Our dinner ended precipitously, with no dessert, and as soon as I could I took my leave and headed into the wind that was blowing up over the darkly glinting Seine. I knew this route so well I could have followed it blindfold. Along the quays breathing in the dank smell of the river, then across the bridge to the Ile de la Cité, dragging my hand over the old, pitted stone parapets above the river, then into the strange asymmetry of place Dauphine, which resembled a deserted stage. I sat down here, and after a moment’s indecision returned to touch the base of Henri IV’s statue like a pilgrim touching an ex-voto. Bewildered, yet deeply moved by the idea that I might become a father, I felt like throwing myself on the mercy of Paris, on the near-infinite human history it had witnessed across the ages, to help me come to the right decision. But in fact I already knew the answer and had no need of the dramatic setting of a windswept, darkened stage. I felt sick at the idea of losing the child. But I felt sicker still at the idea of a forced, loveless marriage and the future it would ruin for all three.
If things are not going exactly swimmingly in my private life, I can at least take satisfaction in the new book I’m writing. Francis has just been over for a two-week stay at rue de Birague. He was in an expansive mood and burst out laughing when I told him that I’d recently had dinner with Michel Leiris and David Sylvester, with the bill lying so long on the table between them that I offered to pay – at which point Michel had said to David reluctantly: ‘I suppose since we’re in Paris this is on me.’ Michel nevertheless recovered sufficiently to tell us what I thought was a memorable story about the great art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who lived in the Leiris’s apartment on quai des Grands-Augustins from the time of the Occupation (when they hid him from the Nazis) until he died recently. ‘Towards the end, Kahnweiler often seemed very close to death, and Zette and I would gather round him, thinking that he was about to pass away,’ Michel explained. ‘But then he would suddenly come to and open his eyes and we would ask him if he wanted anything. “Yes,” he would say each time quite clearly, “une saucisse-frites!”’
I once spent half an hour at Zette Leiris’s gallery chatting to Kahnweiler, whom I found fascinating and wanted to interview, but then a handsome, tanned Max Ernst was ushered in, accompanied by the beautiful, charming Dorothea Tanning, and I was immediately eclipsed. I realised then with some regret that Kahnweiler was one of several people I’d met in the Paris art world whose memories I should have recorded, even if at the time I couldn’t think of a good place to publish them.
Francis was also in story-telling mode, and when we went to the Orangerie together to look at the Monet Water Lilies, which he often does when he’s in Paris, he told me that a key part of the collection (including some thirteen Cézannes, twelve Picassos and ten Matisses) had come from the dealer Paul Guillaume; it had been donated by his widow, Domenica, in a deal agreed with André Malraux, as Minister of Culture, for dropping charges that she had connived to kill two husbands and attempted to murder an adopted son. Francis loves these tales of high intrigue and criminal ruthlessness, probably all the more so that it involves a scheming seductress; it’s not for nothing that of all Shakespeare’s plays Macbeth is his favourite. I’d been a bit worried that he might find my ‘portrait’ of our friendship too indiscreet, since I’m putting in all kinds of personal things he’s told me over the years. But Francis just beams: ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘Be as indiscreet as you like. The more indiscreet you are, the more interesting the book will be.’
Francis’s encouragement has really helped. I’d felt him weigh on the book up until now: a baleful presence that made me censure certain revealing remarks or the odd, uncharacteristic confession. The fact that he appears well disposed to the whole venture has put wind in my sails, and whereas I usually can’t keep up a good narrative pace for long, I now feel I’m moving from section to section, chapter to chapter, with more confidence and fluency. As I know only too well from my exhibition debacle, however, he can change his mind in a trice, especially once another confidant, whether David Sylvester or Miss Beston, has sowed a few seeds of doubt. But I’m riding high because Georges Lambrichs, the editor of Gallimard’s prestigious Nouvelle Revue française, has heard about my text from mutual friends, Zoran Music and Ida Barbarigo, and is very enthusiastic about the extracts – mostly of Francis speaking – that I send him. But I want to make sure that Francis agrees to their being published, so I go over to London and spend a whole evening shoving the proofs back into his raincoat pocket since they fall out repeatedly as we stagger round the bars. Eventually, when I’m back in Paris, Francis sends over a couple of corrections which I add to the final version before giving it to Alice to translate for the Nouvelle Revue française, which is holding space for the extracts in their forthcoming issue. I’ve worked on the translation, trying to get closer to the way Francis sounds when he speaks in French. Then, on a last-minute hunch that he’d better sign off on the French version as well before it’s published, I send it to him.
