The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  But the oddest person by a long chalk in our inner circle is a slight, hard-drinking, chain-smoking figure of mesmerising intensity called Barry Lexington. He is clearly brilliant and as clearly deranged, going off on tirades that make his whole body shake on whatever subject happens to be obsessing him, whether it’s Vietnam, Israel or the Black Panthers. It’s impossible not to listen to him because he is often extremely perceptive and very funny – he accused all of us the other day of ‘doing nothing but sitting at our desks, pulling our puddings’. No work of course gets done while Barry rants on, and there was an alarming exchange of blows the other day when Barry went off, as he often does, on an anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic attack and got resoundingly slapped by the all-in wrestler, who is Jewish. At that moment I realised with a jolt that Barry was probably Jewish too, and that Lexington was probably something like Liechtenstein at some point, which lends another twist to his whole complex, disturbing presence.

  The French editors are amiable and easy-going with us. Although we go around as if we are at the centre of the universe, broadcasting the best of this great newspaper to the English-speaking world, they themselves don’t seem to accord us much importance, mainly I think because they see France and the French language as the only focus that counts. Since beginning to write original articles and reviews for the French edition, as well as editing my double-page spread in the English version, I have fallen into an unexpected dilemma. I’m extremely flattered to appear on the same pages as such revered art and literary critics as André Chastel and Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, but the pieces I hand in are both endlessly time-consuming – I write them in English first, have them translated, then completely rewrite them in French and get the result closely edited – and they never hit the mark I’m seeking because they don’t carry a distinct, authorial voice. So I’ve started writing reviews directly in French and revising them with a helpful editor from Le Monde’s literary supplement, and it’s the best French lesson you could ever have: it makes you start thinking in French, so your whole approach to what you are going to say changes before you even put pen to paper. But as my new identity as a writer in French develops and I need less help, another problem arises. There is no way that I can continue to write in both French and English: one of them has at least to dominate, if not basically banish the other. Language is so central to any committed writer’s identity that you can’t play about with English in the morning and French in the afternoon. As a person who fundamentally prefers to keep his allegiances simple and clear, I’m already split down the middle by sharing my life with two women and I don’t have the nervous stamina, or whatever it takes, to be thrown into another deep dilemma. I do a piece about Lawrence Durrell and an interview with Patricia Highsmith in French, then flounder about in an identity crisis for a fortnight, only emerging once I have banished one language and proclaimed my richer, more subtle mother tongue the winner.

  Like the languages and the lovers, I have kept my two cities, Paris and London, going in tandem, and luckily this has never presented a problem. During my first two years in Paris, I imagined I would be going back to London before long, but then imperceptibly I began having a real life here and putting down at least shallow roots. But while focusing on my adopted home, I don’t like to neglect London, and whenever I have a good reason to go back I’m always happy to spend a few days there, particularly now that my allegiance to the language has been confirmed and I want to keep up with all the current expressions rather than start speaking the strangely stilted English that many expatriates I know slide into. An old friend who’s been in Paris for twenty years wrote to me recently and referred to our ‘having bumped into ourselves’ at the club-like enclave upstairs at Café de Flore, adding that he hoped ‘we would renew the encounter soon’.

  A good opportunity to go to London has turned up because Art International, an art magazine based in Switzerland, has asked me to write about Francis Bacon’s recent paintings. It’s the most serious and best-produced art magazine I’ve come across, and I’m always keen to see Francis, who, when he’s not in the foreground of my life, impacting heavily on the direction it takes, is always in the background, influencing it more subtly by the example he sets and his own attitude to life; this he has drilled into me with phrases repeated so often, like ‘life is meaningless except for the meaning we give it by our drives’, that I begin to think and act as if they are mine.

  Seeing Francis’s new pictures jolts me like nothing else. They are full of blood and thunder, with every head and limb attacked and disfigured by his imperious brush. I am left alone with a score of them in a cold basement gallery, to think my thoughts and try to come to terms with the unbridled savagery they represent. Beside these scenes of wilful carnage and distortion, the problems I myself have in conducting two intimate relationships appear minor, like a slight jarring in an otherwise well-ordered, tranquil world. Francis seems to revel in turmoil, taking it from picture to picture to further extremes like a virtuoso in the rendering of every degree of pain, humiliation and destruction. But of course this would all end in nothing, a mound of pigment that had lost its way and collapsed of its own contradictions, if it were not pulsating with manic energy and purpose. The new works are literally masterful, with Francis at the top of his powers to take his chaos of human flesh to the very edge without allowing it to topple into abstraction, and I tell him so when we meet in the very different atmosphere of Claridge’s dining room.

  ‘I’m particularly glad you liked them,’ he comments suavely. And within minutes we are back into a routine of extravagant food, wine and talk which I know so well but had forgotten how much I liked. Bottle follows bottle, obliterating space and time until I might be at any point in the particular arc of my friendship with Francis, a lunch in the early days in Soho or a drunken spree just before I left for Paris, carrying his introduction to Giacometti like a talisman with me as I went.

