The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Revealing my private misery as factually and succinctly as possible to a stranger has given me a slightly better grasp over my own situation, and of course I could go on pouring myself out (‘Who ever tires of talking about himself?’ I remember Bacon saying sardonically when I prompted him to tell me more about his childhood). But quite apart from the fact that I need to write a full-length newspaper or magazine review to pay for each of these sessions, I wonder whether they’ll do any further good. They don’t touch what I, no doubt fancifully, see as the ‘dark root’ of my disorder, some confusion deep down that won’t allow me to resume life on my own terms. Several sympathetic friends have noticed that I’m battling some inner demon, and clearly losing, given my newly haunted look, but the person I see most, whenever he’s available, is Zoran Music.

  I met Zoran several years ago when a gallery asked me to write the introduction to an exhibition of his paintings. The show covered Zoran’s whole career, from the charming Dalmatian gypsy scenes he painted in his youth before the war, through the scintillating vedute of Venice, to the sudden eruption during the 1970s of his long-buried, highly graphic memories of Dachau. It is these extraordinary evocations of suffering – of crazed faces and shrunken limbs, of emaciated corpses piled up like long sticks in a bonfire, of death and madness everywhere – that have brought Zoran out of the shadows, where he has long lingered as a gifted painter of the picturesque who had no deeper vision to communicate. This current series, entitled ‘We Are Not the Last’ (and signifying that atrocities like the Nazi death camps will occur again), has cast a new spotlight on Zoran’s oeuvre. A tall, silent, modest man, Zoran has so far refused to talk about his incarceration, which began when he was arrested for ‘anti-German’ activities in Venice and lasted for a year and a half until the camp was eventually liberated. Often we sit in his high-ceilinged studio on rue des Vignes for an hour or two without talking (rather, I am reminded, as Danielle did with Beckett). The calm emanating from Zoran is profoundly healing, especially once one senses against what odds it has been achieved. I know how often and how close Zoran came to dying, what a miracle it is that he is still there, still painting, indeed at the high point of his career, even though he is six years older than my father – and my last father figure.

  From time to time I mention the crises in my life, and Zoran says things I don’t really understand, such as ‘In ten years you will have your revenge’. We also talk about his work, but these conversations end mostly with Zoran’s repeating: ‘There’s nothing you can say about painting. It doesn’t exist in words.’ Occasionally, too, I ask him very indirectly about his experiences at Dachau, and mostly he brushes them off with: ‘It’s a thing that happened. It would have been much better if it hadn’t happened. But it did, and there it is.’ But a few times he lets drop the odd detail: the train that arrived at Dachau in which all the livestock and most of the prisoners were half-frozen and dead, with those that remained in the terrible stench crazed out of their minds; not reporting whoever had died next to you in the night before you had managed to eat their breakfast portion of sawdust bread; the prisoner who lost the identification tag around his ankle and thus became unidentifiable to the system controlling the camp; the limbs that still twitched on the cadavers piled high in the courtyard, their immobility the following morning once they were half-covered in snow.

  Being with Zoran and comparing his experience of the blackest hours of the century with my discomfiture is the best therapy. But in my haste now to escape depression I’ve allowed my body, and even my eyelids, to be stuck full of needles in the back room of a diminutive Vietnamese doctor who then covered me and left me to bake in aluminium foil. I’ve also put my damaged self in the hands of a very ‘alternative’ Brazilian therapist called Diva. She operates out of a little garden apartment in Montmartre, and with my lying on the floor we move together through my body, from toes to outstretched hands, cherishing and soothing each part, until I am almost asleep. After several séances of this kind, when she thinks I’m ‘ready’, Diva takes me out to the forest of Fontainebleau and encourages me to let out my ‘primal scream’. I find this embarrassing as I gaze up through the canopy of trees to the mild blue sky and, rather than a full-blown cry, I find I can only manage a brief whimper. Diva takes over here and lets out a blood-curdling scream. Feeling my virility challenged, I attempt to compete but come nowhere near the force and conviction of her cry. Her magnificent dark eyes are sparkling now, and I realise that I have fallen in love with her and that, worse, such love is doomed by professional etiquette from the start, otherwise she’d have half the loons of the planet screaming all over her. So my cries turn more thunderous, and the energy I suddenly derive from knowing that I will never get close to this beautiful, if possibly deranged, woman propel me into another awareness. As Diva and I scream full-throatedly at the lamb-like clouds floating by, I know, not only that I am not as crazy as some, but that now, after all the blackness, I am going to get my life back.

