The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  As the words sank in, my original hilarity at the idea that such New York eminences as Blanchette Rockefeller had been hauled out of their beds to debate my judiciously worded review was replaced by fear flooding my entrails. In a few minutes I had gone from a vaguely redemptive hope to abject terror. My misfortunes had at least been private before: my mother’s telephone call announcing Father’s sudden death, the bill settled furtively at the abortion clinic, Francis’s telegram forbidding me to publish the extracts we had previously agreed on for the Nouvelle Revue française. Now, with this latest, freakish turn of events, I am a publicly marked man: the art press both here and in America will jump on the story and take sides, most likely Rubin’s, since he has the authority and the power. I can just see it: ‘Spat Between MoMA Curator and Venal Art Critic in Paris Turns Nastier and Nastier’.

  Thinking of Rubin, it’s borne in on me again how much he resembles my father. Even when he is in the wrong, he is right: he is right because he has the authority and the power. Just like my father, who could hit me when he was angry. But what I don’t understand is that I feel incapable of fighting back, as if I deserve whatever is going to happen to me. I couldn’t even get myself a lawyer – as Connaissance suggests I should, without seemingly realising I can barely afford a doctor, let alone a lawyer. But it’s not because I can’t afford it, it’s because, obscurely, guiltily, I don’t think I deserve help. In fact I’m beginning to feel that Rubin might be right, that by writing that relatively negative review I’ve done him a wrong for which I should be punished. Just as I should be punished for not making things up with my father before he died. Only punishment can relieve the huge guilt I feel. My father died before he could punish me, but Rubin is very much alive, and I can hear him positively snorting for revenge. And of course in avenging himself, Rubin will avenge my father.

  At the same time, I am painfully aware that each day breaks a few of the thousand tiny ties of affection and habit that bind me to Alice. Sometimes I do it consciously – like Oscar Wilde’s brave man, killing the thing he loves with a sword – but mostly I let time do its work and rarely protest as one small degree of disloyalty facilitates another. We never realise how much we have bound ourselves to another person until the endless unravelling begins. I am bewildered and increasingly lost on every count of my life thus far, and now it seems as if I have to die to my past, to everything I have known or could cling to. As if I have to die before I can even hope to live again.

  11

  Phoenix: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe; 14 rue de Birague, IVe (1985–90)

  I can’t work out whether I’d start sleeping properly again if I managed to eat properly or whether one doesn’t affect the other. But I’m certain that as I lie awake night after night, ruminating over MoMA’s latest threat to take legal action against me, all the anxiety and black thoughts running round my system will put my current weight loss into a tailspin. My ribs are sticking out prominently now, and when I catch my face in the bathroom mirror I see that it has a taut, hollow look, with the tell-tale dark circles of sleeplessness under the eyes. Sometimes the worry begets other worries, such as being seriously, even incurably ill, until a panic attack sets in which I can only contain by reminding myself, coldly and grimly, that an exit from this never-ending cycle of loss and pain and degradation exists. If I am falling, still falling, there is a way of opening up the void forever, as Danielle did, if I had the determination and the requisite courage.

  Meanwhile life, or as it turns out death, goes on. Even though I have ceased going out of my apartment as far as possible, only going down to rue de Bretagne to buy food – mostly chocolate, ice cream and double cream for my coffee, all of which slip down easily – I have to face the concierge every day to get my mail. It’s not that I really want to see my mail, which I am convinced can only bring bad news, not least because Rubin and his team have now decided, the editor at Connaissance tells me, to take out the ad denouncing me in the International Herald Tribune. Since this is the one newspaper I subscribe to, I have been turning over its pages as if it might explode in my weak, wavering hands. So far I have seen nothing, although I can already picture the denunciation that might come: a brief, lofty statement from a famous, well-funded museum effortlessly crushing a malicious critic for the rest of his increasingly obscure career. Latterly, after many a vacillating moment, I have decided to consign the Trib to the rubbish bin unopened.

  There’s not much mail, partly because I’ve been so withdrawn, just as telephone calls have dwindled. But I find it safer not to get letters or calls, since they can only signal that things are getting worse. In fact, I don’t answer the telephone any more, I let it go on to the answer machine, whether it’s friends inquiring how I am and why they haven’t seen me or another impersonal message from Connaissance announcing further retributions against me. Then, amidst the utility bills and the gallery invitations, a simple announcement, a solemn faire-part in copperplate engraved on white card, of the death of James Fitzsimmons, editor of Art International, and the details of his funeral.

  Reduced as I am by my own situation (Jim actually managed to send me a message recently from a clinic in Switzerland, sympathising and admonishing me to ‘resist the ogre of MoMA’), I am appalled to learn of his death. I, and no doubt all the other writers who had stuck with him through thick and thin, can’t imagine a future without Art International – or, more precisely, without him, since we all wrote primarily for Jim’s eye and ear, and in my case certainly his occasional approbation made me feel that I had achieved something in those long hours trailing round the Paris galleries, then distilling a welter of reactions into crisp, balanced prose at my refectory table. Jim was Art International. To begin with, he was a one-man band, handling the whole editorial and publishing process alone. He commissioned the best articles from writers he often knew personally all over the world, designed each issue and saw it through the press, drumming up all the while whatever advertising and new subscriptions he could find. Jim did all this, month in, month out, from a faceless apartment in Lugano, where he had originally gone with his wife in the hope that the mild climate would allay his chronic emphysema.

