The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Perhaps part of the melancholy comes not only from Francis’s burnt-out love affair with George and the autumnal leaves but from the history that hangs so heavily over this square. I suppose this is why I wanted at one time to live here, yet I realise now that the sense of the past is more oppressive than in the Marais because it is concentrated on this one arcaded rectangle whereas in my area it’s spread more lightly and diversely over a whole chunk of the city. I know the Palais Royal has been at the centre of Paris life since Richelieu built it as his own palace (known then as the Palais Cardinal) around 1640, but it’s not so much its political importance, both royal and revolutionary, that interests me as its reputation as a place of leisure, entertainment and debauchery. You only have to dip in to the descriptions of it from around the late eighteenth century for the whole place to start teeming with life. This rather staid-looking square then housed theatres and operas (two of them), an incredible variety of shops, cafés, political clubs and gambling dens. You could find everyone from all the social classes here and buy everything, including love as purveyed by the crowds of prostitutes, demi-mondaines and other females of doubtful virtue that gathered in the gardens (as they did, of course, in the parks of London) along with attendant pimps, thieves and swindlers.

  The very idea of so much intense human activity helps dispel the regret that such a splendid lunch ended miserably. But I still feel anxious about how my notoriously fickle, adopted city will react to Francis’s painting. I know he has pinned everything on this new show, even though he is too much of a dandy to admit it, because Paris is still for him the absolute centre of the creative world. But the gods certainly seem to be on his side because the late October weather is radiant, with high blue skies and a feeling of crisp renewal in the air. The French press has already reacted favourably to the idea of this unruly outsider by making him sound so existentialist as to be almost French, and Francis’s own, well-recorded love of France and French art has done him no harm here. The exhibition opening could hardly be more of a triumph. Only Picasso has had the honour of a full retrospective at the Grand Palais before, and this comparatively unknown ‘Anglo-Irish’ painter (the French make much of the fact that Francis was born in Dublin rather than in the UK, to the point of simply calling him ‘Irish’) has fully lived up to the accolade. There is also the visceral shock of discovering something so powerfully new it feels, as one prominent critic puts it, ‘like a punch in the face’.

  To celebrate the opening, an official banquet has been organised in the Train Bleu, the cavernous Belle Epoque restaurant which Francis likes so much overlooking the Gare de Lyon. A large contingent of Bacon supporters has turned up from Soho, already contentedly drunk, and it looks as though it’s going to be a memorable evening with us all basking in the glow of Francis’s success. But as everyone settles or crashes into their seat at the tables running the length of the brasserie a discordant note goes up, something about George, underlying the jostling and banter of so many jovial guests, and it runs round the room like wildfire: ‘George took an overdose! George was found dead in the hotel room he was sharing with Francis! The hotel manager came and told Francis just as President Pompidou was opening his exhibition. George is dead!’

  The news of George’s death spreads like a dark stain over the French art world, then everywhere across the globe where Bacon’s name and distorted images are known. While his living presence barely drew attention, George’s absence has turned him into an indispensable, mythical figure. Stories about his East End background, life of crime and his very incongruity in Bacon’s highly sophisticated entourage are passed around, embellished and multiplied. As an aura of martyrdom begins to envelop George, the numerous portraits of him that hang in the Grand Palais assume a new intensity, even a prophetic urgency, as if their buckled contours and livid hues foresaw his untimely end.

  Bacon spends the following evening with a few friends at a small restaurant called La Mère Michel. At first, he seems merely absent, going through the motions of being the attentive host, mechanically ordering bottle after bottle of wine. And we go through the motions of being appreciative guests, not knowing what to say. Then, out of the blue, Bacon begins to talk about George, about his beauty and about his love for him. ‘And now he’s dead,’ he repeats after every sentence. He is only just beginning to realise amid all the official celebrations of his Grand Palais opening how final George’s death is. And when Bacon begins to talk about the guilt he will feel, now and for years to come, his voice becomes more and more disembodied, because none of us sitting round that table dares raise our eyes to look at him.

