The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  ‘Mon pauvre jeune homme,’ he said eventually. ‘You cannot even speak about food. You are English, you were born during the war. You know nothing. You do not know the taste of a real egg, you do not know the taste even of a potato as it was when I was growing up when everything you can think of tasted different. I cannot talk to you, my poor young man, what I say would mean nothing to you who have never eaten things the way they were meant to be, the way they were created…’

  After that I was more circumspect about taking on French cuisine as one of my specialist fields, but I’d made good headway on theatre, notably when I went to talk to Maria Casarès, who began her career in Les Enfants du paradis and played ‘Death’ in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée before slowly establishing herself as France’s greatest tragic actress. Mindful of M. Alex, and knowing only a little bit more about theatre than about food, I went over to her apartment on rue de Vaugirard full of trepidation, but Maria Casarès was not only easy to interview but so direct and charming I fell in love with her dark eyes and dark, self-contained sorrow. So when Garith, with a mischievous glint in his eyes, comes banging out of his office and barks out at me, ‘You did a wonderful piece on theatre before, dear boy, wouldn’t you like to go and talk to these madcaps who’ve been thrown out of America and are putting on all sorts of crazy plays, stripping off their clothes, demanding freedom and taking every last drug they can get their hands on?’, I just think, yeah, that sounds like my kind of thing, and Garith clearly agrees. ‘Just up your alley, I would have thought, dear boy,’ he adds, ‘after getting pie-eyed with all those pansies of yours in London. We’ve got terrific photos and it’ll be a big story. You just need to write it up.’

  And like almost every time you get into something that goes way over your head, I didn’t give the Living Theatre another thought because the piece wasn’t due for a while. But now the Living Theatre is in town and apparently creating mayhem wherever they go. Oddly I’d had a premonition that this wasn’t going to be any old routine piece because I’ve been repeating to myself a couple of lines from a poem by Jaime Gil de Biedma that I carry around in my head like a talisman:

  Pero también

  la vida nos sujeta porque precisamente

  no es como la esperábamos.

  (But then again

  life gets the better of us precisely because

  things don’t turn out as we thought they would.)

  From what I’ve been able to piece together from previous reviews, the Living Theatre is a sort of wandering tribe that’s been evicted from America and now exists as a kind of commune where no one owns anything, everyone has equal rights and the children born in their midst are encouraged to see all the adults around them as their mothers and fathers. The founders of this anarchic troupe are called Julian Beck and Judith Malina, and to the extent that they take the decisions they are presumably a little more equal than the others. Another thing that strikes me as incongruous is that the whole tribe has taken over the nevertheless officially run and funded American Center on boulevard Raspail. Perhaps that’s a thing about American bohemia: I remember Francis Bacon telling me that however risk-taking the Beats in Tangier liked to sound, they always had a return ticket to the US in the back pocket of their jeans. At all events, ‘le Living’, as they’re called here, also seem happy to be interviewed for a patently bourgeois magazine like Réalités, and I’ve been invited to see them perform, then hang out with them afterwards for as long as I like.

  The darkened theatre looks like any darkened theatre waiting for a play to begin. The audience is the kind of aloof, well-dressed and slightly blasé audience you get in most Paris theatres, except this one is younger than most and closer to the avant-garde. The play begins, but it doesn’t seem to begin because it’s still dark, the darkness more visible now with figures moving not on the stage but down here with us, pushing their way up and down the aisles, muttering to themselves, quietly at first, then more and more audibly, chanting things like ‘To be free is to be free is to be free’, then a dark form in a dress says, ‘I’m not free to take off my clothes’, and another figure repeats, ‘I’m not free to smoke marijuana’, and a third one cries out, ‘To be free is to be free of the police’. They’re getting louder now, almost aggressive, pushing their way along the rows, with the spectators politely shifting in their seats to let them pass as the actors, they must be the actors, all begin to chant together, ‘We want freedom NOW’, and the audience is visibly disturbed, with a few people getting up and leaving, and I feel I’d as soon go because I don’t like the turn things are taking, but we don’t have much choice, because the figures have begun to crawl over peoples’ laps, and where some spectators were visibly grinning in the dark, they’re not grinning now as all these shadowy forms grapple their way over their passive thighs, voices bellowing and some of them pretending, I certainly hope it’s pretending, to retch and vomit over the bodies trapped in their seats, with some of the public – or perhaps they’re actors in disguise – being dragged away by force and hustled down a trapdoor and out of sight. Then very slowly a light begins to dawn and, with visible reluctance, the actors release their hostages and climb onto the stage and continue to harangue the audience from this new vantage point.

