observer – is that the UK has hit Ian Smith’s unilateral Rhodesia with a trade embargo. Other news more to the point is that I am twenty-four and, if you look at my passport, you can see I am five foot eleven, with grey-green eyes, although my face is not as plumply middle-aged, and certainly not as confident, as the photo suggests. I have already travelled extensively in Europe, as you can also see if you flick through the array of exotic entry stamps on the passport pages; but all those trips presupposed a return date. This time the ticket is strictly and ominously one-way.

  A week later nothing much has changed, although I’m less apprehensive about the whole move and too caught up in the change to know whether I like it or not. My job doesn’t seem overly demanding and I feel I’m fitting in all right. If Garith, the bluff, red-faced boss, strikes me as camp and theatrical, the others in the office come across as normal enough and friendly. I haven’t really had time to get to know them as I translate bunches of snappy French captions in the dank basement office on rue Saint-Georges – a street full of dull, grey office buildings in what I suppose is Paris’s main business area, not far from the Opéra and Gare Saint-Lazare. David Warrilow, pale, angular and elegant, is the number two at the English edition, and he appears very suave and welcoming. Then there are a couple of senior women editors, both American, another junior editor – my opposite number, an Oxford graduate called Giles – an English secretary of the self-contained, demure kind, a layout designer, Dorita, born in Paris to Spanish parents, and a couple of extras who come in part-time. Collectively they seem to me to indicate that being employed to put out an English-language magazine in Paris is a bit of a laugh, really. I’m relieved to find that they’re not too keen or always talking about work and jostling for position; everyone appears to enjoy a laugh and a drink, even at lunchtime, so to that extent I feel I could have met with a far worse fate.

  But fully employed as I am, with a cheque going into my new Société Générale account at the end of the month, I am still sans domicile fixe, without a fixed address, like a tramp, a displaced person or indeed, I suppose, a junior editor recently arrived from London and still trying to find his feet. For the first few nights, I was billeted at an unprepossessing local hotel that catered to commercial travellers down on their luck, single men in rumpled suits and off-white nylon shirts who always seemed to be having one last cigarette before facing other hopeless situations like going to bed alone. Then there was a real farce when I left the hotel to take up a room in an apartment belonging to a woman who took in paying guests. Predecessors of mine had used this option, although none of them appeared to have stayed long, and I found out why soon enough. First of all, I thought my new landlady, a distracted, blowsy French woman in her mid-forties whose lipstick always looked smudged, was being touchingly solicitous when she kept bursting into my room to ask if I needed anything; then it became irksome, because her tone had grown strident and there was no lock on my door to keep her from barging in at any time of the day or night; finally the penny dropped, when she made a very determined stance, arms akimbo in a floral housecoat and her hair all over the place, to indicate that she expected something specifically more than the rent for the privilege of staying in her house. When I mentioned this to David Warrilow the following morning, he burst out laughing, richly and melodiously, as if the whole comedy of life were being borne in on him. ‘So she’s still trying her luck, is she?’ he said, shaking his head. Then, very generously, and almost as if he’d thought of it before, David suggested that I move into what, having been there once for drinks, seemed to me to be his palatial apartment high up over the boulevard du Montparnasse. I couldn’t have imagined a better outcome and, trying to disguise my delight, I accepted gratefully.

  The jukebox barks out ‘Satisfaction’ one more time. My half of Kronenbourg lies untouched on the reassuringly traditional-looking zinc bar of La Rotonde as, a Gitane smouldering in my mouth, I gyrate to the music, feeling I know exact
ly what Mick Jagger is implying there. Basically, he means he can never get enough, and God knows I can relate to that, given that I’ve had nothing at all since one old flame from London sailed through Paris two weeks ago. Still, it’s been a good day, and I’m happy to be strutting my stuff without embarrassment in a café that I’ve been using so regularly since I moved into David’s place that it’s like a second home, where I know all the barmen by name (they call me Monsieur Mikkel) and most of the regulars, some of whom are well known. One of the old-looking bunch who are always there in the early evening is called Zadkine, whom I wouldn’t have known from a hole in the wall until David told me he was a respected and influential sculptor. I say ‘Bonsoir’ to him cordially enough, but never know how to continue the conversation since I imagine I’d have to talk to him about revolutionary form or something. I didn’t need any help in spotting Ionesco on the terrace outside, however. He’s become so famous as a leader of what they call the Theatre of the Absurd – Arrabal’s another of them – that I recognised his domed bald head and pale, clown-like face right away. I haven’t actually spotted Sartre yet at the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, but it’s surely only a matter of time, particularly since I go around most evenings with David, who seems to get in everywhere and know everybody in Paris.