  But the constant workload, coupled with a debilitating dependence on cigars and hard liquor, took their toll. Jim’s letters and postcards to me (I have scores of them) were always droll, and sometimes hilarious, but over the past couple of years a despondent note crept in more and more noticeably. He couldn’t pay the printers, the Swiss tax officials were on his back, the latest issue had been impounded by the US customs and galleries were refusing to pay for the advertising they had taken out. Then there was the fall down the stairs after ‘demolishing’ a bottle of vodka, the apomorphine cures and the repeated emergency rush to hospital for oxygen therapy. ‘Oh merde, oh merde, oh endless seas of merde!’, one account he sent me of these tribulations ends by way of a dejected farewell. But the same pace of work was maintained, and a complete new issue of the magazine stood ready for the printer a couple of days before Jim died at the age of sixty-five.

  Art International goes with him, and I realise that beyond Jim’s disappearance there will be the loss of the only art journal I know where you had a chance of writing freely about virtually anything in the arts that really moved or fascinated you. Jim didn’t encourage you to write about things he personally disliked, but he was amazingly receptive to his writers’ interests, even when there wasn’t the slightest chance they would boost the meagre revenues from advertising and circulation that we all depended on to scratch a living. I leavened my suggestions for new, airy-fairy articles with more solid proposals like a piece on Nicolas de Staël (in the course of which the artist’s widow, Françoise, opened up for me Staël’s old studio beside the Parc Montsouris, near his friend George Braque’s), the redoubtable Sonia Delaunay or my close friend Zoran Music, whose dealers know that such tributes should be accompanied by full-page publicity, preferably paid in advance. But who else would have published a lengthy essay on S
hona sculpture (‘Shon-na we do something about it?’ Jim asked obligingly), or on such specialist themes as the art and poetry of Henri Michaux, or indeed an exploration of the erotically charged worlds of Balthus, Klossowski (Balthus’s brother) and Bellmer – my ‘three dirty old men’, as Jim unceremoniously named them?

  A couple of other regular contributors to the magazine have got in touch to ask me if I know what’s going to happen now, since I had not only been closer to Jim than most writers but also figured on the masthead as ‘Senior Editor’ (Jim conferred these honorific titles mainly, I think, on those who did not complain when they had to wait to be paid). But of course I’ve no idea. All I’ve heard is that there’s a group of angry Swiss printers (when Jim could no longer pay one of them, he would move to a local competitor) demanding long overdue settlement, and that Jim’s widow has distanced herself from the magazine to avoid bankruptcy. Who would ever want to take on such a fraught venture, I wonder, with its endless frustrations leading only to the likelihood of financial ruin? But since we all know that Art International is irreplaceable, I write blithely back to each contributor, giving the address of the lawyer dealing with Jim’s estate and suggesting that he or she would make an ideal new editor and publisher.

  ‘Blithe’ is not really a word I would apply to myself or to any of my actions at the moment. For the past six months I have been in an unstoppable free fall, as if my grip on the rock face of anything cherished, familiar or even known having been prised away, I was simply incapable of breaking this ever faster, precipitous tumble, by grasping onto a ledge jutting out or a small tree sprouting from the mountain face. It reminds me of the baboons I watched at play in Rhodesia, and how they lazily stretched out a huge arm at the very last moment to stop themselves from hurtling to their death. But I have no brakes, no tactics in reserve: I have been ejected into the night, without explanation or a plan, I am like Dante in the dark of my middle years, falling like a dead body, thinking of his ‘e caddi come corpo morto cade’ each time I pull the bedsheets over my head and hope to escape. But of course there is no escape: only sleeplessness and the relentlessness of loss.

  Since several other writers, and notably Thomas McEvilley in ARTforum, have begun to attack his ‘Primitivism’, Rubin has at least momentarily forgotten about me in the process, and the telephone calls from Connaissance describing his latest threats have diminished. His ire has been directed elsewhere. I’m glad that other people have sensed the huge flaw that underlies his blockbuster concept. But of course he is doubtless convinced that if I hadn’t let the genie out of the bottle in the first place, the reaction to his show would have been nothing less than rapturous. But I’ve actually lost interest in Rubin, even though he has crucified me, because I see him more and more as an overweening, loudmouth bully – and perhaps worse. In the present exhibition he has apparently included several tribal works that come from his own personal collection, and once the show ends, having toured to prestigious museums in Dallas and Detroit, Rubin, I’m told, will offer these pieces at auction. This is a ‘conflict of interest’ on a scale that would normally take one’s breath away, and no doubt that is why Rubin has so overreacted to my innocuous criticism.