  Francis wants to be brought up to date on everything that has happened in Paris, where he followed the May events with keen, if detached, interest. We’ve got through the first bottle of Krug without having even looked at the menu, so another is brought and popped open at our table and I realise how greedy I am for this kind of luxury after so many months of lager, plonk and reheated stew. It’s just like old times, with Francis benignly pink and in one of his star roles as attentive host and master of ceremonies, which I know as the evening progresses through the clubs of Soho will slowly turn him into a diabolical but still hugely attractive Lord of Misrule. For the moment, however, a detailed discussion of how best to translate General de Gaulle’s dismissive dictum to the students ‘La réforme oui, la chie-en-lit non’ is under way, and I reckon that all my recent experience of transforming French texts at Le Monde should allow me to shine here; but after pulling the phrase this way and that through the English language we conclude that Francis’s suggestion that ‘shitting on your own doorstep’ is about as close as we’re going to get. Then I’m very pleased because he laughs outright when I tell him that there was a poster all over the streets immediately afterwards with a big cartoon of the General with the caption ‘La chie-en-lit c’est lui’. Despite turning sixty, Francis hasn’t lost the impulse he had as a young man to confront authority, although I don’t think that has ever taken a specifically political character in his case; he declares himself without much emphasis to be an ‘old-fashioned liberal’. But he is very aware of politics’ wider impact on people’s lives. We are now well into the evening ritual, with champagne and caviar dispatched and the second bottle of Crozes-Hermitage opened to go with the red-leg partridge, and Francis is correspondingly expansive. ‘I can quite see why the students wanted to get rid of all those dreadful old men in government,’ he says. ‘But what would they have done if they’d actually overturned them and got all the freedom they said they wanted. Because freedom is a very strange thing. Apart from artists, most people wouldn’t know what to do with real freedom once they had it. I mean, if you’re not an ar
tist, what would you do with it? Of course, you can shake your arms in the air and shout slogans, but what would it really change?’

  I suppose I’ve given up any idea of coming back to live in London, but there’s a stolid calm and dependability about the city with its orderly queues and red pillar boxes and telephone booths which I appreciate and, deep down, approve of. You couldn’t imagine Londoners taking to the streets, chopping down their own trees and overturning or torching other peoples’ cars to form barricades against the largely respected coppers that keep the peace. I enjoy slipping back into the old familiar atmosphere of the dank pubs, the smoke-fugged upper decks of the buses and the trendy restaurants where old girlfriends of mine used to work as part-time waitresses. Sometimes, in a cab or talking to a bus conductor before he ratchets out the right ticket from his silver machine, I worry whether I might sound a little foreign, coming up with the odd expression that’s no longer current or quite English. But otherwise I feel very much at home and correspondingly a little bored after a couple of days revisiting old haunts. I’ve walked through Soho without feeling the need to drop into the French House or the Colony Room by myself and gone back to the Egyptian rooms at the British Museum which have fascinated me since childhood. I’ve also been catching up on the bookshops, hunting for bargains along the Charing Cross Road and seeing what was fashionable at John Sandoe’s, which is still reassuringly crammed with the latest glossy hardbacks, just off the King’s Road. Sandoe himself wasn’t there, but I was taken in hand by a lady with a brisk, upper-class voice who pressed book after covetable, expensive book on me until I realised I didn’t have enough money to pay for them. To cover my embarrassment I told her I’d already bought a lot of books and couldn’t take any more with me back to Paris, where I now lived.

  ‘How frightfully clever of you to live in Paris!’ she shrilled at the top of her voice, allowing me to slink out of the shop empty-handed.

  Francis has been telling me for a while that he’s coming over to Paris to discuss a big, new exhibition at either the Musée d’Art Moderne or the Grand Palais; he feels the space at the Grand Palais is more ‘suitable’, by which I think he means ‘grander’, which it certainly is. Then he sends me a telegram, which turns up from our post office as a ‘pneu’, a terse message typed out on blue paper, also known – I’m showing off my local knowledge here – as a ‘petit bleu’, to say I should call him at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères to arrange to meet. Francis already knows Anne, who was very shy about meeting the ‘grand peintre anglais’ I’d told her so much about, and although they got on perfectly well she doesn’t care for the late nights or the excessive drinking, which she calls ‘idiot’: I tell her she’s ‘idiote’ as I swing out towards the nightly odyssey over an endless sea of superior booze, then tell her how right she was as I come round the next morning with my mind and movements half-paralysed.