  A couple of former contributors have got it into their heads, for some bizarre reason, that I have agreed to take over Art International, and they have written to congratulate me. At the same time, several artist friends have been urging me to jump aboard the rudderless craft that this suspended magazine has become, with one of the more successful ones saying that he knows a wealthy Italian lady who would help finance its relaunch. As I play with this fantasy – editorial power, social prestige, a rich backer – I have to acknowledge that I am at a distinct crossroads in my life, not to say at a loose end, and that there are no other alluring prospects in sight. For the past twenty years I’ve made a living from various forms of art writing, and I’m unlikely to get much more successful at it than I am now. My ambition to write books flared up for a moment, then guttered; the hope is still there, but with the Bacon book mouldering contentiously in a drawer there won’t be another literary project for the foreseeable future. I’m not particularly interested in publishing per se, but it would be an old dream come true to have a magazine whose editorial policies I could shape while choosing the subjects I find worthwhile and enlisting the writers I respect to tackle them. I am of course closely connected with Art International and have, I suppose, instinctively espoused its belief in liberalism and quality. I’d be devastated to see the magazine disappear for good, and hugely proud to help keep it going. So could I, as these others suggest, be the one? I should have preferred that someone else had come forward so that I could have resumed my purely honorific role as ‘Senior Editor’ and avoided all the responsibilities which, I vaguely assume, descend on anyone foolhardy enough to become ‘owner, publisher and editor’ of a small, unfunded niche magazine.

  But as the weeks go by it’s becoming increasingly clear that if anyone is going to walk the plank, it’s me. Until now I have been very adept at avoiding anything that might curtail my freedom, from conventional job and civic responsibilities to wife and family, so why would I hanker now after a career move that will weigh me down with duties galore? The obscure impulse pushing me in that direction can only come from witnessing my previous life of untrammelled liberty trashed and discarded. Any real move away from that loss has to be radical. Before going forward, I check once again that I can acquire the magazine’s title and archives for one nominal Swiss franc without any of the debts that Jim accumulated. Then, in a confused state of high elation and deep anxiety, I get on the night train to Lugano and try to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep in my second-class couchette.

  The legal formalities are concluded with eerie swiftness in the lawyer’s Art Deco offices overlooking the lake, although we pause for a brief pleasantry as I push my silver one Swiss franc coin across his desk. With the deeds to my purchase folded away in my suitcase, I take a cab past via Maraini and gaze for a moment at the anonymous, modern block of flats where Jim used to live, then ask the driver to take me to the depot where all the magazine archives have been stored. My heart sinks when I see that the depot consists of a scatterin
g of sheds on a piece of waste ground, and it sinks even further when I contemplate what I have acquired.

  I’m not at all sure what I expected, but it was certainly more than a wallful of dog-eared past issues and a scattering of shoe boxes filled with index cards denoting institutional and private subscribers, present and past, as well as a couple of Rolodexes with the names of writers and other magazine contacts. All of this will undoubtedly prove useful, but I think what I was really hoping for was a little handbook on how to relaunch an art magazine and make it successful. I cheer up, however, when I come across a file of more personal papers where, in addition to letters from artists like Morandi, Miró and Man Ray, I discover an extensive correspondence from Dubuffet: leafing through it I see that it is full of practical tips as to how to get an international art publication off the ground. I’m also delighted to hear from Vera, Jim’s widow, that Jim has bequeathed me his impressive collection of first editions, mainly of the poets – particularly Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden and Berryman – that he liked best.