  I’d have been worried enough by this impromptu performance in any event and I’d been getting ready to fend off anyone who came near me, but I know I’ve got to keep my cool and look as if I regularly went to the theatre to be aggressed and attacked because afterwards we’ll be talking with no holds barred, and I expect to be given a pretty hostile reception. But the ‘actors’ file out peacefully enough in little groups into the gardens afterwards, dazed by the late evening sun but triumphant, as though they’d been purged by all the simulated violence that has taken place, and they start lounging around a huge cedar of Lebanon. I begin to relax as well, particularly when we’re joined by hordes of small children who are soon playing hide-and-seek amongst us, probably thinking I’m great fun because I’m dressed so differently, and I take off my tie and jacket and try to look more like everybody else in their old T-shirts and jeans – which is what Julian Beck is wearing, too, but you can’t mistake him with his bald pate and a strange curtain of white hair growing out from the back of his head, and Judith Malina, a tiny, concentrated figure in black, comes over to join us, and the three of us start chatting. ‘That cedar was planted over a century ago by Chateaubriand,’ Julian says, and although I still resent the raucous ordeal they’ve just put us all through, I warm to the fact that he’s clearly an educated man, and since everybody seems to be smoking weed quite openly I accept a joint from him and get out my notebook. But I hardly need to ask any questions because Judith has started talking too. ‘Chateaubriand has his issues and we have ours,’ she says. ‘The whole world has changed but nobody seems to have noticed. That’s because nobody opens up fully, nobody can open up fully and our task is to make people open up and confront the confusion that’s in all of them. We’ll never make any progress until they recognise their own confusion. I want more progress, more openness, and I want it NOW!’

  There’s applause from the crowd of ragged actors behind. A couple of them have fallen asleep; the others are smoking. I think I should try to mingle among them to get other voices for the article, and one of them who tells me his name is Rufus offers me another spliff, if that’s what it’s called, and I think that’s fine, although I never smoke the stuff regularly and it doesn’t seem to be having much effect besides making me feel a little easier and light-headed. ‘These are all my kids,’ one of the guys with a mound of ginger hair and thick sideboards says, motioning to a group of children hiding behind the cedar. ‘I’ve balled every goddam woman you see here,’ he adds, and as I look round at the women, who are mostly sitting together, wearing beads and shawls but no makeup, and playing distractedly with the children, they smile back at me, and one of them, a bit more attractive than the others, she’s called Mary Mary or was it Angry Mary, says, ‘you should really try
the good stuff, this really packs a punch’, and she lights a rollup and hands it to me. I don’t really want another one but I think I’m winning their trust, if I take it they’ll open up, give me the story, so I take a really deep drag and when the smoke hits the back of my throat with a thump I give a big wink to show I’ve had this before, know where I’m at, even though I’ve no idea, and everyone laughs, and the woman says, ‘The point you want to get across is that we are a non-violent revolution in a violent civilisation. The violence must stop NOW!’

  ‘The violence must stop NOW!’ the others join in.

  I look at my pad. I’ve got quite a few notes down. Cedar. Chateau. Revolution NOW!

  I’m not feeling very well. As if I had just stepped out of myself. And now I’m looking down at where we all are from a worrying, dizzying height.

  ‘The violence must stop NOW!’ the refrain comes from under the cedar.

  I want it to stop too, NOW, before this disconnect goes any further. But I’m separating from myself, whatever I and myself are, they’re drifting apart, one of them floating higher and higher up into the night sky, like a tiny balloon, severed, distantly looking down on the other. Something has happened that should not have happened. A split, an irreparable fissure in the mind.

