The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Most of these changes are welcome, and in any case they run only skin deep and do not alter the city’s essence. Paris will survive, even if she comes increasingly to resemble Venice as a high-class tourist destination with a superior lifestyle and a cluster of the world’s finest monuments and museums. But what about the Parisians? What has happened to those who once made the city the undisputed centre of artistic life? When I first arrived here fifty years ago a pantheon of great French writers and artists radiated intellectual, creative authority, from Sartre, Camus and Genet to Malraux, Lévi-Strauss and Matisse, from Jean Gabin and Edith Piaf to Coco Chanel and Jeanne Moreau, while the inventive upheavals brought about by Dada and Cubism, Surrealism and Existentialism still reverberated in the air. And what great minds and subversive movements have come to replace them? I hardly dare put the question…

  So was all the Parisian posturing and preening I endured before leaving twenty years ago not so much a show of innate superiority as an instinctive cover-up for the void that was to come? Had that generation of Parisians already sensed they were living off past glory and were about to be shuffled off the international stage? This loss of cultural pre-eminence has trickled down to the more mundane aspects of everyday life. The pride that Parisians used to take in how well they dressed, in the capital of fashion, and how well they ate, in the capital of cuisine, as well as the quality of everything they produced and the way their country was run, has evaporated noticeably. Because of my intervening absence, I am acutely aware of how brutally downgraded, how lacking in identity and purpose this Paris appears compared with the Paris I encountered half a century ago.

  But then of course I myself was half a century younger and correspondingly more impressionable. What overawed me then no longer cuts much ice. I take the haughty wine waiter, the pseudo-intellectual’s flannel, the Old Master-filled apartment and crested signet ring in my stride. Where once I was struck by a quicksilver phrase, the punning mot or learned allusion, I now turn them over like a scanner in my mind, noting mostly where they are thin, derivative and lacklustre, even though this gives me less satisfaction than an awareness of how gullible I must have seemed and been before. Similarly, I no longer quail under the stern façades of the Ecole Normale Supérieure or the Collège de France but look at them like once-overweening uncles and wonder, now that I feel more their age, how much really original thinking, rather than abstruse learning by rote, goes on in their hallowed halls.

  I was waiting in the little Métro station at Rambuteau for the next train. It was a quiet moment in the middle of the afternoon and there were only about a dozen people on the platform. An old Arab bent almost double over his stick was waiting alongside me. I let him get into the carriage before me and, as he lowered himself with elaborate precaution into the seat opposite mine, I glimpsed his deeply lined face and a whole world came flooding back. I had never known his name, but I knew him well by sight because he had been a regular at Marie-Hélène’s café on rue de Braque in the 1970s. He had been young then, with brilliantined black hair, and full of sarcastic opinions and slyly suggestive remarks that Marie-Hélène serenely disregarded. While I watched him, I heard the hubbub around the bar again, the noisy toasts and boasts as the clients jostled about clumsily trying to impress their hostess as she stood, as she still stands in my memory, Muscadet in hand and unattainable behind the silvery moat of her zinc. And while she, Marie-Hélène, had disappeared for decades into darkest Auvergne, he was now an old man, bent and infirm, creeping round the city like a reproach. The shock I felt at seeing him so diminished also came of course from the realisation that, after some forty years, I had also aged considerably and only existed now as an unreliable seeker after the past.

  That experience was to recur in varying forms frequently over the weeks that followed, but nowhere more so than at an after-opening party that the art dealer Claude Bernard, who had not lost his knack for entertaining on a grand scale, invited me to. It was as dark as a nightclub on the ground floor of the Alcazar, the fashionable restaurant in Saint-Germain-des-Prés that Claude had taken over for the event. I waited patiently in line to heap up my plate with delicious foie gras and smoked salmon from the buffet table, and armed with a glass of champagne that fizzed exuberantly in the gloom I found a corner of the big room to sit down and devour them. Everybody else around me, vague silhouettes seated in odd combinations of sofas and chairs, seemed to be doing the same, since it was already late in the evening and, like me, they were famished. I was amused to note that although I could barely make out their features the whites of their eyes seemed almost phosphorescent, as if they had been preserved after death and some artistically inclined mortician had taken it upon himself to render them more lifelike by adding a touch of white heightening to their open orbits, like certain Egyptian statues.