  Once these new belongings have been sifted and transferred to rue des Archives, an agreeable moment ensues. I ‘have’ the magazine and its various accoutrements, I own the title and what is quaintly termed its ‘goodwill’ (that is, its well-established reputation), and I can even start thinking of myself as a ‘publisher and editor’. Now, without getting upset about needing to actually produce anything, I can ponder all my options. My admiration for Art International as it was will in no way preclude root-and-branch changes to the new edition. In fact, under another owner, it will be another magazine. Ever since I got into avant-garde literary reviews like Tel Quel and Change, I’ve become hugely interested in the great French tradition that has produced the finest and most influential art magazines ever. Cahiers d’art, founded by Christian Zervos in 1926, has long been a touchstone, but Minotaure, brought out by Albert Skira in the 1930s (with Breton as editor), and Tériade’s long-lasting Verve have also been vital points of reference. Then, during one long hot summer at the Bernheims’ country house in Provence, I discovered a complete run of l’Oeil, which has been going strong since 1955, and I devoured issue after brilliantly varied and inventive issue, moving from Byzantine mosaics to Matisse, from Beckmann back to Egyptian sculpture, while outside the house the scents of thyme and rosemary rose as the sun declined and the invisible cicadas resumed their dry, obsessive chant.

  Having put a bit of weight back on, I’ve been thinking of taking squash up again as well as having a hit at jeu de paume, as they call real tennis here. We’ve got a huge space the size of four squash courts allocated to this ancient game at my racquets club on rue Lauriston, and it’s so rarely used that when a couple of players are batting the hard, tennis-size balls over the sunken net, clouds of dust spring up into the air like gusts of forgotten time. I’m beginning to get seriously involved in this strange, intricate game. ‘The history of real tennis is the history of Europe,’ one old-time member of the club regularly intones as he watches a match, and I’m fascinated by the idea that not only the rulers of France but Henry VIII played it regularly (at Hampton Court) and that Shakespeare refers to the noble sport on several occasions. There used to be about 250 tennis courts in Paris before the Revolution, when the game was hotly disputed among aristocrats and commoners alike, with extravagant wagers being laid on the outcome; many of these big enclosed spaces have since been transformed into theatres, and now only this one court remains active. I love the ceremony: players bow to each other before the game begins, before bowing towards the dedans, the area at the back where spectators sit. But when the game gets under way, you are above all conscious of how deadly and unforgiving it is. Every stroke, spin and angle has to be calculated swiftly and decisively, and you know whether you have struck the ball well when you hear the deep, cello-like twang that the racket, tautly strung with cat gut, makes when it strikes the felt-covered, slightly asymmetrical ball accurately (as well as the arm-numbing vibration of a clumsy shot). It is a tactical, strategic game, and the pressure is as mental as physical, taking up every ounce of attention. As your game improves, you can aim to score outright points by hitting the ball into the window-shaped grille or striking it against the buttress-like tambour so that it shoots off at an unsuspected angle and is thus more likely to bamboozle your opponent. It takes months of mishits before you begin to understand the split-second timing and graceful rhythm of the game, but even for rank beginners like me there is the occasional moment of grace when an awkward shot plays itself against the wall and is transformed into an unstoppable winner.

  Having seen much less of them over the past few months, I value all the more the group of friends with whom I play squash and this ancestral forebear of modern lawn tennis. When we’re together, we talk freely about everything, but it’s mostly about the game we have just played, the odd professional problem and women. Harry, the most regular of my four or five partners, recently told me to stop moping around in the ruins of my relationship with Alice and find a new woman, stalwart advice that is easier to give than to follow. I countered this by telling him that if he hoped to hide his new affair from his wife that he should ditch the red silk briefs he has recently taken to wearing for his habitual, greyish Y-fronts. We usually reserve this kind of banter for the delicious moment when we are all seated at Café Scossa, on place Victor-Hugo, with a beer in our hand. The chat and the laughter comes easily, like a balm, and being boys together we never miss the chance to eye up any pretty girl that happens to swing by.