A week goes by. I’ve almost forgotten that Francis hasn’t been back in touch and send the French text in to the NRF since they’re approaching their deadline for the new issue. Then, out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Francis telling me that under no circumstances can the text be published. Then I get a telephone call. Francis’s volte-face still hasn’t sunk in.
‘But you said the text was fine, Francis, as long as I changed those few things.’
‘I didn’t know what I was saying. Somebody had slipped something into my drink at the time. I was drugged. I didn’t know what I was doing.’
I can’t believe what he’s saying.
‘But you could have called me at any time to make other changes if you’d wanted.’
‘Well, the whole thing represents only half the truth. I think you have to tell the whole truth in these things if it’s going to work at all.’
‘I just noted down what you told me. I didn’t add or take away anything. And now Gallimard are just about to print it.’
‘Well, you’ll have to tell them they can’t. Look, if you need money you only have to say. I can wire you some today.’
‘It’s not about money, Francis. It’s about the admiration I have for you and the way our friendship has altered my life.’
‘Well, I hope all this won’t alter that friendship, which I appreciate very much. But don’t forget. If you need money…’
I put the telephone down. There is nothing more to say. All the hope, all the longing has gone. Everything feels substanceless, myself, the walls of the room, the powder blue sky outside, as if life had drained away. I think suddenly of Danielle, how young she looked, how innocent despite everything she’d seen. At one hotel we went to together, they’d asked for her identity card at the desk because they were afraid she might still be a minor. She died. I didn’t. But now I’m falling. Perhaps it feels like this when you begin to die. It begins with this sensation that there’s less and less to hang on to, less to hold you back as you fall further and further into the black hole.
This summer is nearly over. I watch it every year like a miser, trying to hoard it, hoping to delay the passing of the long, bright days. But the days begin to shrink, however slightly, the moment the summer solstice comes round. I usually give a party to ward off the depressed feeling I always get when I think of the days getting shorter, the light fading. What we think of as midsummer’s night the French call the ‘feast of St John’: it was then that the Kings of France, right up until Louis XIV, used to light a great bonfire by the Seine on the place de Grève, where the Hôtel de Ville now stands, in praise of the season’s bounty. But this year I didn’t feel like celebrating. The Polonaise has had her abortion, and since I took her home from the clinic, we haven’t spoken. A few days later, Alice lost her footing and fell down the free-standing circular staircase that an architect friend had rigged up for her to access the mezzanine bedroom he also designed for her new flat, which is not far from me on rue des Lions-Saint-Paul. She
is in the Hôtel-Dieu, with her back badly broken. When I first visited her, she had been sedated and was fast asleep. The next time we agreed that once she was able to leave hospital she would stay with me and that I would look after her until she could walk again.
If I’d had an inkling that the summer was going to be dogged by misfortune, I would have written to Setsuko to ask her to come later. But she’s had both leave of absence from her work and a cheap flight booked since the winter. Now that she’s here, I’m pleased, not so much because she has brought me a place mat with a view of Mount Fuji and a pair of overly small, brown nylon socks as presents, but because I find her very presence soothing. As long as I prepare nice meals and take her out regularly, she makes no demands. We lapse into a routine of brief jokes and long silences. ‘You got steady?’ she asks at one point, and when I say I don’t we laugh because we both know I’m lying. ‘I know you got steady. I very angry,’ she says with mock severity, then goes on to reproach me indirectly: ‘You feet too too big for Japanese sock.’ When she arrived I saw a flash of concern in Setsuko’s eyes because she noticed I was not looking well. I’m still losing weight, but now that I’m cooking to please Setsuko I’m beginning to eat more and to sleep better. We while away the days, planning meals, going to the markets, which are a source of wonder to her, and sitting out on café terraces, which Setsuko finds the height of European sophistication. I’m beginning to feel better and ready to push the boulder a few inches back up the slope.
