Thenceforth I wander through the silent rooms at rue des Archives, incapable from time to time – as I find a reader’s letter full of praise or an unpublished poem we had chosen – of holding back my tears. This has been my home, then my office, and now a vacuum. So much hope, so much effort has given way to this succession of empty, mournful rooms – an enfilade of failed ambition, memory and regret.
While I had been in Manhattan in a last-ditch attempt to persuade Condé Nast to find a niche for Art International in their vast publishing empire, I hit the street one morning and, like a bolt out of the blue, saw Francis Bacon’s death announced on the front page of the New York Times. The shock was all the deeper since I had seen Francis several times since his outburst over Clio, and although I knew that he had been unwell there was nothing to suggest that he might be close to dying. The news was so unexpected and so final that it hit me literally like a punch in the stomach, and for days I wandered round the city like a ghost, going through the motions of pleading a future for the magazine while I myself, empty and fearful, wondered what my future would be now that a whole pillar of my existence had been ripped away.
With Francis gone, and Art International gone, there was nothing to do but try to pick up the pieces in the mournful silence of the rue des Archives. As I paid off bills and refunded subscribers from our near-empty coffers, life appeared to have ground to a halt; but I’d forgotten that, even after major upheavals, things are always in flux. One minor surprise was that I was heartily congratulated by various art-world professionals on the financial acumen I had shown in suspending publication, even though in reality the decision had been prompted by a generalised weariness and the fact that Jill had become a mother and that thenceforth she would always be a mother first. This was confirmed when she announced that she was pregnant again, and while liquidating our little holding company, the Archive Press, I prepared once more to become a father, sitting in a ring on the floor with other loosely clothed future fathers and learning to identify movements within the womb while the women got on with the real issue at hand.
Soon I was laying in two sets of nappies and wearing a tartan papoose that hung sloppily around my neck. Whenever I had the rare privilege of carrying Clio in it I was overjoyed, but I resented the fact that it flapped mostly unfilled against my chest as if confirming my uselessness in anything that concerned newborns. When Alex did arrive, however, I was the first to make his funny little tallow-coloured body dance to check that his reflexes were working and, as he bawled out against this clumsy intrusion, softly sing ‘Alex-ander, Dad-dy cal-ling’ over and over to him until the very monotony of the sonorous syllables sent him to sleep.
Another, more gradual surprise is to discover that Francis would be as present to me in death as he had been while he was alive. I had already begun to collate snatches of our talks from the previous three decades without having any particular purpose in mind. Then literary agents in New York contact me ‘with most wicked speed’ to suggest that I would be best placed to write his biography. I dither for a few weeks, aware that, given Francis’s capacity for covering his tracks, I wouldn’t have much more than my own knowledge and the paintings themselves to draw on. Then I see that this is not so much a choice as a vocation for which fate has been preparing me for years, and I sign a contract for the book without more ado. While beginning to assemble whatever documentation I can lay my hands on, it becomes clear that working on the biography will give me a new focus and help dull some of my regrets about the magazine. Then I start contacting and talking to as many of Francis’s friends and contemporaries as I can, and even if, with such lively, garrulous companions as far apart as Paddy Leigh Fermor and Henrietta Moraes, I get the odd telling reminiscence or usable quotation, I have to make do mostly with remarks like ‘He was larger than life’ or, more often still, ‘Oh, he did love to drink, didn’t he!’ Suddenly every fresh commentary on Francis – the reminiscences of an early school friend, or one of his own throwaway remarks – becomes a nugget from which I try to reconstruct a new facet of his almost entirely, and surprisingly, unrecorded life. It dawns on me little by little that, for all the table talk and boozy late-night monologues to which I was privy, I know only the sides to Francis that he wanted me to know and that, now, I am condemned to write the biography of a near-invisible man.
