The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  The modest pride I took in cutting all ties at last with Le Monde was dashed the moment I joined the queue to sign up for the dole. It wasn’t so much the loss of face or self-respect that waiting in line with a cross-section of impoverished, hopeless and plain, damned unemployable people might entail: I had been there before every time I’d queued to get my resident’s permit renewed, and often enough even to hand in my annual tax return, the day before a hefty lateness fine was imposed. It was much more the minor bureaucrats, enclosed in small glass boxes, who dealt with us that got my goat because they assume immediate superiority, proposing all manner of unsuitable employment just to get us off their books. But I sign up, anyhow, realising that the paltry sum I will receive from the State might offset some of the social-security payments that have been docked off my payslips these last six years, even if the sums involved won’t make much of a dent in the 70,000 or so francs I still owe my former employers.

  The only boon in this moment of need is that I’ve kept up my freelance profile. Detached attachment to several different publications, with their varied contents and styles, suits me far better than being bound to one master. I like the idea that I can play one against the other, according to their merits and above all to the fees they pay. Freelance is really just a cosier term for mercenary. You might imagine yourself on a white charger, your lance glinting all silver in the sun, just as your agile nib reflects the fire in the hearth, but when you gallop into the fray, when your Olivetti smacks out one arresting sentence after another, you are simply in this one or that one’s pay. I like to be different things to different people but remain essentially loyal to myself. And that must be why I fall back so naturally into a Goldoni plot, serving not two but several masters.

  Since doing a piece for him on Bacon, James Fitzsimmons, who runs Art International out of the idyllic-sounding lakeside city of Lugano in Switzerland, has become a welcome ally. He sends me regular postcards, detailing which shows he wants me to visit, no, let me rephrase that, which shows he thinks I might want to visit and review, but he leaves the final choice up to me when I write one of my monthly ‘Paris Letters’ for the magazine. This very civilised give and take – where Jim suggests things he thinks would be interesting while leaving me a free hand – is a modus operandi that I can adapt to naturally. Highly cultured and with patrician tastes, Jim could only be an oddball. Why else would he, an Irish-American born in China, brought up in Persia, schooled in England, then reinvented as a photographer and art writer in New York, be running a prestigious, English-language art magazine from Italian-speaking Switzerland?

  If I have become his man, his eyes and his ears, in Paris, I still cannot allow him exclusivity. The only way I can possibly survive and pay off my mortgage is by extending this fragile web of allegiances. A pushier, more down-to-earth publication called Art News, based in New York and apparently very New Yorkerish in its emphasis on hard news (of which we have precious little in the art world) and spectacular auction prices (equally rare), has also swum into my ken. But I like their factual approach to things and their sense of where the best story might be nosed out, no less than their endearing ability to pay better fees punctually (Jim being charmingly erratic in this particular). So although I generally propose different topics to each, I sometimes end up doing the same story for both, albeit from different angles. Thus, having contributed a review of Dubuffet’s latest Hourloupe series (which I find increasingly crude and repetitive) to Art International, I’ve managed to set up an interview with the great man for Art News.

  Dubuffet’s just turned seventy-five, and I expected him to be rather frail and, for all his eagerness to keep the common touch, living in considerable bourgeois comfort. I was wrong on both counts. With his dome-like bald head and bright eyes, Dubuffet comes across as very much the live wire, scampering agilely around his bare, monastic living room and taking pot-shots at all his well-known bugbears like ‘museum’ art, which he finds so lacking in the originality and ‘power to change society’ that he liberally accords to art brut or ‘outsider art’. But luminously intelligent as he is, Dubuffet doesn’t seem to realise how contradictory his arguments are. He goes on, for instance, to say that real artists shouldn’t give interviews because they need to remain fundamentally ‘antisocial’ in order to create, and that he himself avoids talking to the press because it’s a form of self-promotion. And then, without missing a beat, he gives a word-perfect performance into my tape recorder, stating all his main artistic goals very clearly and forcibly, which I need only transcribe and translate with minimal editing before sending the finished piece off to Art News.