  Perhaps what has happened had to happen, but every now and then I am shocked or scared into action. André and Claude Bernheim, old collector friends of mine in whose country house in Provence I often spend part of the summer, invited me to their sumptuous flat the other day to see a new Twombly they have bought. I go out rarely these days but the Bernheims are among the few people I can still open up to without precaution or restraint. To please them, I give the new picture a few nods of silent acknowledgement during lunch, although I am convinced Twombly’s work is nothing but the most rarefied linear twaddle. More arresting, for me, was the sight of my own gaunt face first as it flitted through the mirrors illuminating the flat, then as it was reflected in my friends’ anxious gaze. André and Claude are finely attuned to life’s unexpected reversals and cruel ironies, and they have been following my debacle with Rubin. They ask no questions, but since they know both of us well they must also have sensed how my relationship with Alice has begun to founder, as if it were self-destructing of its own accord. Slowly the conversation turns to the benefits of therapy. And it must be a measure of my own concern that when Claude suggests I should ‘see someone’ she knows and trusts, instead of laughing at her, which I certainly would have done in happier times, I immediately note down the name and telephone number.

  Rosine Debray lives in the heart of the old Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the French nobility moved in waves during the eighteenth century as the Marais was perceived to be growing overpopulated and insalubrious. On these fresh, green pastures to the west of the city, where Louis XIV had already erected the Invalides as a grandiose hospital for aged and ailing soldiers, the nobility built themselves one palace after another, set in the latest architectural magnificence between an imposing courtyard, where coaches could sweep in over the cobblestones, and formal (or later increasingly landscaped) gardens in which the owners and their guests could enjoy the purer air. The whole area became so synonymous with the great families of France that the aristocracy was referred to simply as ‘le Faubourg’ (as the English referred to ‘the Quality’). If some of the great houses were destroyed after the Revolution, most survived to become ministerial residences, embassies or even museums. Thus the great Hôtel Matignon was transformed into the Prime Minister’s official address, and the Palais Bourbon, built as the Duchesse de Bourbon’s country house in the 1720s, has long been the seat of the French National Assembly, just as the noble Hotel Biron was gradually taken over by Rodin (originally at the suggestion of his former secretary, the German poet Rilke) before entering a new lease of life as the Rodin Museum.

  Truth to tell, this gilded slice of history was barely on my mind as I trudged up the rue de Grenelle for my first appointment. The whole area has always rather intimidated me, because where the Marais’ grandeur is faded and accessible, a bit like a great duke on his uppers, the newer, smarter ‘Faubourg’ has never lost its sense of caste and superiority: the ‘two hundred families of France’ still reign, even if the power of their lineage and the beauty of their houses have been transferred more anonymously to various ministries and institutions. More prosaically, when I venture into this stronghold of privilege, I am made painfully aware that I could not have belonged to them and decidedly do not belong now. Compared to those I live amongst on rue des Archives, the people here exude self-confidence, even arrogance, as they flaunt their tailored clothes and fashionable shoes. I was of course on the periphery of it when I lived on rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire, but while there we contented ourselves with one gastronomic temple, dedicated to Poilâne’s bread, here there is the temple of cheese, of fish, of meat, the temple of the ‘Faubourg’ and the temple of glorious France.

  But the real worry preying on me is whether I can possibly afford a doctor, whether of the mind or the body, who practises on these snooty streets. I thought I had anxieties enough about my health and mental state without having to sit here, nervously fingering the notes in my pocket (cash is always acceptable, I’ve been told). I look round at the other sorry-looking patients waiting to be called and wonder what ghastly narratives they have piling up inside their heads, and decide that at least I’ll try to make my tale less messy and dismal. And by the time I hear my name called out, I’ve crafted this transition and dovetailed that incident into a more coherent, even slightly amusing version, as if I were adapting the story into a play that might get the odd laugh or nod of recognition.

  Madame Debray turns out to be distant and formal. I provide a lame summary of my complaints, but she doesn’t sound interested in either my father’s death or Rubin’s rampage. The focus turns increasingly to my relationship with the Polonaise and with Alice. I provide a few telling details about both, and at one point she laughs.

  ‘Ah les femmes, Monsieur!’ she says spiritedly.

 
‘Les femmes… les hommes…’ I say in a mournful echo, to suggest philosophically that men are no less vain and capricious than women.

  This remark, coming at the end of our session, leads Madame Debray to conclude: ‘You have considerable psychological resources, Monsieur.’

  And I leave feeling considerably cheered, there being no compliment quite as flattering as a medical one.

  For the next session I reconsider the main points of my inner disarray as if, after the first rough draft, I wanted to develop my story and take it to a level where the irony and humour of the various situations would be all the more dramatically disclosed. Madame Debray appears to welcome this edited and refined version. By our third meeting, my ‘play’, as I have begun to think of it, seems ready for a dress rehearsal. I perform it with a certain authority and practised ease, which Madame Debray clearly relishes, since she laughs out loud a couple of times. I feel correspondingly proud, particularly as I imagine how my little act must shine compared to the dreary tales of other patients – unless, I think uneasily, she teases even more interesting stories out of them, praising them inordinately for fleshing out this minor detail or recollecting a deeply hidden, apparently nonsensical dream. And this time, instead of handing over the fee with gratitude, I edge the large notes reluctantly onto the side of the table, leaving them within my grasp.