  Beaubourg, more officially known as the Centre Georges Pompidou, appears to have set a precedent, with every successive French president wanting to found a new museum. The past couple of years have seen the Musée d’Orsay, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s hotly pursued dream, and the first of François Mitterrand’s ‘Grands Travaux’ inaugurated. I’m not particularly interested in the latter’s grandiose plans for Parc de la Villette, but it will be fascinating to see whether I. M. Pei’s ‘glass pyramid’ will work in the ossified setting of the Louvre. What affects me a great deal more is the lock, stock and barrel removal of so many masterpieces from their hallowed setting at the Jeu de Paume (built as real-tennis courts under Napoleon III) to the cavernous former railway station looming over the Seine. That move would have been questionable enough without the brutalist intervention of Gae Aulenti, who has designed the interior space. I suppose we all cling to what we are already used to and appreciate, so any far-reaching change to the works’ original display and well-worn surroundings might not have pleased me, especially since I relished knowing in advance which particular Degas, Manet or Cézanne was awaiting me round each corner of the Jeu de Paume’s intimate little galleries.

  It was raining when I joined the queue outside Orsay for the inauguration, and I was lucky enough to share the wait with Pierre Soulages, whom I had interviewed for Art International not long before. Soulages was even more sceptical than me about the way one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world was going to be re-housed. But we knew that the move had been enthusiastically endorsed by Pompidou (who stopped the proposed demolition of the actual railway building), then Giscard, and now Mitterrand, accompanied by numerous museum officials, all eager to write their superior taste into art history; and standing disconsolately under our umbrellas we railed at the idea that political leaders should have such sway over the most important cultural decisions. For a while after that, I myself felt unusually empowered because I’d found my views shared by one of France’s leading painters. But my spirits sank again as soon as we were ushered into the new installation and found that the reality exceeded our worst fears. Impressive as the barrel-vaulted space is (it was, after all, a major railway station with a huge hotel), it dwarfs the art it now contains. Sculpture comes off less badly, but the paintings, conceived mostly for domestic bourgeois interiors, look uprooted and helpless, often hidden away behind vast columns or relegated to odd little rooms specially created for the purpose. I can well see h
ow difficult it was to reconcile such a vast public space with these intimate scenes, but Aulenti’s solution seems to have exacerbated the problem rather than solve, or at least, soothe it. I come away longing to set the clock back to the familiar, higgledy-piggledy days of the Jeu de Paume, before arriving at the melancholy conclusion that after a decade or so no one will remember that the Impressionists once had a home that suited them so admirably.

  I know I am conservatively inclined both in politics and in cultural matters, and I often wonder whether this doesn’t spring from a deep-seated pessimism about human affairs in general. I was very struck, for instance, by the fact that deposing the Shah of Iran, corrupt as he may well have been, led to Ayatollah Khomeini’s becoming the Supreme Leader. I expect radical change to make the status quo worse, although I’m not only happy to be proven wrong but I often also welcome change. I don’t know how I might have reacted to the Eiffel Tower when it was being mooted (I still don’t actually like it, although it was the Centre Pompidou of its day), but I was immediately in favour of Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre because I admire his work. So perhaps I’m not so much against radical change as what I consider to be bad taste (replacing Les Halles with a shopping centre; the pointless, vainglorious Tour Montparnasse; the Gare d’Orsay transformed by force into a museum). Although numerous panjandrums questioned the wisdom of dedicating a prime Marais town house to Picasso (‘that bluffer’, as Madame Delaunay described him when I interviewed her for Artnews), I welcomed the idea. I venerate Picasso for what he achieved in the first half of his career (even if the late work depresses me as the weak-minded ramblings of an old man), and I was also delighted by the idea that the abandoned Hôtel Salé, which had fallen into serious disrepair, would be renovated to house the Picassos that Picasso, ever a step in front of the pack, had kept for himself.