  By doing my regular ‘round-ups’ of gallery shows all over Paris for Jim Fitzsimmons, I’ve also come into contact with quite a few artists more my age and less well known, some of whom have become good friends. Adzak definitely stands out as one of the most curious, not just because he is constantly covered in plaster dust, as Giacometti apparently was, from head to foot, but also because he leads such a strange, troglodytic existence in a freezing, cave-like studio in Alésia (also like Giacometti). But the comparison ends there. What Adzak (whose original English name was Royston Wright) produces during the long days he spends in his inhospitable burrow is mainly casts of body parts, as if he were making an inventory of the people he knows piece by piece. He’s done plaster casts of my hands and had them framed as a gift for me, but I’ve resisted having my whole body done because I’ve heard it’s an alarming experience to be completely covered and immobilised in plaster until it dries. Adzak has of course made many casts of himself, including several separate impressions of his buttocks and penis. He is clearly not without humour or a certain sly charm, and recently he persuaded a good number of his previous and present mistresses to have their bottoms tenderly moulded by him. These stand now in all their astonishing variety of size, shape and voluptuousness around the entrance to his cave.

  ‘Roy’, as Adzak is known to his friends (he adopted the ‘Adzak’ name from a family that nursed him through a serious illness in Afghanistan), certainly qualifies as a one-off, and he does nothing to make himself attractive to art dealers and collectors. His more recent experiments have included photographs that chart the way certain phenomena, such as a leaf or a whole landscape, change over time, and it comes as a shock to see a luxuriously verdant forest in summer shrunk in winter to a few, spiky, black skeletons. Roy is scrupulously thorough in these experiments, with no detail overlooked. Recently, he has been creating as full a self-portrait as possible along these particular lines, showing how his appearance, his hair and his excreta change over specific periods of time. Somehow I don’t see the latter forming a fashionable gallery exhibition any time soon, but there’s a sense of stubborn, indeflectible purpose in Adzak that I admire.

  Dado has that kind of crazy conviction, too, and his subject matter is if anything more unpalatable than Adzak’s. He’s Yugoslav (Miodrag Đurić is his full name) and he hails from wild, mountainous Montenegro. His childhood memories consist solely of wartime atrocities, such as a mass execution, with bodies then decapitated or strung up with their tongues lolling out in the trees round his native city, Cetinje, the former royal capital. Dado sees death and decay in everything, not just the canker in the rose, but the potential for disaster at every crossroads, the putrescence in every human association. And he paints it. Out of his brush, which he depicts as a diseased, dripping phallus, come nightmares of every complexion: a mound of suppurating dead flesh with paralytic children dancing on it, corpses eating their severed limbs, half-rotted skulls that still bear an uncanny resemblance to people he, and I, know in the Parisian art world, the whole earth as one big graveyard. This fresco of death and destruction is set permanently against a beneficent blue sky, as if catastrophe were the friendly norm.

  And Dado himself is like that. He’s small, compact and intensely energetic, with such a wild head of hair and unkempt beard that all you really see in the hirsute mass is his mischievous, darting ey
es. He is immensely good-humoured and companionable, always ready to talk, stay out drinking and laughing uproariously all night. If he has money, he’ll spend it on an extravagant meal, then not eat for several days, or quickly finish off a painting and try to get a loan out of his dealer. He never stops drawing, on a sketch pad or whatever comes to hand: even when he’s having lunch or talking on the phone, his hand races over the page obsessively, filling it with graceful arabesques of cruelty and humiliation. He’s been doing it since he was a small child, and his mother, whom he lost shortly afterwards, said: ‘You will be the Walt Disney of your generation.’ She was right in as far as the endlessly inventive line of his imagination was concerned, but he has become the dark Disney where all human life is doomed. Yet Dado himself, whom I see as a haunted apocalyptic satirist, is all sweetness and light. No one would be quicker to help a friend or a complete stranger in trouble, or to nurse a sick animal back to health. He lives most of the time with his wife and numerous children in a spectacularly broken-down but still beautiful, half-timbered Normandy farmhouse, its walls covered by rambling roses and his own bright frescoes of human horror. The lush gardens are filled with contented sheep that Dado originally acquired because his first winter in Normandy was bitterly cold, and Dado being Dado had no bedding or blankets, so he hit on the idea that he and his family could keep warm by sleeping amongst sheep at night.