  We continued to restore ourselves amply and silently until I became aware that several pairs of white-heightened orbits were trained inquisitively on me. I felt embarrassed and flushed unseen in the dark. Perhaps I had disturbed a group of old friends who, in the Parisian fashion I knew so well, had hived off to commune together through the evening and so avoid meeting anyone new and potentially disturbing. I had no group to join (not even Jill, who wasn’t in Paris that evening), but that would not have excused me in the eyes of some tight-knit coterie reunited to ensure it kept all others out. Shyly I peeped back at the orbits, particularly at one that seemed encircled by a huge halo of white hair. And as our eyes met, almost coagulating in the deceptive murk, I realised that I was looking at an old Indian artist friend, Viswanadhan, once as darkly hirsute as a summer forest at night, and that next to him was a curator from the Centre Pompidou that I had once worked with, and beside her the wife of my great friend, Dado, who died barely a year ago…

  The moment of awareness, of recognition, teemed with associations as my glass of champagne, obligingly refilled by a hand in the dark, fizzed once again. I wanted that instant to endure, to keep that split second long enough to root out at least some of its silent implications. We were suspended in the interstices of two worlds, one embedded in the 1970s, the other fully part of the twenty-first century. This was as close to time travel as I would ever come, but what enchanted me most was the almost physical juxtaposition of two distinct eras, as if for once such conjunctions were not only in the mind, in the imagination, but concrete entities that you discovered in this tectonic shift in time. Then someone said: ‘Is that really you, Michael?’ And the moment was past.

  There will be a lapse of time now, I realise, before I join the people I used to know in Paris, a ghost among ghosts, a revenant that has been accepted. There is a slight judder, like a machine grinding to a halt, and I realise that was the sound of my short absence, my twenty years away, being absorbed into another dimension of time. I came back; and from this moment on I have come back. The ghosts have accepted me as one of theirs, and now I may climb, as unsteadily as my Arab friend, to take my seat among their shadowy ranks.

  Death has created its own narrative, inevitably, and it shadows mine at every turn, removing so many of the Parisian figures I once held in awe, whether I knew them personally or admired them from afar. Not only have they, a whole generation of elders, disappeared, but so have many of the traces of their works and days which they thought, fondly, would pass down intact to posterity. Who remembers Laurent Terzieff, who was once on all fashionable Parisian lips as he dashed from play to film and back again, playing all the roles? How did Topor, with his fertile fantasy and manic laugh, or the acerbic Michaux, nothing if not a near-genius in his literary and graphic explorations, slip under the radar? And what will become of my own artist friends, Dado and Adzak (whose old studio has been turned into a museum in his memory), Mason and Music, now that they are no longer here to protect their work and ensure it continues to be seen and debated? Their presence, once so vital and intense, is fading fast against a landscape already half silted up by the sands of time… And here I stand, a survivor in this wi
lderness, piecing together echoes of their voices, fragments of what they left behind.

  You can walk across central Paris in an hour at most, which makes it an ideal city to explore on foot. I used to make it a point of honour to walk for forty minutes or so to a dinner or a gallery opening, then return to the Marais still under the same steam, choosing a different path, another bridge across the Seine, each time. Now that I am back, however, I’ve had to take into account that I am less fleet of foot, even if I remain obscurely confident that one day I will wake up and, as before, stride manfully across the city, from Montmartre to Montparnasse, from Château de Vincennes to the Arc de Triomphe…

  While awaiting this unlikely rejuvenation, I have found a wonderful alternative. I have always admired the Paris bus, green and sleekly efficient and, although the epitome of public transport, immeasurably more elegant and pleasurable than the Métro. Whenever I take the Métro, it is only because I am in a hurry and cannot allow myself the luxury of the autobus: I ‘descend’ as into Stygian gloom and cannot wait until I return to daylight, whereas the Paris bus is for me tantamount to being in a Pullman, a travelling salon, comfortably ensconced while the whole, marvellous spectacle of the city unfolds. My only regret is that Paris buses have done away with the enticing open platform at the back that you could board simply by unhooking a leather strap, whether at the bus stop or, more excitingly, when the bus was caught in traffic and you could thread your way through the hooting cars and jump up onto that enviable balcony to join your peers for a fag, because you could even light up there and smoke to your heart’s content.

