The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Garith seems to have sensed my disappointment.

  ‘Come with me, dear boy,’ he orders.

  We walk round the corner and into a garden filled with trees and bushes. The bitter early spring has not touched them into any semblance of life yet. I haven’t seen much of Paris but I do know there are next to no private, domestic gardens and even fewer as large as this. Part of the garden, which looks as straggly and untended as the house, is taken up by a tiny structure with four Doric columns supporting – somehow the word is particularly apposite – a plain pediment.

  ‘They call that the Temple of Friendship,’ Garith whispers breezily. ‘God only knows what they all get up to in there. Sapphic rituals and what have you, I should think. I’m not sure Miss Barney uses it much any more but she won’t want us poking around in there.’

  Just then a door opens noisily at our backs and we turn round to see a plump lady staring at us. She’s wearing a white smock and she looks reproachful.

  ‘Bonjour Berthe!’ Garith roars cheerfully as we walk over to the house and give her our coats. Berthe bundles them over her arm and leads us into a kind of antechamber. It seems darker in the house than it was outside, as if the house had half sunk into its own garden. There are books in small piles on various chairs and canapés, and the faded red damask of the walls is covered with small pictures, mainly portraits, as well as mirrors and open, outstretched fans.

  ‘C’est Monsieur Garite et son ami,’ Berthe announces.

  A very straight-backed, silver-haired lady dressed in black with a single string of pearls comes over to greet us. Although small, she has an air of patrician entitlement and a clear, calmly inquiring gaze.

  ‘Ah, dear friend, how nice to see you,’ she says.

  Garith bows gallantly over her proffered hand, half-raising it to his lips.

  Miss Barney’s gaze now turns on me, and she raises the lorgnette she wears round her neck to examine me better.

  ‘This is Michael Peppiatt,’ Garith says, ‘who’s recently joined us from London. He’ll be writing the article on Miss Brooks.’

  I hesitate for a moment, wondering whether I should try to replicate Garith’s suspended hand-kiss – which I remembered my Spanish poet friend, Jaime Gil de Biedma, telling me was the correct way to greet older ladies – then in the end offer a damp palm to Miss Barney’s unexpectedly firm grip.

  ‘Romaine,’ Miss Barney calls out. ‘This is Mr Pepperat who’s going to be writing about you in Réalités magazine.’

  I’m suddenly aware that the dark room is thronged with silent, elderly people sitting on bulky, elaborately carved wooden chairs and velvet sofas. I begin to feel ill at ease as if I’d taken a wrong turning and strayed into the geriatric wing of a hospital or a genteel old people’s home.

  ‘Now how did you and Garith Windsor meet?’ asks a querulous voice. Miss Brooks’ frail silhouette comes into focus. She is wearing what looks like a diminutive top hat and a tight-fitting black jacket, made all the more severe by a white shirt with heavy silver cufflinks.

  ‘They met during the war, of course,’ Miss Barney answers with immediate authority.

  ‘Which war are we talking about, dear?’ Miss Brooks says, letting out an alarmingly loud cackle. ‘Were they in the trenches together?’ she asks, flicking her arms forward as if she has just said something unanswerable.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ Miss Barney says, ‘and do please stop shooting your cuffs like that all the time. I don’t know where you think you are. They weren’t in the Great War, dear, because they’re not old like us! They met in the last war. Were you in the same regiment together, Mr Pepper?’ she asks, eyeing me keenly.

  I look to Garith for help.

  ‘Michael was barely born then, if I’m not mistaken,’ Garith intercedes jovially. ‘He’s a very, very young man, but hugely keen to write about Miss Brooks’ paintings.’

  ‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ says Miss Barney. ‘Let’s hope he can get it done while we’re all still here on earth.’

  It’s very hot and oddly heavy in this ornate room. There are a lot of pictures in gilded frames, including one of a little girl that my eyes keep wandering back to as a reminder of youth, the freshness of youth. I feel my shirt beginning to stick to my back.

