The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Very often these days I catch myself thinking and telling my friends how hard I work, that barely is one review of a book or a play written than there’s the monthly gallery round-up to send in to Art International or an exhibition preface to write for this or that artist. I could also complain that I make pathetically little money compared to an accountant or a dentist of about my age and experience, or even a proper journalist working for a newspaper paying not only a decent, steady salary but, more covetable still, all expenses; I long to tot up my telephone costs, meals out and the odd taxi fare and send the bill in; so far, however, no one has expressed the slightest intention of reimbursing any out-of-pocket sums. These gripes, I have to admit, tell only one half of the story, and the advantages of my situation hugely outweigh them. First of all, I am master of my time: I get up, work or go out and stay out whenever and for as long as I want. I also don’t have to endure a packed Métro carriage morning and evening. Then, most importantly, spending your time looking at pictures and plays and writing about them has to count as a unique privilege, even if my abiding frustration at not doing more writing for ‘myself’ takes some of the shine off this. And any problems on the money front are at least alleviated by frequent invitations from richer friends to dinner, weekends in the country or occasionally entire holidays by the sea. I was amused the other day when someone asked Francis Bacon whether he would be going on holiday this summer. He looked startled, then riposted: ‘But my whole life is a holiday!’ It was funny, at least partly true, and a very good attitude which I’m trying to adopt.

  Francis has been back to Paris frequently over the past couple of years. I didn’t see him for several months after George’s suicide, and when we had a reunion he looked pale and almost transparent with grief and guilt. I think he’s beginning to get over the worst of the loss and suffering, but what I don’t understand is that Francis stays in the same hotel, and presumably in the same room, that George overdosed in, almost as if he wanted to intensify the pain and deepen the guilt he feels. It’s not something I can ask him about because I know he would simply lash back with the most wounding remark he could think of. If he chooses to spend so much time with me, it must be partly because I don’t pry directly into the many no-go areas there are in his life as in his work; on the whole, I let him decide what he wants to talk about when we’re together, and only then, if he touches on an opinion or a detail that interests me, do I slip into interview mode. Francis has been to my little place several times, and he’s taken to it and to the whole area so much he’s actually suggested I might try to find something similar nearby for him. Of course he has these sudden enthusiasms for certain places, just as he did when he bought his house in Narrow Street overlooking the Thames a few years ago. He had parties there and high hopes it would be conducive to work, but then he complained about not being able to paint because of the ‘flickering’ light coming off the river, and little by little the whole venture seemed to become more of a burden than a pleasure. So we’ll see whether this new idea is a fad or not. But I’m flattered he likes the way I’ve organised my life and I’d be delighted if I could find him a studio in Paris where he could really work as well as paint the town red, which he already does here with as much panache as in London.

  I’ve been on the receiving end of so much of Francis’s largesse, from banquets at the great five-star restaurants like Taillevent and the Tour d’Argent to feasts at only slightly lesser establishments made just as memorable by his prodigality with the best Champagne and Bordeaux, that I set up a lunch for him at our very own bougnats’. The thing about Francis is that however much he likes the high life he is as happy at the other end of the scale, and I would say that if you put the Ritz at one end you could legitimately have Bébert and Marie-Hélène’s joint at the other, given that, at their level, they can produce as good and hearty a meal as any. I know Francis likes their bar and during his couple of visits there has established himself as something of a hero by buying drinks for every last gilder, furniture restorer and stall-holder in sight. But going from there, as I now have, to organising a lunch in the café’s rough-and-tumble for such privileged guests as the picture dealer Claude Bernard and his sister, Nadine, Picasso’s printmaker Aldo Crommelynck and his wife, and the eminent former Surrealist writer, Michel Leiris, and his prim spouse, Zette, could well have been a step too far. The latter arrived in their chauffeured limousine, a mirage of polished black and silver that I suspect rue de Braque has rarely, if ever, witnessed before. This spectacle irritated the bar’s regulars, who of course resented such a display of bourgeois privilege on their home turf, and the atmosphere might have deteriorated had Francis and I not ensured that the Côtes du Rhône I’d ordered was circulated regularly and liberally to all and sundry in the café. Francis was in his element, skilfully smoothing over social differences while handing out fulsome compliments to Marie-Hélène as she surfaced from her tiny kitchen-cupboard, and to Bébert, stumbling about in overalls as he plonked down dishes of the day delicately imprinted with his sooty fingers.

  I’m relieved to come out of this experience without having lost what little reputation I’ve managed to build up here. Things could have gone badly wrong, with the regulars turning against the posh folk and making them feel distinctly de trop, or the posh folk insulating themselves in their perfumed aura and making the regulars feel as underprivileged as they really are. Francis helped avoid both pitfalls because he moves with such deftness and ease between social classes, clinking glasses with a couple of fruit-and-veg sellers while trying to pin down the concept of ‘realism’ in a single pithy phrase with Leiris. But I can see his mind is working at all kinds of levels, and I’m not altogether taken aback when he turns round to me and out of the blue, as if we’d just been discussing it, says:

  ‘I have to be conscious of Picasso the whole time, you see. There’s no way round it.’