Suddenly our days in Paris are numbered. What had been a vista opening on to a seemingly endless future is reduced first to a number of weeks, then to a handful of days spent in feverish preparation for the move to London. For me certainly, after living abroad for nearly thirty years, it is not so much a move back as a leap into the dark. London had at best turned into an occasional, parallel home, a place I visited regularly and where I kept up with a handful of old friends. But the idea that it will now be the centre of my life takes me by surprise, and I have no idea how I or the whole family will react to it. Clio is extremely pleased that she will no longer have to contend with hearing a foreign language on the street, and she announces proudly to anyone who cares to listen ‘Do you know, we’re going to London where everyone speaks English’, even though I’m pretty sure she’ll miss such aspects of Paris as the lobster tanks at the fishmonger’s on rue Montorgueil where she is enthralled, particularly when these monsters of the deep clamber over each other with their claws and antennae waving in the bubbling water. Alex, meanwhile, now just six months old, won’t have much with which to compare the new experience, while Jill should be able to take the change in her stride since she has only been away for six years. For me, however, it is like a lifetime, although I already know that I have a perfect place to write looking out onto the tall trees that border our garden square and that, paradoxically perhaps, it will be easier to return to the city now that Francis is no longer there than it would have been if he still exerted his influence over me from his chaotic South Kensington studio.
The furniture has left, our apartment has been let, and it seems we are going out on a high with a round of parties that is already making me regret the move. We have just been received at the American Embassy by Pam Harriman, and I, smitten by her ability to make each guest feel like the only person (or certainly man) in the world, can imagine nothing more glamorous than being greeted by her dazzling smile again, despite Jill’s reminding me that I possess neither Gianni Agnelli’s suave charm nor Averell Harriman’s fortune. Our closest Paris friends have also rallied round to fete us as we leave, and we discover that two other couples we know well who have just had children like us are also on their way back whence they came, one to the States, the other to the Far East. The six of us meet to say goodbye in the Luxembourg Gardens, just as the leaves on the towering chestnut trees are beginning to float down through the autumn sunlight, and for a couple of hours we walk slowly, reflectively, up and down the dusty, gravelled paths, sharing hopes and plans, then pausing to watch the fountain in the central pool rise in great white gusts against the perfect blue sky, each aware that we all now stand at a crossroads, wondering what the future holds in store.
Once everything is ready for our departure, I board the river bus for one last journey down the Seine. Rooted to the deck, oblivious to the tourists crowding round, I watch my former life slip by, moment by moment. While the boat surges indifferently up one bank and down the other, every monument and building releases some memory or association for me. My life quickens, slows down, then accelerates again as we pass Concorde and Tuileries, Louvre and Marais. Coming back along the Jardin des Plantes, I fantasise I can hear the lions roar and even smell the sawdust in their cage. An instant later, we are gliding under the Institut’s gold-ribbed dome and with a pang I realise I might never study in Cardinal Mazarin’s fine, ancient library again. My memories reach into and behind each façade, before leaping far beyond into the unseen hinterland of the city.
The ripples from the boat’s bow as it cuts through the glassy water fan out until the whole surface of the Seine comes alive. My memories follow in the same darting moveme
nts, in overladen, liquid transitions. This instant of the present is suffused by the past, with a single, simple image – the bustle on the Champs-Elysées, the splendour of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, a pretty face on boulevard Saint-Germain – sparking off a hundred others. By travelling around the heart of Paris, I am travelling round the centre of myself, the crux of my entire adult life. My name was written on this water and on stones that span the city: my hopes still rise at certain sights and my love lingers in rooms where other hearts beat. Ten thousand days and nights have flashed by now as irrevocably as a moment’s sleep.
The boat is rocking against the quayside as I step off, and the ground shifts under my feet. I catch my balance and walk shakily up the stone steps towards the Hôtel de Ville, towards the old, warm lights, wondering why I feel such a momentous change even as the familiar perspectives of the Marais slide back into view. Going up rue des Archives to where it cuts across rue des Francs-Bourgeois, I stop to collect my thoughts under the vast, blind wall of the Archives Nationales that enshrine the history of the city since its beginnings. Behind this windowless façade lie the records of a million lives, a fragment of the vast human backdrop against which I have traced my faltering path and my transience.