  The other night, for instance, we passed what I thought was a local family bistro – it certainly looked like one, if somewhat smarter – and I suggested we had dinner there. David looked a little surprised but we went in, and once I opened the impressive-looking menu and saw the prices I tried to turn tail until I saw David mouth something to me and found to my astonishment that sitting next to me on the red moleskin banquette was Marlene Dietrich, talking in heavily accented English to a couple opposite her. I literally felt the ground shift under my feet, as though we had slid into a parallel universe of celebrity where the unusual became the norm and cinematic legends materialised at your side. Once David had established it was indeed Marlene and not some lookalike (‘C’est bien Mademoiselle Dietrich?’ he murmured to the waiter, who nodded discreetly as he took our order), we eavesdropped shamelessly until it became evident that Mademoiselle was far gone in drink since she kept repeating with slurry indignation to her friends opposite that her husband had never allowed her to eat hot dogs. As her friends nodded in commiseration, and she said it again and again as if it were the defining experience of her life, our interest in the legendary Marlene began to dwindle, and since no more startling revelations were forthcoming, we began talking about David’s own passion for acting and his ambition to leave Réalités and journalism altogether to devote himself to the theatre – rather than doing the odd bit of amateur dramatics and some well-paid but unfulfilling film-dubbing (which he does not only from French into English but the other way round, since he is now perfectly bilingual). The bill, being about six times what I would have expected in an ‘ordinary’ bistro, certainly seemed to have included this unexpected brush with fame, and I was mightily relieved when David took care of it since I didn’t have enough francs on me even to pay my half.

  David is laughing indulgently as I stop dancing to down my beer and order another demi for us both, only too glad that David has been temporarily weaned off whisky, which he consumes in alarming quantities later in the evening, after having barely picked at his dinner. I’m still firmly in the Francis Bacon routine of sticking to champagne whenever available (which is less and less) before and after dinner, and if there’s no champagne forthcoming I drink beer and red wine but no spirits or digestifs, apart from the occasional Armagnac or a delicious, black walnut liqueur that David keeps, and never touches, on his drinks tray in the flat; seeing David sinking a bottle of Grant’s in one session makes me feel uncharacteristically moderate and restrained. I’m already ravenous, it must be the dancing, and I’m hoping David will agree to dinner soon at one of the more modest bistros we frequent along the boulevard; there’s one I’m particularly fond of that does all the French classics I like, including boeuf bourguignon and petit salé aux lentilles, and serves no-nonsense jugs of rough Corbières; a further attraction is that it’s in the rue Delambre, where shadowy women wait in the doorways for custom, a sight that always makes my heart race even if they’re unattractive and I know that if I did fall for their wiles it would make short work of any spare cash I have. I can just about afford the occasional culinary treat, like tonight, or the odd foray into the Coupole’s vast, domed dining room, but when I’m eating alone, I go further down towards Montparnasse station to Roger la frite, the cheapest place in the area and one I suspect David doesn’t even know, where in a functional space a bit like a soup kitchen with harsh yellowish lighting they bring omelettes, steaks and sausages all piled high with similarly yellowish chips.