  About a fortnight later the Crommelyncks generously return my invitation by asking me to dinner in their elegant apartment on rue de Grenelle. I accept without thinking much about it, but I am impressed by their stylish hospitality, and even more by the fact that their only other guest is Catherine Deneuve, a childhood friend of Aldo’s wife. Much as I try to disguise it, I go from being relaxed and matter-of-fact to rigidly self-conscious. But if I hadn’t known I was dining with a famous actress, whom everyone now associates with Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, I would have simply thought how lucky I was to be in a tête-à-tête with such a gorgeous woman, who ate and laughed and drank and smoked with such natural abandon that I might even have been tempted to try my luck.

  Sometimes it feels as though there are fewer and fewer differences between Paris and London. I’ve been buying my shirts whenever there’s a sale on Jermyn Street but now I’ve found a French shirt-maker called Arthur & Fox who has brought out a more modern, European version of the classic, plain pinpoint or Bengal-stripe English shirt I like, so I wait for him to have his ‘seasonal reductions’ to stock up for the year. It’s very much the same with food. For years I’ve been bringing back tins of Jackson’s tea, jars of pickle or redcurrant jelly and packets of smoked salmon as gifts for French friends, but we’re just about to have a Marks & Spencer’s open on boulevard Haussmann, which will make my presents appear much less exotic. Even if we do continue to eat jam with our meat, our two cultures are, perhaps inevitably, growing closer.

  One thing I find that still divides us sharply is the notion of the ‘intellectual’, whom the French revere but the English tend to dismiss as a tedious, self-inflated waffler who spins theories for the mere sake of them. This whole debate has always rather rankled with me, perhaps because I was so in awe when I arrived of the overpowering intellectual tradition in France from Descartes onwards, and the more impenetrable a philosophical text tended to be the more impressed I became until I realised I was succumbing to a kind of intellectual snobbery, struggling to absorb the more abstruse analyses of a Jacques Derrida even as my eyes closed and his latest
treatise was falling from my hands. Similarly, I made a concerted stab at the so-called nouveaux philosophes, who have emerged from the aftermath of May ’68 on a wave of anti-Marxism, but I was struck mostly by their posturing and wordy obfuscation. Through Sonia Orwell (who considers him ‘fondamental’), I met Jean-Marie Benoist, whose substantial essay, ‘Marx is Dead’, has just come out, and I found him easy to talk to and likeable. But as I struggled through his book, I was conscious it represented above all what he was supposed to do, at this early stage in his career as a ‘professional’ intellectual, trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and destined to take a leading role in France’s public debate about politics, philosophy and everything else under the sun that the media want him and other public intellectuals to explore; it was a show of skilful reasoning rather than a declaration of personal truth or conviction, which would have interested me considerably more. Other new philosophers, like André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, are so regularly trotted out for their opinions that, to my delight, Gilles Deleuze, in my eyes a far more penetrating and subtle philosopher, has dismissed them as ‘TV buffoons’.

  Although it impressed me hugely for a few years after I arrived in Paris, the French admiration for wordplay and concept juggling, often an intellectual form of showing off, irritates me now, not least when it crops up in a text I have to translate. To take a simple example, a catalogue introduction I’m working on begins, quite literally (in French): ‘X’s paintings make manifest the evidence of their presence.’ How do you put that into sensible English? I settle for: ‘X’s paintings make an immediate impact’, although I’m tempted to say: ‘Oh boy, you won’t miss these babies.’ There is one prolific French art writer whose texts I avoid like the plague because you cannot even guess – and you suspect he cannot guess – what he is trying to say in his abstruse, convoluted prose. But in the hands of a master, French immediately regains its deadly lightness (like a fencing foil) and its lucidity. I took great comfort from the fact that when I started reading the work of Michel Foucault, I was highly sceptical about what I would find, only to become excited and delighted by his brilliant reinterpretations of such elementary, and clearly changing, notions as ‘madness’.

  In this hermetically sealed French universe the one major figure I have never been able to make my mind up about is Jacques Lacan. I’ve tried to read him several times only to stop in exasperation at what I see as a mixture of deliberate mystification and endless wordplay that is often neither subtle nor revealing. But Lacan is very much the man of the moment in Paris, the favourite maître à penser (although I dislike that phrasing, a ‘thought master’, in itself) of so many people across the city, ‘lacaniens’ all, that I’m starting to feel that it’s my own dimness and limitations that are really at fault. I try Lacan again and fail again. Meanwhile the myth surrounding him grows and grows. He is a practising psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and both his questionable modus operandi and his extortionate fees have given rise to endless gossip. He is quoted everywhere, with such throwaway remarks as ‘Love means giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it’ being trotted out by smart people at fashionable parties. Gross as the thought is, I’m beginning to wonder whether Lacan, who was once close to the Surrealists and published his first texts in Breton’s review Minotaure, hasn’t got more than a touch of the charlatan about him, but I keep quiet about it for fear of being intellectually lynched.