  ‘Carolus-Duran,’ Garith says in a stage whisper. ‘Painted Miss Barney as a child way back in the nineteenth century and gave her mother painting lessons while they were both in Paris.’

  ‘Well, if he wants to write about them, I guess he should have a look at them,’ Miss Brooks says.

  Night has nearly fallen outside, but no attempt has been made to turn on any of the little table lamps in the room. Having first considered me with suspicion, Berthe, the housekeeper, seems to have warmed to me, perhaps as the only young person around. Ever since she saw how eagerly I dispatched her deliciously damp cucumber sandwiches she has plied me with smoked-salmon rolls stuffed with goat’s cheese and vol-au-vents and now, as in some magnificent finale, pastry boats filled with strawberries and cream and wedges of moist chocolate cake. I have just slid one of these whole into my mouth as I get up to grope around the sitting room, vainly attempting to discern original Romaine Brookses from the other, highly varnished images that are crammed together as in a traditional Salon exhibition right up to the ceiling of the darkened room. Berthe is still following me round with plates of strawberry boats, but I think I am otherwise alone as I look up at the walls where the gilt frames glitter but the paintings inside them are dark and indecipherable. Suddenly I bump into a small sofa in which a woman with a heavily lined, tragic face is listening to a puckish-looking elderly man, who keeps repeating ‘Marcel wouldn’t even recognise the Ritz today in all its vulgar modernity – wouldn’t even recognise it!’, whom I identify as Paul Morand, once Proust’s friend; so the woman sitting on the causeuse, I reason, swallowing another of Berthe’s creations, must be the great Paris correspondent of the New Yorker.

  We’ve moved from Earl Grey to bourbon, and I’m getting comfortably tight when I see Garith making none too discreet signs that we should leave. I am a little put out because, after my initial embarrassment, I am beginning to feel at home, even secure, as I down my fourth whiskey. I am also beginning to see the point of this strange visit, which reaches beyond the publication of Djuna Barnes’s unforgettable Nightwood and that international lesbian bible, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, to a whole gallery of outstanding figures, a Parnassus of its own. Since Miss Barney had known Carolus-Duran who had known Manet, and Morand had known Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in the entire world, who had been close to Victor Hugo, who must have known everybody imaginable… And to think that Proust himself had come to this very room to find out more about Sapphic love while writing A la Recherche, and James Joyce and Hemingway and T. S. Eliot had come, to name only the most famous… But Garith is waving his arms and getting even redder in the face and there’s no way I can linger amongst these illustrious shades flitting like bats in the deepening dark, even though now I want to go into the Temple, to another secret interior that has eluded me, just as Giacometti’s studio did, and I decide to elevate both of them to a special category as my ‘sacred places’ of Paris as Garith hurries me through my adieus, my effusive thanks to Berthe, and back into the navy pea coat, my head teeming with galaxies of fabulous names, and out into the cold, sobering night outside.

  For those who become intimately bound to them, cities consist essentially of key streets and sacred places. I suspect that my relationship with Anne is a passing, finite one, and when I sense the bond between us straining at the roots, like a kite longing to break free, there’s a place I go to that immediately puts doubts and frustrations into perspective since it stands as a monument to the way time reduces everything we know to insignificance. The Roman arenas are only a few minutes’ walk from rue Larrey and usually empty because no one seems interested in the fact that, after close to two thousand years, they are still there, partly oblit
erated and partly reconstructed, of course, but wholly evocative – so that once you dive under the unobtrusive archway that leads to them, even though they are now ringed round with nineteenth-century apartment buildings like my own, it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to bring the whole arena alive. I hear the bears and lions roaring as they are released from the surrounding cages, watch the gladiators and bare-knuckle fighters in combat, then listen to the strolling players putting on their versions of Euripides and bawdy Aristophanes alongside popular Roman entertainments of the time by authors whose very names have disappeared into the dust underfoot.