  One of the best things about being a freelance writer is the way a single article can occasionally change your life. Tensions seethe in our chaotic editorial set-up at Le Monde, and at one very low point a drunk and obstreperous Barry Lexington had to be wrestled to the ground to prevent him from hurling a weighty Remington typewriter out of the window and onto the street four storeys below. The very future of the English edition now seems in doubt, and I have started casting around for as many back-up positions as a ‘cultural correspondent’ on other English-language newspapers and magazines as possible. I’ve found an ideal slot reporting regularly on art exhibitions in Paris and further afield in Europe for the Financial Times. The editor in London, Freddie Young, is exceptionally easy and pleasant to work with and he accepts most of the shows I want to cover without question. But even I was surprised to get his go-ahead for a full review of some modern African sculpture that was shown recently in the exhibition annexe at the Musée Rodin. The artists in question are from the Shona tribe in what is now called Southern Rhodesia. They have their own language and traditional, ancestor-based beliefs, and over the last decade or so a number of them have revealed a distinct talent for carving in stone. I would have seen the show and given it a mention somewhere in any case, because I have a special interest in the so-called ‘primitive’ arts, and I’ve bought a couple of things that I like, including an impressive tribal shield, even though they will probably turn out to be very run-of-the-mill objects as far as their value is concerned. But what took me much further into Shona art was meeting Frank McEwen, who served as British cultural attaché in Paris after the war and got to know Matisse, Brancusi and Picasso well. Fascinated by African art since childhood, Frank went on to be the major force behind Rhodesia’s main museum in the capital, Salisbury, and once he’d noticed that a few of his native employees could draw and carve with a crude, expressive force, he encouraged them by providing materials and a space where they could work. With natural fluency they began to produce a range of striking figurative sculptures that drew on such local myths as the great bird of Zimbabwe, an eagle believed to act as a messenger from tribal ancestors.

  Talking to Frank at length about this unusual school of sculptors deepened my interest to the point where I wrote a couple of enthusiastic reviews about the exhibition. This delighted Frank, and we continued to correspond after he returned to Rhodesia. Then a telegram from him arrives out of the blue announcing that he has decided to retire and asking me, as someone who understands the importance of Shona sculpture, to replace him as director of the National Gallery of Art of Rhodesia as well as a smaller museum in Bulawayo. At first, I’m inclined to laugh. I’ve got my flat and a couple of new freelance opportunities, and my private life, if it can be called that, has brightened up considerably since I’ve been seeing a charming American girl who’s studying here and I’ve just met an older, more sophisticated French woman living between Paris and New York. So why would I want to give up all this to go out to Africa, intriguing as it sounds? Then I receive a more formal letter from Frank confirming the offer. Reading it carefully I blink at the size of the salary, the paid holidays, the penthouse flat in the National Gallery itself, the servants (servants!) and the car. I look round my twenty-five square metres and the unmade bed. A couple are arguing in the street below, the sky is a sullen cloudy grey, Marie-Hélène’s shrill laugh rises over the hu
bbub at the bar. Surely one little trip to Africa, touching down on Cape Verde to refuel, couldn’t hurt. At least I could see what I would be missing…

  The sheer, empty beauty of the landscape is what astonishes me most. I have never seen such a wide sky overarching an infinity of long grass, grazing animals and distant mountains. At dawn on my first day I was woken by a tall, powerfully built black man who, as I gasped in terror, gently handed me a cup of tea. I saw the sun rise and slowly touch the shadows into colour. Then Frank took me out into the bush and we watched the animals, most memorably baboons going through a complex, daredevil contest that involved young males jumping off a cliff face and lazily reaching out a long arm to save themselves at the last second from crashing to the ground. We followed various animal tracks in the hope of seeing giraffes and trekked out to the great Temple of Zimbabwe, which dates back to the eleventh century, to admire the vast, dry-stone walls that still survive, prompting me to fantasise about what the original Shona kingdom and court might have been. We met some of the foremost Shona sculptors whose careers Frank had fostered, then drove down roads overhung by jacaranda trees in bloom to the smaller museum in Bulawayo, pausing to watch elephants gather at dusk around a waterhole, and staying in roadside hotels where, for all the exotic sights that encircled them, the atmosphere and the food (a brass gong being sounded to announce dinner) resembled boarding houses in England in the 1950s.