  The faces under the tree are still smiling, but blurred. The voices, too. Suddenly I am totally alone on this desolate planet, detached from myself, frightened and shrunken under the infinity of the stars. I drift out on to boulevard du Montparnasse, this is still Montparnasse, but those lamps lighting the street are fallen stars and the trees they illuminate look flat and substanceless. Nothing will ever be the same again. Even the Métro steps seem disconnected as I float fearfully down towards a destination I’m no longer sure of. The people in the Métro know that I’m ‘out’ of my mind. They only look at me furtively, but I can see it in their eyes. I am the man who has lost his mind, and they will contact the police or the hospital to have me taken away. Perhaps there is a ward where they keep people who are no longer ‘themselves’.

  If I make it back to rue Larrey, perhaps everything will slip back to the way it was before, as if I’m waking up out of a nightmare, shaken but hugely relieved. Eventually I find the right street and then the right door, still with this strange sense of floating, and I make my way up the staircase carefully, half-expecting to see Duchamp coming down, slim and dandyish, and let myself into the flat. I know that Anne won’t be back for a while, so I’ll have time to pull myself together, get back to the Michael she knows rather than this stranger who has inexplicably lost himself. But the moment I open the door I remember we have just finished redecorating the flat in psychedelic green whorls and orange zigzags that will only confirm that I have lost my mind. Closing my eyes in the lobby, I drop my clothes off onto the floor and fumble my way into the bathroom, pulling the plastic curtain behind me to mask the lurid walls before I turn the shower on. In a sudden gust the plastic curtain wraps itself round me with intimate insistence until I fight myself free of its clammy hold and adopt a foetal position sitting under the drumming water. This now seems to be my best bet, my only bet. If I can stay here long enough, the poison in my system might wash away and I can tell Anne, in a normal, even hopefully off-hand way that I took strange stuff and had a bit of a turn.

  I put on fresh clothes and wait for her return. But when she comes in, I look into her loyal brown eyes and see myself reflected as the distorted dwarf I have become. My only chance of not being taken away, being ‘sectioned’, is to keep this madness a secret, from Anne as from everyone else.

  3

  Street Theatre: 12 rue Larrey, Ve (1967–68)

  And yet normal life, so-called normal life, goes on. Although what I’d long accepted as a hairline, cyclothymic crack in my personality suddenly stands revealed as a frightening psychotic fissure, nothing much has changed on the outside. Sunday is like every Sunday, with the ritual followed as closely as a church service. We get up late and I go down to buy the croissants from our good, if grumpy, baker on rue Monge while Anne makes the coffee. Then we shower (and behind the obscenely clinging plastic curtains I try to block out the memory of myself crouched on the shower’s ribbed floor), dress comfortably, and go down to one of the local food markets. Our preferred route is to stroll along rue de l’Epée-de-bois, whose name comes from an old wooden sword used as a shop sign, and I always try to picture it as it would have looked centuries ago when each house on the street was identified by a sign rather than a number. Then we wander down through rue Mouffetard’s thronged shops, with their displays of vegetables and seafood and cheese, until we get to the bounty of farmers’ fresh produce laid out on the stalls that flank the place Saint-Médard.

  While Anne begins her shopping offensive, I usually steal away to sit and sort myself out for a few minutes in the Eglise Saint-Médard, which was built on an old Roman road and where pilgrims suffering from convulsions used to come in the hope they would be cured by praying at the tomb of a famous ascetic, François de Pâris. I never pray, having lost what religious belief I had in adolescence, but I go to small, venerable churches like this, or Saint Séverin, or the Greek Orthodox Saint-Julien-le-pauvre beside the Seine, as refuges against the city and whatever happens to be warring in my mind at that particular moment. Still, I always get back in time to relieve Anne of a bulging string-bag, which usually includes root vegetables unfamiliar to me, like Jerusalem artichokes and the unpleasant-sounding rutabaga (which turns out to be the humble swede or neep), and we work our way through the stalls until we have enough food for several meals. If our finances are not too depleted, as they tend to be towards the end of the month, we allow ourselves at least one treat: some early asparagus, a big spider crab from Brittany that continues to claw vigorously at its plastic bag, or a punnet of wild strawberries. Then we stop for a small glass of sharp, almost sour white wine, un petit blanc, at the café where the stallholders josh with each other at the bright zinc counter, before trudging back festooned with food.