  Alice is amused by my suspicions, but she herself is also sceptical, not least because she knows Lacan’s wife (a well-known actress who had married the highly controversial writer, Georges Bataille, before becoming Sylvia Lacan) and tells me that Lacan’s thought is so convoluted that even when he writes a note saying that he won’t be back for dinner its meaning is far from clear even to those who know him best. Lacan’s lectures have become a highlight of the Paris season, and when Alice says we can attend one with Sylvia, I jump at the chance, thinking that hearing Lacan actually talk might enable me to see the light…

  The large amphitheatre at the Sorbonne is already packed when we sidle into our reserved seats at the front. The expectant hush grows minute by minute until Lacan bursts in already talking loudly as if he were picking up a recent conversation. I’m pleased I can understand almost everything he’s saying, and I’m quite entertained by his practised delivery which goes from quiet complicity with the audience to a long silence suddenly punctuated by an angry roar, as if he were banishing some sudden opposition, or a sly joke which immediately elicits the appropriate laughter from his respectful listeners. I notice that despite his almost simian appearance Lacan is wearing a fussily tailored suit with a lapelled waistcoat and unusual double cuffs on his sleeves. The whole event has of course also been carefully tailored, with moments when intimate thought seems to be shared and others in which Lacan goes into declamatory mode. ‘C’est ÇA!’ he suddenly shouts, and the whole audience leans forward, pens raised in the realisation that the central concept of the lecture is about to be revealed. ‘Mais,’ Lacan resumes after a weighty pause, ‘ce n’est pas ÇA!’ The questing intellects who imagined they had at last penetrated Lacan’s long drawn-out exploration of everything and nothing snap shut again and their pens droop, while Lacan himself, his attention suddenly transfixed at a point high over our heads, continues a discourse on life and death of such staggering banality that I can only think that he is enacting a deadly derisive parody. But the audience remains rapt, with no hint of collusive mirth. Then the pens start racing once more across the page, noting down every commonplace remark as if it were a key to the mysteries of the universe. At that moment, looking around at the heads bowed in slavish transcription, I decide to risk the wrath of the lacaniens and, however transgressive it might appear, never give their prophet the time of day again.

  I get back to rue de Braque feeling more cheated than elated, as well as hot from the walk all the way down rue Saint-Jacques and over the river by Notre-Dame. I get under the shower and am just beginning to enjoy the cooling water when the telephone rings. Cursing my luck, I see I don’t have a towel within reach so I emerge with my shirt held in front of me, in case any nosy neighbours are staring into my windows from across the street. Streaming water on to the floor, I pick up the receiver.

  ‘May I speak with Michael Peppiatt?’ the voice asks, pronouncing it ‘Peppi-ah’. This is clearly not someone I know, and I quickly debate whether I should suggest a call back when I’m dry.

  ‘Jeffrey Goldstein at Goldstein, Hopkins and Blum in Los Angeles is on the line for you,’ the voice announces.

  I have a couple of friends who enjoy making bogus calls, but I’m not sure either of them can do an American accent quite this convincingly. I sit down, spreading the wet shirt over my lap as Mr Goldstein introduces himself.

  ‘We represent the well-known American motion-picture director Peter Bogdanovich,’ Mr Goldstein continues portentously, pausing to let the name sink in. The name is vaguely familiar, although my first reaction is to reply jauntily, ‘And I’ve just attended a lecture by Jacques Lacan.’ Then I remember that while looking for work a while ago when I’d just started on the dole a friend put me in touch with an art dealer in New York called Spencer Samuels, who told me he represented the Estate of Borislav Bogdanovich. Spencer suggested that, since I was reasonably familiar with the European art world, I should try to get Borislav’s work better known since it had never received proper recognition before he died, adding that his son, who had become very successful meanwhile with films like The Last Picture Show, had both the wish and the means to try to rectify that situation. That would be Peter then, I thought, fidgeting on my damp camp chair.

  Mr Goldstein then inquired about my ‘schedule’ and whether I might be available to come out to Los Angeles in late September to discuss the possibility of setting up a series of exhibitions of Bogdanovich père in the capitals of Europe. Leafing over the desk diary I realised that I had no ‘schedule’: nothing planned for the summer and
even less in September. For appearances’ sake, I nevertheless wrangled slightly over the precise dates, then put the phone down.

  I have been to New York a couple of times, but never to the West Coast, and beyond certain films I’ve seen set in Los Angeles or San Francisco I have no idea what to expect. When I get off the seemingly never-ending flight, a limo is waiting for me at the airport. The driver, whose upper arms are the size of thighs, is fascinated by my accent. Do all people in Paris speak with that accent, he asks as we drive away. I tell him that people in Paris, indeed all France, usually speak French, just as Germans speak German, and Italians Italian. He is looking at me intently in the mirror over his head and is so fascinated by this concept that he swerves momentarily off the highway. It occurs to me that the driver, whose meaty right arm lies limply over the seatback, had imagined that all Europeans have English as their native tongue, but speak it, like folk recently arrived in America, in all kinds of accents. In fact, I add in conclusion, only the English speak English, and they mostly speak it like me – I mean, I add self-consciously, like ‘I’.