My own brief history here is at an end. From this moment on Paris becomes my past.
Postscript: Full Circle: 16 rue Michel le Comte, IIIe (2014–18)
But Paris did not disappear. It lived on, sometimes waning in intensity as I relished the new freedom I found in the very atmosphere of London (freedom perhaps from the all-pervasive constraints of the French State), then flaring up on odd occasions, such as when I was asked to write the obituary of a well-known French personality, check the translation into French of a text I had written, or organise an exhibition in a Paris museum. It flared up higher still, of course, when I returned on trips to the city, no longer the ‘Anglais parisianisé’ as Michel Leiris used to describe me, but a revenant, curious to test my reactions to Paris now that I no longer lived there.
The past never disappears, of course. It appears to fade but it has in fact merely been absorbed into that vast amalgam of memory that inhabits all lives at all instants, moulding every impulse and haunting every dream. The past is precisely what makes us who we are, what distinguishes us, and it continues to grow like a lengthening shadow until we die, that moment when we join not only our own past but the past of every person and every thing the world has ever known. But while we are alive, it shades and from time to time overwhelms the present. On my first visit back to the place des Vosges, for instance, it was not the great square with its slightly irregular brick façades that I experienced, but the countless times I had already passed through it and the emotions, from rage to exultation, that used to bottle up in my throat beneath its serene gaze. The tense that I experienced then became not so much the imperfect, I realised, as a past continuous.
In a similar way, the Louvre’s great galleries of hallowed paintings mingled with my recollections of them, my reaction to many a Poussin or Claude either dulled or heightened by previous glimpses, as if I were looking at them through a pile of superimposed transparencies; but then the reward would eventually come, and a familiar image would confront me with all the shock and freshness of seeing it for the first time. These are the instants perhaps that we most crave, when the past is present but subsumed or even eclipsed by the intensity of the moment: a tense all of its own, such as the occasion when a particularly grand dinner, given at the Hôtel de Crillon before the sale of Carlos de Beistegui’s collection, summed up and, with its glittering jewellery and sparkling chandeliers, surpassed all grand dinners I had been to; or, to take a more precise and personal instance, the afternoon when I went back to play real tennis at rue Lauriston. The sun was coming through the skylight in thick shafts onto the subterranean court, and as the ball thudded into the corner sending up motes of illuminated dust (the very stuff of memory) and spun obliquely out, I managed to make a crosscourt forehand shot sending it into the winning gallery, where a cowbell tinkles gratifyingly to record the event. A hundred failed strokes had gone into that successful one, while the dust of the past danced high overhead in gilded particles, and all tenses of the verb merged into a split second.
Nevertheless, my memories of the city did eventually begin to recede, degree by slight degree, as the more questing, invasive tempo of London life and the demands of a growing family took over. Paris settled down into a backdrop, a residue of highs and lows, a fresco of the splendeurs et misères of my bachelor days. And slowly the recollections faded, with the sunlit glades of youthful ecstasy receding and the paths into memory itself petering out into dead ends.
Then, after almost exactly twenty years of writing books, curating exhibitions and watching our children grow, Jill and I decided to come back and live in Paris, returning to our old flat, which we had rented out very handily during the intervening years. We dealt with the accretions of past tenants – superfluous wires, unseemly curtains, a botched paint job – with deadly efficiency, seeking like a restored reign or dynasty to reimpose ourselves, with our recognisable style and our insignia in pride of place. The Baroque candlestick lamps, the Spanish table with its crossed wrought-iron stretchers and the African palaver chair set the tone, which was subsequently bolstered by a curated display of paintings by our artist friends, from Dado and Music to Bacon, Mason and Tàpies. A few gilded sconces and some antique picture frames inset with gleaming tortoiseshell lent new light to the walls, while the grubby carpet, scarred and pitted during previous occupations, got a quick cover-up in the form of Kilim runners and Bokhara rugs. In the same swift, bohemian manner, any indelible stain left on armchair and sofa was banished from view by a flurry of cashmere throws found in the modernised, less picturesque but still-thriving caverns of the Hôtel Drouot.