  What I have come to love about the Arènes is their mixture of transience and permanence. On the one hand they reach back to the origins of Lutetia, as Paris was called in Gallo-Roman times, but having later served as a cemetery they were filled in and covered over when Philippe-Auguste built his new city walls at the end of the twelfth century; they then disappeared from the face of the earth until they were rediscovered and, with vigorous petitioning from no less a public figure than Victor Hugo, restored. Originally thousands of people would have sat on the various tiers overlooking the arenas, with slaves, the poor and women consigned to the top, while the lower echelons, sheltered from the sun by an awning, were reserved for Roman dignitaries and local notables. It is a miracle that this place has come down to us more or less intact: on hot afternoons you can almost hear the ancient crowds howl and smell their sweat. With its distillation of centuries of human hope, illusion and despair, the Arènes seem to me an ideal place to collect one’s thoughts, try to understand who one is and what it is one wants out of life in all its unexpected, bewildering twists and turns.

  Some small children have arrived, kicking a football through clouds of dust; in another corner, slowly and stiffly, a couple of old men are playing boules. I feel disproportionately pleased that games are still being played here, in such an ancient setting. As I get up to go, I notice that a plaque on the wall bears a short text by one of my literary heroes, the critic and editor Jean Paulhan, who I’ve been told lives just round the corner at 5 rue des Arènes. This (in my translation) is what he says:

  It was here in the second century A.D. that communal life in Paris began. Ten thousand people could mix comfortably in the arenas of Lutèce where nautical jousts and gladiator combat gave way to fights between wild animals and the performances of ancient comedies and dramas. As you pass by this premier monument of Paris, consider that the city of the past is also the city of the future, the city of your hopes.

  Paulhan has been such an outstanding figure in Parisian literary life, notably as the editor of the Nouvelle Revue française, which most people consider the leading literary review in France. But throughout a long, admirable career he has always kept his distance from the Surrealists, and notably from Breton, with whom he had a particularly vicious spat and challenged to a duel, which Breton declined. Breton died recently, and since then I have always been in two minds about him, mainly because of his (perhaps unfairly) perceived role in the poet René Crevel’s suicide and his expulsion of Giacometti from the Surrealist ranks (although that turned out to be a boon for Giacometti and his future development); but also, more generally, I’ve always resented, almost personally, the authoritarianism that Breton radiated: the supremo, the leader of the movement, the ‘Pope’, as he was nicknamed. Something about his demeanour also reminds me of the school bully or the swaggering head boy, which has always prompted me to react and revolt. Still, I’m moved by how much his death marks the end of an era, because both he and Surrealism have loomed so large in contemporary culture, and this led me to write a poem that ends by suggesting that Breton’s death has left us all more ‘responsible’.

  I’ve also been trying to get a clearer idea of what Surrealism itself means beyond all the sound and fury of its public demonstrations and its provocative manifestos. I dislike the hectoring tone of the latter and the humourless conviction that runs through its propaganda – it comes close to political, even religious, propaganda – that Surrealism always knows what’s best for you. At the same time, this was meant to be, and indeed was, a liberation, a rejection of the past values and attitudes that had led to the Great War, a revolution that turned everything on its head in the belief that the whole world needed to be reinvented. What was most remarkable, I thought, was the way Surrealism affected not only every branch of the arts but all intellectual activity and behaviour – and in France at least the very patterns of thought.

  Although it was a thoroughgoing transformation, how much really good art and literature (as opposed to polemic) did Surrealism actually produce? In terms of painting, Dalí, Miró and Max Ernst, at best; in terms of writing, Eluard, Aragon, Breton himself, but who else (since neither Artaud nor Bataille could be considered, and certainly did not consider themselves, as Surrealist)? I imagine that all these individuals were sufficiently gifted and determined to have come to the fore with or without Surrealism, that they didn’t require the great wave of creativity that the movement produced, bringing with it a host of good and not-so-good minor poets and painters (though considerably more good poets than painters) who might otherwise never have been empowered.