  Nevertheless I enjoy the feeling of sheer, voluptuous excess, and when Francis is in town my whole life goes into top gear – and not merely in the sense that my penny-pinching meals at La Casbah and Le P’tit Coin are replaced by sumptuous, wine-drenched banquets at the Ritz and the Tour d’Argent. Suddenly new projects come into view, a travelling show (‘Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past’), a book (my dramatic revelations of the artist I know) or a translation (there is talk of David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis coming out in French). But more immediately there are all the people that I would never meet, particularly in the clannish Parisian art world, if I weren’t going around with Francis, who appears to want me to sit in on his congenial lunches with a range of well-known museum directors, art dealers and art-world writers, even though I don’t do much more than provide a rough translation of the compact phrases Francis likes to bring out with a flourish or find a name that he has temporarily forgotten. This is my moment on Mount Parnassus, because many of the people I come across, whether Mary McCarthy, Yves Bonnefoy or Susan Sontag, are the authors of books, and I should like passionately to join them, to write my book, whatever that turns out to be. Even while writing articles, however, I get stuck, since my creative impulse is regularly challenged by an equally powerful critical impulse, with the result that the two are locked in combat until the looming deadline decrees that I just rush the piece out any old how. Dreaming about future achievements, however, does not prevent me from more practical considerations, and I take note that with my insider knowledge of Francis’s forthcoming exhibition at the Grand Palais (the venue has now been secured), I will have a small scoop all of my own that I can write up for Le Monde.

  ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly’ is a phrase that’s been running through my head for weeks.

  The deed I have in mind is desperate but not necessarily bloody; it’s like an invisible strangulation. I’ve managed to get back more or less into my office routine in the wake of Francis’s departure (he always leaves bodies behind, and I’m correspondingly glad to be still standing). The relationship with Anne, though frayed and losing its original, easy-going impetus, limps on. The ‘funny spells’ that still come over me as a result of my bad trip with the Living Theatre are less frequent, albeit as hard to deal with. What is driving me to desperation is my love, my own weird love, for Danielle. I am under her sway and I worship her, like some damned soul at an uncertain shrine, and like that benighted creature I don’t really know what my devotions amount to. We began in a stasis and we are stuck in a stasis, with no before or after. When I penetrate her pale, smooth body, I feel like an X-ray. I know I have done it before, and I will do it again. There is no change, no progression in coitus because it leads nowhere, and in any case there is nowhere to go. An ejaculation today is like the first ejaculation a year ago, a flare of sperm suspended against a void. In Danielle, time comes to a standstill. And without time, there is no direction, and no hope.

  To survive, I have to break away, like a disciple who has lost faith and needs to re-establish his fragile identity, his broken self. I have made several pathetic attempts to talk about my dilemma before, but they were expressed so tentatively that Danielle probably had no idea what I was trying to say.

  At our next meeting, on the bridge outside the discreet café on the Ile Saint-Louis, I tell her plainly I am no longer able to continue a liaison that makes me duplicitous, that keeps me dodging and weaving continuously in my everyday life, that splits me in two and makes me question where my loyalty and even my identity lies. I cannot love between two lovers. I have lost myself and my life is in tatters.

  It is dusk and the light is going down on the freezing Seine still flowing beneath the bridge. Danielle in her grey winter coat closes her eyes and as I talk to her she starts to circle round slowly, her arms stretched out as if she were being crucified, her mouth wide open in a soundless scream, as if once again she had been picked out to suffer, to descend an endless spiral of grief. I watch her silently, and when I can no longer bear the sight of her turning round and round, I move away over the hump of the bridge, pausing giddily, shell-shocked, to watch the broad back of the river rippling with electric light plunge towards the sea.

  ‘Next time I will kill you!’ I hear her scream as I plunge further into the welcome, passive dark.

  A week later her book, Meurtre, arrives, inscribed: ‘To you, Michael. A long time afterwards’.

  I write her a poem, but it is really a poem for myself:

  Murder today.

  Your book the unopened wound

  in the death between us.

  I cannot send it to her because it is all over. All the guilt, all the subterfuge, and all the love, all the hopeless, tormented, doomed love, ends here.

  ‘I’ve left you some soup to heat up and some salad in the kitchen,’ Anne says. ‘I hope you feel a bit better today.’

  The door closes decisively, and a different kind of silence settles over the apartment, heavier, like an invisible fog seeping into the darkened bedroom.

  I can’t remember when I�
�ve been so ill before. It started like an ordinary flu, everyone’s been coming down with it, then a temperature with shooting pains behind the ears and a hacking cough. Now I am completely drained, with no energy or desire to get up or do anything but stay here in the dark, detecting the little sounds that filter through the silence, a distant motorbike, the brief scuttling then a scratching in the wainscot, a voice raised by someone in the street. Then total silence again, until out of boredom I totter over to the record player to put on a favourite song, Mouloudji singing Prévert, Léo Ferré’s haunting adaptation of Baudelaire that Danielle gave me, ‘Les Feuilles mortes’ (‘Autumn Leaves’) by just about anyone from Yves Montand to Piaf and Gréco. I put them on one after another, downing whatever wine or spirits is still left in the house, and if I can stop short of getting drunk life seems marginally better for a moment.