  While I gorge during our lively dinners together, slim, fastidious David usually drinks and smokes and, when I prompt him, talks very freely about Réalités, Garith and the others in the office, as well as about the higher-ups who run the French edition and apparently half-own the whole thing. This interests me hugely, not only because I am still learning the ropes and trying to get beyond my ‘new boy’ status as quickly as possible, but more specifically because David knows what new writing possibilities are in the offing, such as a piece on Rembrandt or Mondrian, and I’m very keen to do as much writing as possible on anything that crops up, from new novels to medieval manuscripts, while biding my time waiting for my own big writing project to take shape (if only I could decide what this was going to be about rather than accumulating lots of pithy observations, scraps of poems and diary entries exhorting myself to get up earlier and begin work on a novel, any novel, without further ado). But I enjoy doing these shorter pieces because I don’t have to delve too deeply to bring them off satisfactorily and at the same time I can practise different writing styles as I do them: I’ve just finished one on Aubrey Beardsley where I tried to achieve a tone and rhythm in the writing that echoes, however faintly, the languorous line of his drawings; I don’t think anyone else has actually noticed how sinuous and full of double-entendres my florid descriptions of the works are. Meanwhile, of course, although I see these short essays as amusing diversions, my own great literary project remains a bit of a mystery.

  David is seven or eight years older than me and considerably more worldly-wise. I much prefer spending time with him alone, like these evenings, rather than with his actor friends, who also tend to be older than me as well as rather superior, particularly the bored-looking, supercilious French ones whom I think he knows mainly from film-dubbing sessions. At David’s invitation I went along to a dinner at the rather swanky Balzar restaurant on rue des Ecoles (it’s like Brasserie Lipp, but more for successful artists and intellectuals than politicians) where they’d all gathered in a mass of black polo-necked, existentialist ennui at a large table. I’d expected to be included in the conversation, even if it centred mainly on various plays and films and actors, but nobody bothered even to greet me, let alone draw me out, so that I had to sit in an intensely self-conscious pool of embarrassment and silence all evening. Eventually I cobbled together what I thought would be an arresting statement in the best French I could muster, including a significant subjunctive clause, and when I blurted it out towards the end of the evening all faces turned towards me for a brief second, registered disdain, and then, to my horror, returned dismissively to the conversation I had so foolishly and pointlessly interrupted.

  I was deeply humiliated by this experience, which had made me feel as if I simply did not exist, and as I went over it obsessively in every detail, it occurred to me that several of the guests that evening were openly homosexual and that they might well have thought that David, who it has been gradually dawning on me is also that way inclined, had brought his inconsequential little boyfriend along. The idea outraged me, even though David has never made so much as a tentative pass at me while I have been under his roof. But it also brought to a head a nagging concern that has been quietly building up over the l
ast few weeks: I can’t go on accepting hospitality, I must establish my independence. I’ve come abroad to stand on my own two feet, as my father put it, and I must avoid being perceived once again, as I think I might have been with Bacon when he fêted me so extravagantly in Soho, as the poor young heterosexual sponging off older, influential men.

  It hasn’t taken me long to find a less comfortable, naturally more expensive – since David would never have accepted my paying any rent – but also more acceptable solution. Rue du Moulin-Vert in the modest area of Alésia, just behind Montparnasse, would certainly not be everyone’s idea of dreamy, romantic Paris. I myself would have much preferred something with a bit more character, panache even, than this dull little street, whose nineteenth-century green windmill has been replaced, I see when I walk down to the end, by a rather plush-looking restaurant, called unsurprisingly the Auberge du Moulin Vert. Otherwise, the street gives off waves of lower-middle-class respectability without any corresponding lower middle-class aspiration for better things. If you’re here, the street seems to say, you’re not going anywhere else. The Résidence at no. 11a, however, struggles to escape this prediction. It is a 1950s building with a built-in Utopian optimism reflected in the large windows and well-tended patches of grass in each of its communicating courtyards; it also has a transient feel, as if conceived for short stays. The room that I have secured by paying one month’s rent in advance, and another as a guarantee against any eventual damage, is on the ground floor, and although they call it a ‘studio’, which certainly sounds better than ‘room’, it’s very small and a bit Scandinavian-looking with lots of blond wood and a kind of sloping architect’s table which, I tell myself, will be perfect for taking some of the entries in my notebooks further towards the elusive novel I’m trying to pin down.