  The crowning pleasure in this relaxed routine is our ritual visit to the Cinémathèque on rue d’Ulm, a stone’s throw from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, an institution which I see as indeed so ‘supérieure’, with alumni ranging from Bergson to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, that the very sight of its stern, classical façade sparks off the feelings of intellectual inferiority that I often experience in Paris, whether gazing at the latest offerings from an illustrious publisher like Gallimard or imagining all the brilliant thought bottled up under the sparkling dome that crowns the Académie Française. But I have no such hang-ups in the dream world that Henri Langlois, its temperamental dictator, has created at the Cinémathèque. Anne and I are addicted to its riches now, arriving in the early afternoon for the first showing and, almost against our will, staying for the second one, even if the film on offer is less compelling than the first, and then, with no will left at all, staying for the third, so that when Sunday dinner time eventually comes round our heads are filled with a hot jumble of disjointed images: Gary Cooper walking down that deserted street in High Noon, Simone Signoret lifting her face to be kissed, the shadows playing over the doomed Jean Gabin in whatever it was called. We would have stayed even longer in our well-worn, plastic-covered seats if there had been anything else to watch, but we already felt lucky to have seen so much, some jewel of Italian neorealism here, a whole afternoon of Buster Keaton or the Marx brothers or Eisenstein there, without, as sometimes happened, Langlois deciding to cut off a film in mid-projection if he felt that the audience was laughing in the wrong places or chattering too loudly. Nothing dismayed us more than when the lights came on halfway through a film and his portly figure loomed up in front of the screen to remonstrate with spectators about their unseemly behaviour and to send us on our way or, if our luck held, to let us off with a warning.

  We are all pretty tolerant of Langlois, not only because we acknowledge that he is the high priest in this temple of film but also because of the stories about his
having saved so many movies that might otherwise have been destroyed during the Occupation, even though it’s also said that he stuffed loads of film cans higgledy-piggledy into his bathtub and often can’t lay hands on pictures he knows he has – somewhere. But as a group of hardcore film fanatics, gathering outside between sessions to drag fervently on our Gauloises or Gitanes, with their distinctive yellow corn paper, we’ve reason to be grateful because there is nowhere else, even in film-mad Paris, where we could have seen all Buñuel from Un Chien andalou to Belle de Jour or the most puzzling, provocative New Wave masterpieces interspersed with classics like Abel Gance’s Napoleon and Renoir’s Grande Illusion – and for literally less than a couple of francs a time.

  At the end of these marathon sessions, Anne and I walk up towards the place du Panthéon, past the Hôtel des Grands Hommes and then down and around the perimeter of the dark, gated Luxembourg gardens, letting the mass of images settle like a heavy buffet meal in which one has feasted on so many different dishes that the hors d’oeuvres are barely distinguishable from the desserts. Or, full of flickering effects in close-up and dissolve but otherwise famished, we move down to the Latin Quarter and patrol the small streets, glancing disdainfully at what the other vintage cinemas like the Champollion or the Studio des Ursulines are showing that we have not already seen, until we find a Vietnamese soup kitchen or Greek grill that will relieve us of having to cook our own supper.

  If we’re feeling flush on such an evening, which happens only before we’ve paid the rent, we wander over to place Maubert, another square where there is a lively food market, and half-cross the Seine to the big, noisy Brasserie de l’Ile St-Louis. Although it’s meant to be for special occasions, we must have been here about twenty times over the past year so that it’s become another addictive ritual, and at every meal we’ve had there I struggle to decide whether I’ll have the soft, fatty ham hock with lentils or with apple sauce, or avoid the dilemma altogether by plumping for the house cassoulet, an order which the saturnine waiter in his long, off-white apron always relays loudly to the kitchen as ‘un Cassius Clay’, raising a laugh despite the fact that everyone in the restaurant must know his old jokes by heart. If I start with an oily herring on a bed of raw onion and warm, sliced potatoes, Anne will choose something lighter and more ladylike such as a mixed crudités, but she’s perfectly capable of putting away a big choucroute and finishing off with a blueberry tart as I deal with a Munster cheese rendered only slightly less smelly by the aromatic cumin seeds that come with it. And where Anne contents herself with a green-stem glass of Alsatian wine, I down a mug or two of beer, followed by a ceramic pichet of red wine. Thin and sourish as it may be, it unlocks a surge in the blood, and my hopes rise as, arms wound tightly round each other, we wend our way home to bed.