One morning Setsuko and I wake late and I make us a breakfast of scrambled egg on toasted baguette with strong, filtered coffee. The phone rings. It’s my mother, calling from the house in Stocking Pelham, their absurdly bucolic-sounding village in Hertfordshire.
‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ my mother announces curtly. ‘Your father died last night. Heart attack while he was having a gin in his armchair.’
I am speechless. Then I tell her how sorry I am and ask if there is anything I can do to help.
‘Not much you can do now,’ my mother says with grim finality. Then she hangs up.
Setsuko immediately senses I am shocked and upset. She takes me over to the bed and cuddles my head very tightly against her breast. I stay there for an incalculable amount of time. The darkness she holds me in teems with sensations. I am watching my father paint seagulls with magical ease in colour washes on the beach in Suffolk. I have just learnt to swim. I admire and love him. We have bicycling holidays in France; he lets me taste pastis, which I spit out. We are close, share jokes. We are the men, and I’m the cheerful, plucky, little one. Then I begin to grow, and grow away. His presence becomes threatening, irksome, worst of all uncouth, as I delve into the mysteries of Latin and Greek, Shakespeare and Romantic poetry. There is the standoff in adolescence when I no longer fear him physically: he will not dare hit me any longer. I am the present, he is the past. We go from brief love to an ever-deepening disrespect, from closeness to a sneering distance where I have multiple options for sarcasm at my disposal. Where love seemed so simple, hate has thousands of cunning, serpentine ways in which to undermine and disturb.
Setsuko’s tight embrace has not slackened. I have invaded all the generous darkness, all the forgetfulness, of her little body. I want to stay here. I want to end my days here. I want to cease here. I want to die now.
I have started walking through Paris at night again. Both Paris and I are older, more hard-bitten. I notice how dangerous the streets have always been. Here and there are plaques commemorating the deaths of certain soldiers and gendarmes, the deportation of certain citizens during the war. Chez Goldenberg, the restaurant where I loved the latkes, was bombed and strafed with machine guns not long ago. Six people died, twenty-two were injured. I am drawn to these streets, but of course all streets have known death ever since they were first laid out; with the neatness of their houses and the symmetry of their urban planning, they were ossuaries, charnel-houses, funeral chambers, from the start. I haunt the area. I can’t sleep, and the guilt of my father’s death is like a quicksand I recognise as of my own making, long ago. This is where I have to allow my descent into the void, without knowing whether I will surface again.
Setsuko has gone to her mysterious Orient, Alice has risen from her bed. I am alone in the ruins of my former life. The smooth living room with its books, pictures and furniture no longer gives me pleasure or even the satisfaction of seeing myself reflected in it. This is the life I used to have. It sits there still, glib in its gold frames, fatuous in its cashmere throws, but now it belongs to the past. If I am here still, it is to atone for my sins: what I did to my women, what I did to my father, what I failed to do for myself. I am sleepwalking, mainly because I cannot sleep at night any more. I lie there in a strange mixture of anxiety and guilt, and I worry that the tension that holds my body in its vice-like grip will accelerate the weight loss that is now making my ribs stand out. After sending me for numerous unpleasant tests, my doctor has found nothing, and I can only smile politely, I hope not too ironically, when he suggests, in his best medical manner, that a hot bath every evening before bed might just turn out to be the solution.