  I fall for Dado’s mixture of strangeness and boisterous, barbarous sense of fun, and after a while I begin to write about his work which he shows at the prestigious Galerie Jeanne Bucher. He has a devoted following of collectors, of which I suppose I’ve become one, since he gives me whatever he’s drawn while we’ve been together or arrives after seeing his printmaker with a sheaf of engravings for me. He’s endlessly free because he’s working, or at least drawing, the whole time, and since I don’t have his single-mindedness and I’m not writing much beyond my art reviews and catalogue prefaces, I’m pretty available too. So together we wander often for most of the day and the night round the city, which he’s known since the mid-1950s, and I discover a whole side of Paris I’d never come across before. Rue de Seine is usually our starting point because there’s not a gallery or bar along that street where he doesn’t know both the owners and the staff. So we’ll go in and see a new show or two, particularly if it’s the work of someone Dado might feel in competition with, bottling up any derisive comments we have until we reach La Palette and can outdo each other in pulling the pictures to pieces over a demi. Like me, with my recent experience of Africa, Dado has developed a fascination for tribal art, and we drop in to the most reliable dealers’ shops to see what’s available. Partly under Dado’s influence, I have put a down payment on an extraordinary African chair, a sort of chaise longue carved out of a single piece of wood, which, the dealer says, accommodated several people sitting side by side during tribal meetings. I think Dado is excited by the idea not only that I’ll be getting something I want but that this is also pushing me further into debt, since he himself always lives on the edge – so much so that his children survive only by burying packets of rice in the ground which they retrieve when there’s nothing else to eat.

  One place Dado makes a beeline for when he comes to see me at rue de Braque is the pastel shop, tucked away in a courtyard off rue Rambuteau, which I would never have discovered myself in a month of Sundays. I know some of these places selling specialist artist’s materials quite well, since various painter friends are always dropping in to order a new, ready-stretched canvas at Sennelier on the quais along the Left Bank, or taking me along to Montparnasse to choose new colours or charcoal sticks at Lefebvre-Foinet, which has been there since 1880 and supplied every artist of note from Le Douanier Rousseau and Picasso to Modigliani and Matisse. I love the trips to these inner enclaves for all the smells and shades of colours they contain, even if I don’t really follow all the specialist discussion about the best way to dilute a particular pigment or prepare the ground to take it. I feel like an interloper, a spy or a fly on the wall, and this is probably the role I fulfil best: getting into secret spaces and unusual situations without any real credentials or involvement, just being there, observing, noting things down and carefully, almost covetously, storing them away, probably for no reason or certainly no reason I can think of now. But I consider getting into the Maison du Pastel, which has been run by the Roché family since the 1870s, a real coup, firstly because I didn’t even know it was right next to my street (in fact, cheek by jowl with the self-service laundry I use), secondly because they’re only open on the odd afternoon every month, and most of all because when you get in there (as I can only when I’m with an artist who’s buying these costly sticks of colour) you find a whole parallel universe of art.

  Pastel has of course been used for centuries, and it’s played a prominent part in French art since Quentin de la Tour and Chardin. When Henri Roché, a chemist interested in art, took over the small company, they were producing about a hundred colours; under his guidance, over the years the number of tones increased to an extraordinary five hundred. Not much has changed, I suspect, a century or so later, and while Dado is excitedly trying out newly introduced shades I look round the venerable little shop with its well-worn wooden floor. Behind the counters, which are laden with boxes of luminous colour, are shelf after narrow shelf dividing Red Ochre from Cadmium Orange, and Siena and Burnt Umber from the evocatively named Sepia. Little groups of purchasers, presumably all artists of various persuasions, debate the merits of hard over soft pastel, and as they experiment with a new hue I notice that the dust from all these hundreds of hues lines the shelves and floor, shading into and tinting the very air of La Maison du Pastel.

  In this very hidden, secret place, we discuss, examine and even breathe colour.