  I was entranced by Africa, all the more so that I had been deeply shocked by George Dyer’s suicide and welcomed this radical change of scene. But the underlying political tensions as well as the difficulties I foresaw as much with the redneck white farmers as with the apparently submissive blacks, who avoided your gaze, made me realise that I would soon regret uprooting myself from Paris. I took my leave fondly, vowing to come back and research into the extraordinary Shona myths and the legacy of Zimbabwe, whose totemic birds – messengers from the gods – fascinated me all the more when Phinias Moyo, one of the sculptors, presented me with his carving in dark green serpentine of a sly, wise eagle that stayed in my lap, quizzing me throughout the return flight to Europe.

  When I got back to the Marais, with the vast strangeness of Africa still burnt into my eyes, I decided to celebrate those roots by giving a party. Some of my friends from London came, others from Réalités and Le Monde, or from newer pockets of my Parisian life, like the Marais film-maker and a couple of artists I’d met while reviewing their shows in galleries on rue de Seine. Anne came with her new boyfriend, who sported thick ginger sideburns and the widest flared trousers anyone had seen. Bernard came, eyeing Anne’s sister up something rotten and visibly boring her with details of all the improvements he had wrought in my tiny flat. We danced a few variations on the Twist, with forays into the Mashed Potato and the Frug, and somebody who’d just returned from the States introduced us to the Hully Gully. We drank too much and laughed even more.

  Having put my older lady friend into a taxi in the small hours, I go back up the stairs to my flat and bump into a man I’ve often seen before in the café slipping out of Marie-Hélène’s room. He’s noticeably better dressed than Bébert, who’s gone down to the Auvergne for the week to see his parents. The conclusion is obvious, but I don’t think much about it until late the following morning when I open the door to go out and find a large bag of wild mushrooms on the mat. Marie-Hélène is making a peace offering, quite unnecessarily, since the last thing I would do is spill the beans or make some stupid joke in Bébert’s hearing. I think these are ceps, known to be particularly delicious in risottos and pasta dishes. I’ve got enough here for a whole dinner party, and their pungent, earthy smell wafts gustily into my room. Before I make any plans I try to look them up in a guide to mushrooms, where the first one I find is called, worryingly enough, ‘trompette de la mort’. It would be easier, of course, to ask Marie-Hélène herself how she thinks I might use them, in a daube perhaps, or chopped into scrambled eggs. But this is now a delicate matter, because any reference to the mushrooms would also immediately conjure up the mystery man coming out of her bedroom. I’ve picked a couple of mushrooms out and they seem to compare closely to the boletus edulis, but just to be on the safe side I look into the section on poisonous mushrooms and find: ‘Many of these deadly fungi bear an unfortunate resemblance to edible species and are thus especially dangerous.’ It’s obvious to me that, although you come across mushroom-induced deaths of various kinds often enough in the French newspapers, Marie-Hélène would never attempt simply to get me out of the way. But what if even she couldn’t tell for certain ‘deadly’ from ‘edible’?

  The following morning, on my way out to Le Monde, I slip the bag of ambiguous fungi stealthily but firmly into the communal dustbin at the bottom of the stairs, then wave cheerily at Marie-Hélène who’s doling out coffee, calvados and the first tots of white wine to her regulars at the bar.

  7

  One of Us: 11 rue de Braque, IIIe (1972–75)

  Things at Le Monde in English have gone from bad to worse. Although the parent paper’s editor-in-chief, André Fontaine, hasn’t yet spelt it out in a formal letter to us, the édition anglaise is patently on its last legs. Scenting blood, our main political subs have moved in for the kill, headed by Barry who gleefully screws up the leading news stories he used to edit so diligently with non sequiturs and private jokes. Both Barry and Gwyn have taken to coming in late, then disappearing to lunch at one of the fancier local restaurants, such as Au Petit Riche, and coming back, if they come back at all, catatonic from the wine and Armagnac they’ve put away. Their drunken antics weigh as heavily over the editing room as the smell they bring in with them, most noticeably when they returned the other day boasting that at some incredible Lyonnais restaurant near République they consumed a huge platter of roasted garlic heads with their leg of lamb, and this combined with numerous digestifs created such a powerful, decaying stink that it sticks in my nostrils as the odour of our impending demise.