I’ve tried to forget the abandoned book about friendship with Francis by throwing myself with renewed conviction into art journalism. Connaissance des Arts, which I’ve known since I worked at Réalités because they were part of the same group, have been asking me regularly to write for them. I’ve been very pleased because the magazine, which was growing decidedly fusty and overly French in its focus, has been bought by Americans who’ve sharpened its look and given it more editorial bite. I’ve done several long pieces for them on contemporary artists that interest me, from Bacon and Hockney to Arikha and Kitaj. I also wrote a more caustic summary of Jackson Pollock’s achievement, suggesting that in time such masses of arbitrary marks would lose the relevance that the art establishment, above all in America, has lavished on them. Several artists and friends went out of their way to congratulate me on making that point, which surprised and gratified me, since I write mostly about the things I like and want to appreciate more fully, without any particular critical agenda.
Oddly, a similar situation cropped up a few weeks ago, when I went to New York for Connaissance to review a stunning show at MoMA which sets out to trace the influence of ‘primitive’ art on the modern masters. The exhibition hadn’t yet opened, but the idea was that I should see the works chosen and discuss them with the museum’s curator, William Rubin. A thick-set, middle-aged man who argued forcibly for the themes underlying his exhibition concept, Rubin loaded me up with illustrations of the ‘primitive’ and modern works, displayed side by side in pairs, as well as advance copies of the essays due to be published in the catalogue. I was dazzled by the quality of the works and the boldness of the couplings: I’d never seen an ensemble that was so visually compelling. But once I’d left Rubin, who weirdly enough reminded me of my father, and joined the crowds on the city’s hot, congested streets, I grew steadily less overawed and more sceptical. For sure, the works looked superb standing side by side, but wasn’t the very idea of coupling them tendentious? For someone just coming off these hot streets with little background knowledge, wouldn’t it just look like a rip-off? Picasso had seen this African sculpture with a big nose and started painting women like Marie-Thérèse with big noses; Giacometti had seen a Nyere walking stick and came up with literally stick-thin figures? When I read the texts, my doubts grew because it wasn’t even certain that some modern masters had in fact seen this or that ‘primitive’ work that had been plonked down beside it: for instance, Giacometti ‘might have seen’ the Nyere walking stick when he was supposed to have visited the Bern ethnographic museum in the 1920s. On the other hand, of course, he might never have clapped eyes on it.
In any case, I knew enough about good artists to realise that they are rarely so directly influenced, and when I came to write my review, I made a few mild observations of this nature while praising the seductive visual qualities of the event and
sent it off to Connaissance, where they seemed pleased with my balanced, if sceptical approach. Meanwhile, I’d been trying to widen my net by interviewing artists as different as Pierre Soulages and Diego Giacometti. If the interview with Soulages assumed a rather didactic tone once the artist had rewritten much of our original, more spontaneous talk, the meetings with Diego took me back nearly twenty years to when I’d arrived in Paris clutching my letter of introduction to his brother, Alberto. When we broke off our interview to go out for lunch at a local bistro in Alésia, I told Diego the story and felt that the original frustration at not meeting Alberto had been largely overcome by my being in his company and asking him all sorts of questions about the brothers’ lives together in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron studio. Soothed by the experience, I decided to walk back to rue des Archives, covering almost half the city. It gave me the chance to weigh up my depleted condition in a more favourable light. I’d lost girlfriends, I’d lost a child, I’d lost a book, I’d lost a father. But perhaps the talk with Diego, who came across almost as a father, or at least a fond uncle, provided a gleam of light. Perhaps I could inch my way back and reclaim some of the confidence and happiness that had so mysteriously and as if inexorably slipped through my fingers.
I got back to the Archives flat still savouring the possibility that I might re-emerge from these ashes and saw that the answerphone was blinking. The editor at Connaissance was asking me, in a curiously cold voice, to call him back. Once I got through, he came to the point right away. Apparently Rubin had seen my review in the latest Connaissance and gone through the roof, calling an all-night emergency meeting of the MoMA’s board to decide how to react to my ‘shabby attack’ and hiring two sets of lawyers, in New York and Paris, to investigate the way I had ‘plagiarised’ the exhibition catalogue and to build a case against me, notably probing into the ‘undue influence’ African art dealers must have had on me in arriving at my criticisms of the show. MoMA is currently debating, the editor adds, whether to take out a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune to denounce me and my African art paymasters.
The Existential Englishman Page 31