Having applied this veneer until the years rolled back and we felt fully reinstated as the monarchs of our tiny realm, we were able to look around and see that, unlike most other places in the world, little had indeed changed in the twenty years since we left our cobblestone courtyard. The mounting posts, tethering rings and sundial had not budged over a couple of decades any more than they had over the past several centuries. Pleasingly, the fig tree that still dominated the small green oasis at the centre of our ancient yard had now been flanked by rhododendrons and camellias as well as profusions of seasonal flowers planted by the gay couple living in the princely apartments on the first floor, the piano nobile; and they in time would become our close friends and confidants whom we trusted in every circumstance. But this far we had only made the external transition: we were to all intents and purposes ‘back’, but we did not yet know what effect this would have on our inner life, on the marrow of our being. So when our aged neighbour, Madame Desportes, now well into her nineties, walked sprightly past us one morning and quipped ‘If you’ve come back, it can’t be so bad here after all, can it?’, we could only laugh and acknowledge gratefully that she was right.
To reunite with a city is not altogether different from resuming a marriage after a long divorce. The same difficulties and disappointments remain deeply embedded in the relationship, but as the ones asking to be taken back, Jill and I know we have to make concessions. I often think of that silly but telling joke that when God made France he saw that it was too perfect, so then he created the French, as I walk down the narrow pavements of our area, displaying a steely determination to give way graciously to anyone who claims the right to push me into the gutter. But I’ve already noticed that, twenty years on, Parisians are generally less full of themselves and the glory of being French. They come across as disenchanted, not to say depressed, in line with the ailing economy which is apparent right outside our building in the darkened windows of abandoned shops and the numbers of people sleeping rough and scavenging for food in the dustbins outside convenience stores like Monop’. And where they once referred to most things English with disdain, they are now, mirabile dictu, full of admiration a
nd longing to join their compatriots who have already moved in their hundreds of thousands to London.
Certain pretensions are too deeply rooted to have disappeared. Just as many Parisians still consider the city streets, squares and even park benches made for them alone (rather than to be shared with others, whether Parisian or foreign), they also cling to the belief that their food is better, which it certainly often is in itself, even though the overall quality of Paris restaurants has deteriorated spectacularly. Consequently, a baker does not hang out his shingle as a mere boulanger but as an artisan du pain, a maître boulanger or even, in the case of a very superior establishment in our area, as a ‘créateur de plaisir’. The woman who runs the more modest bread shop where I have been buying my pain de campagne for decades takes a dim view of all these fancy new purveyors just as she does of the fancy new residents who have thronged to the Marais, turning it into the city’s unquestionably most fashionable area. ‘They’re people who don’t eat!’ she grumbled dismissively as she wrapped my loaf the other morning; and I realise with a touch of melancholy that the new Marais residents simply aren’t interested in the doorstopper ham-and-gruyère baguettes which in the old days were her pride and joy.
Another change that’s struck me is that the whole, previously dingy area between rue de Bretagne and République, now sonorously known as the Marais du Nord, has sprouted tiny, chic boutiques and ‘concept stores’, some of them so elegant that you have no idea what, if anything, they’re selling; while others have small quantities of luxury food, clothing and perfumes that seem too expensive for anybody to buy. Whenever I ask locals how these shops survive, they suggest that they depend on passing tourist trade. Meanwhile, both rue de Bretagne and rue Rambuteau, which used to purvey nothing but food, now feature estate agents, eyewear stores and even a bookshop each, on sites where pig and horse butchers’ stood before.
The Existential Englishman Page 38