  So I think of myself as pretty available, and it’s true that doing my kind of ‘piece work’, an article or interview here, an exhibition preface or a translation there, means that once I’ve finished a text on time I can usually have a breather before beginning on the next one. But if I’m not actually writing, I’m trying to drum up more commissions, and in this respect I’ve just added a whole new string to my bow. Theatre has always had a hold on me, from school and university right up to Robert Wilson’s performance artwork Deafman Glance, which impressed me deeply when I first saw it – even though I think Aragon went over the top when he wrote that open letter about it to Breton, saying: ‘The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a wordless mouth … I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born.’

  I’ve also been following my colleague David Warrilow’s recent involvement with Mabou Mines, founded in Paris by Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech with support from budding composers like Philip Glass, who’s written a striking vocal piece for them. I’ve been hanging out a bit with this experimental group and Lee has asked me to write a play for them, adding that he’ll stage whatever I come up with. I’m overwhelmed by this generous offer and I keep trying to put some ideas together and getting discouraged because everything seems too tame, too conventional, particularly since the Living Theatre’s shrieking, retching and moaning still resonates in my ears. So far the only idea I’ve retained is that when the curtain goes up (though I imagine Mabou has dispensed with theatre curtains) the darkness onstage is filled with the sound of bluebottles buzzing louder and louder, but I’m not at all sure what it means or where it will lead… I mentioned my predicament the other day, more as a joke, to Freddie Young, my editor on the Financial Times, and his immediate response was that, if I wanted to write a play, I should go and see a few, and while I was at it, why didn’t I review them for the FT?

  I’ve done several reviews over the past few weeks, often grouping a couple of worthwhile plays in a single piece, and I’ve got to know the theatre scene here reasonably well, from the ultra-institutional Comédie Française, which has been going for nearly three hundred years and has its own, in-house troupe of actors, to the more progressive Odéon,
notable for having put on Ionesco and Beckett while Jean-Louis Barrault ran it, and smaller, more bohemian spaces like the Vieux-Colombier, where Sartre’s Huis-Clos was first staged. Theatres close regularly and reopen on their old sites (many of them former real-tennis courts closed after the Revolution) or elsewhere. The news is that Peter Brook is taking over the old Bouffes du Nord, and the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, which once manufactured arms and gunpowder, now houses Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. It’s a bore having to schlep all the way out to Vincennes, but I took my new, more mature lady friend, Alice, out there the other evening and for a moment it was touch and go, not only because of the dreary journey but because we were badly seated and the only way Alice, who is very petite, could see what was going on was by sitting on my new Aquascutum tweed overcoat doubled up thickly beneath her. But the spectacle, directed by Luca Ronconi, was utterly amazing and culminated in an extraordinary scene in which a series of very lifelike heads made out of bread are suddenly ripped apart and eaten by the protagonists onstage.

  Theatre invitations are becoming almost as numerous as the ones I get to museums and gallery openings. I’m particularly pleased about this because it allows me to take Alice out without spending money I don’t really have. She is not only older but considerably better off than me, but if I select the best plays and the most interesting exhibitions I don’t feel I have to provide more than the occasional expensive meal out. We tend to have an early dinner at rue de Braque, where I whip up something simple but elegant like smoked salmon followed by herb-encrusted lamb cutlets, or a late supper – usually a more delicate meal of steamed vegetables and fish – at her apartment on rue Henri-Barbusse, just off the boulevard Saint-Michel before it reaches boulevard du Montparnasse. I like this area because some of the former abbeys, priories and Carmelite convents that were built here have survived as hospitals or charities, and behind their massive walls you can hear bird song and imagine fabulous, hidden gardens filled with trees and flowers, fruit bushes and vegetable plots. It’s an easy trip for me to get to Alice’s attractive apartment, which looks out onto a peaceful, planted courtyard, because I simply jump on the number 38 bus and dismount halfway along the Luxembourg Gardens. As I got off the bus the other evening I found myself caught in someone’s upturned gaze, and a split second later I was drowning, drowning all over again, in those searching, wounded eyes. It lasted barely a second, but by the time Danielle had turned away, we were both reeling from the sudden exposure, as if we had glimpsed a memory we could not bear. When I looked again, she had disappeared from sight, and I was struggling with a turmoil that I thought I had put behind me once and for all. Before going to the haven that Alice’s flat has become for me, I went over to the Val-de-Grâce and walked round and round its magnificent enclosure, seeking the promise in its name, a valley of grace where I could find refuge from the past.