  Barry continues to fascinate me as much as he disgusts me. When I learnt that, in a drunken rage, he’d kicked his girlfriend’s guinea pig to death I was filled with revulsion and, although I couldn’t think of a meaningful retaliation, I decided to avoid him for good. That’s proved particularly difficult in our present situation because we are all trapped together aboard this sinking, this stinking ship. I know I can rustle up enough freelance work to pay for my minimal daily needs, but even though I live rent-free these days, I do have a whacking great loan to reimburse, month after month. So while it would be a relief to hand in my notice and escape the whole fetid atmosphere that hangs over the office, I’m very aware that while my salary lasts I can at least meet my mortgage repayments.

  In one of the abrupt volte-faces that typify the way he generally carries on, Barry suddenly decides that he wants to save, rather than sabotage, Le Monde en anglais, which he pronounces not with a sneer now but reverentially, as if the slender publication should be held up as one of the last remaining beacons of European civilisation. Barry warms to his theme, reminding us (Gwyn has overcome his habitual stupor to join in) of the numerous grave errors we have corrected while translating and editing our French counterparts’ copy, and extolling the consistent prose quality of my arts and literature pages. From trying wilfully to kick the paper to death, he has come up with several last-minute bids to revive it, and he suggests we have a formal meeting to discuss these plans in the nearby bar which serves as his regular watering hole. I hesitate to go, particularly because the main argument seems to be that if only we could get rid of Anaïs and replace her with Barry the paper would take on a new lease of life. I’m no fan of Anaïs’s or the way the whole venture seems to have got irremediably out of control. But there is no doubt in my mind that with Barry in charge, we’d have a totalitarian nightmare fitfully lit up by scenes of grotesque black humour. If I don’t go to the meeting, on the other hand, I won’t know what new mischief is afoot, so having persuaded François Villon, our very own Baron Tanqueroy,
and a roughly sober Gwyn to join us, we all slope like conspirators into one of the bar’s amiably large, wooden booths and order our first beers.

  As Barry outlines his plan to revamp the organisation, his body begins to shake with excitement, but I can already see that it is a fantasy even in his own strangely mottled, grey-green eyes. It will take only one technical cock-up or a massive bender round the Paris bars for him to withdraw from any sense of personal responsibility and simply disappear, as he has done in the past. But once we’ve downed our second round and ordered more, the tension between us begins to drop away. Having outlined his Machiavellian plot with manic conviction, Barry suddenly changes tack and gets us laughing at Anaïs’s handling of last-minute crises and the way she plays the blame game if anything goes seriously arsy-versy. The rest of us join in, vying with each other to catch the way she drawls out of the side of her mouth, and even Gwyn comes out of his alcoholic trance to do a passable imitation of her sitting on the side of her desk, swinging her legs and mechanically chewing gum. We get up in a much more cheerful frame of mind, but as we pass the booth behind, we see Anaïs herself, ashen-faced, sitting alone over a dry Martini and clearly eavesdropping.

  I sleep badly that night, staring at the beams over my head and listening to my heart beat erratically. Of all the conflicting emotions that this precarious situation involves the strongest is a feeling of shame. Shame that I hadn’t bitten the bullet earlier and handed my notice in, shame that I attended Barry’s meeting and shame that I mocked Anaïs, whatever I think of her, behind her back – and, as it turns out, to her ears.

  The next day I come in and announce formally that I will leave Le Monde as soon as they can find someone to take over the culture pages. The news meets with indifference, as if someone had shouted ‘Man overboard!’ once everyone knew that the ship had struck a reef and was now taking on water fast. Barry and a couple of others go through the motions of saying how much they will miss my expertise and my company. But in their eyes I see they are weighing up what their own next moves will be.