  In saying that Breton’s death makes us more ‘responsible’, what I meant was that he has been the ‘man in charge’ for so long that we need to replace him somehow to make up for the loss of his overarching presence. It’s an odd situation, and one that I don’t think occurs in England, where the loss of a major intellectual has less impact. Does France have a soft spot for these authoritarian figures, does it harbour a nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary days of kings and the Sun King in particular, and actually like being bossed around? It was bossed around in no uncertain manner, of course, during the Occupation, however taboo that whole chapter remains; although the French are singly individualistic, like most peoples they seem to become sheep-like en masse. How else could Napoleon have made his vertiginous ascent, or indeed an ex-adventurer like André Malraux succeed in becoming France’s first Minister of Culture deciding on everything from who should decorate the ceiling of the Opéra to which Paris monuments should be blasted free of their accumulated grime?

  Of course the real man in charge is, unquestionably, the General, whose presence has become part of the air we breathe. Unlike Breton and Malraux, de Gaulle never appears to have needed to impose himself, at least to someone of my generation: he was always there, always in charge. Oddly, I feel no animosity towards him, as I habitually do to people in authority, partly because I tend not to get mixed up in politics, and partly because I see him almost as a cartoon character, a rather dotty old grandpa constantly banging on about something that doesn’t really concern you. It’s not for nothing that he was nicknamed the ‘grande asperge’, and when you see that great big torso with the knobbly face on top, just like the tip of a huge asparagus, you, or I at least, want to smile, just as you do when Donald Duck comes on the screen. I’ve been watching the General on a couple of old newsreels when he talks to France itself, ‘mon cher et vieux pays’, and turns to the French people, with his hands outstretched, saying ‘Françaises, Français, aidez-moi!’, and it’s very moving. Somehow you do want to help him, since he looks like a great big stricken mammal who’s going to perish if you don’t. Obviously he has an odd genius for putting himself across, even if his press conferences seem to have been organised at the Elysée Palace with the kind of lugubrious majesty that must have accompanied Louis XIV’s grand lever. Whatever he says, from a change of policy to an ironic aside, waving his big arms clumsily to emphasise the point, is taken up in every café, imitated, pulled to pieces and scrutinised like an oracle demanding interpretation. Not many people seem to like him openly, but they all love to discuss him and disagree. As if he hadn’t garnered sufficient attention already, the General has just crowned his visit to Quebec with a provocative speech that ends, ‘Vive le Québec libre! Et vive la France!’, and the tongues in Paris have been wagging non-stop for days
.

  I’ve turned my hand to most things over the last year at Réalités. In art I’ve been lucky enough to write about the whole gamut, from illuminated medieval manuscripts and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (which I’ve seen close up, like Michelangelo himself, on a scaffold) to the latest paintings by Jean Dubuffet which, the artist told me, were inspired by ‘l’art brut’, ‘outsider’ art, and represented a direct attack on the traditional values of what he disparagingly calls ‘museum painting’. I’ve also done pieces about aspects of contemporary literature, like concrete poetry, and (using my first two Christian names, Michael Henry, as a nom de plume) made forays into food and wine, which has allowed me to taste wines dating back to Napoleonic times and to go to the temples of Parisian haute cuisine. Just as the wines smelt like sherry and turned out to be undrinkable (although, had I not been instructed otherwise, I would have knocked them back quite happily as historic apéritifs), so my encounter with the director of the legendary Lucas Carton restaurant on place de la Madeleine unravelled swiftly. I went there, armed with notebook and pencil, ready to ask questions about their most fabled dishes as well as the private dining rooms I’d heard that famous people who didn’t want to be seen could reach via a secret passage. Once I’d been announced, I was taken by a nervous-looking employee even younger than myself through the empty, glamorous, pink-lit art nouveau restaurant to wait in a decidedly unglamorous back room for half an hour before Monsieur Alex, as the director is known, arrived. Rather than answer the feeble questions I had prepared (‘Is fresh produce the key to success?’, ‘What’s the best meal you’ve ever had?’), M. Alex turned the tables and asked about my nationality, my age and where I usually ate. As I replied lamely, the corners of his mouth turned down in increasing degrees of disdain.