  It follows quite naturally that I have begun once again to learn my bus numbers, their routes, their frequencies and even their characteristics, because no one bus seems to be exactly like another. I have already established a number of favourites. If I walk out of my building on what we call the rue Michel and turn right, I arrive in minutes at a stop for the reliable no. 38, which will whisk me through Châtelet, over the Seine, and up boulevard Saint-Michel towards Alésia and beyond; I say ‘beyond’ because it goes all the way to the Porte d’Orléans, which is ‘here be dragons’ country as far as I’m concerned. My preference is to go as far as the Jardins du Luxembourg, have a long stroll revisiting old sites and occasionally discovering new ones (although I’ve never seen the apiary that’s apparently producing honey there), and on the way back stop at the Marks & Spencer’s on boulevard Saint-Michel to stock up on tea, pickles and assorted Indian condiments.

  Mostly these trips have no specific aim or destination. If I were once a boulevardier or flâneur, threading my way full of curiosity through the old streets, I am now a ‘bus boulevardier’, taking my pleasure once (when I’m lucky) I find a good observational seat towards the back of the bus with a full-pane window where I can observe, dream and reflect on the marvellous passing strip of inner city that is unravelling before my eyes. There are several buses whose main function seems to reside in circling the Luxembourg, and these I catch with manic regularity because they enable me to reconnect with so many aspects of the city that I love, from imposing Senate to squalid alley, from pallid couple kissing to stately matron with a forest of leek leaves sprouting from her shopping bag, from sumptuous window display to forgotten antiquarian bookshop. Since I often stay on until the bus reaches its destination, I can observe whole fluxes of people boarding and dismounting, sunk deep in conversation or blankly consulting their mobile phones, oblivious to the drama of the city outside. Suddenly the pavements empty as the bus heaves and shudders in a short cut down back streets and past half-abandoned garages, deserted post offices and dour apartment buildings whose windows blaze in the brilliance of the setting sun. Then later, on another evening, I will see those same apartments fill with electric light, one by one, as dusk comes to darken their façade.

  Recently I found out that a single ticket covers however many rides you can fit within a ninety-minute period, thereby adding an extra pleasure, the voluptuousness of thrift, to my journeys. That dispensation has allowed me, once I’ve had my fill of such vistas as the Luxembourg Gardens on one side and the radial rues de Tournon and de Condé stretching down to boulevard Saint-Germain on the other, to jump on the amiable no. 89, which offers a magnificent ride past the Panthéon and along the Seine towards that further spot so close to my heart, the Jardin des Plantes. Or I might take my local 38 down to Châtelet and, same ticket in hand, mount the obliging 72, whose windows give close-up views of the Louvre, the arcaded rue de Rivoli and the open splendour of place de la Concorde, with its enigmatic obelisk from Luxor, before following the Seine as it sweeps majestically past the Grand Palais to the Musée d’Art Moderne and alluring parks and pastures beyond.

  A leitmotif throughout this memoir is my difficulty with writing, my failure to write, my struggle with every aspect of what is called ‘writing for oneself’. Perhaps the strangest thing about growing old for me is that where there were so many problems in this area suddenly there are next to none – or at least only the hands-on problems of subject, form and style. Why, I wonder in retrospect, did I spend so much time railing against what I saw as this enormous injustice, the incessant desire to write wrestled to the ground by the invincible impossibility of writing, of one hand holding back the other in perpetual, grunting stalemate? I was my own worst, perhaps my only, enemy. Whatever I committed to paper was immediately reviewed by an historic committee that on any one day might include Shakespeare, Keats and Byron, or Kafka, Borges and Beckett, and found woefully inadequate. If the first line would not pass muster, how could the second and third be written? They could not: they were stillborn, grotesque little corpses in my brain.

  I think if I made it so difficult for myself to write freely it was mostly because I had not yet found the subject that would engage me fully. Biography, autobiography, memoirs are the genres that require more maturity perhaps than any other: how, for instance, can you approach the subject of old age – or the allure of youth, seen in retrospect – if you have not experienced it? I had to wait a very long, frustrating time before I felt entitled to write as I wanted. I could, of course, have tried to fictionalise my experience and written novels. Yet when I tried to cast my relationship with Francis Bacon in the fictional mould as I described here earlier, I liked the freedom from fact that it offered but decided that only fact would convey the story accurately and powerfully. Since then, in the things that I read, I have always preferred documents like diaries, letters and other factual sources to novels and short stories. If I have to choose between a good biography and an artfully simulated, fictional ‘life’, I would always go to the former just as I would take a pork chop over a dubiously constituted pâté, or a grilled flounder over fish paste.

  Another reason might be that I set my sights unrealistically high. I cared so much! I wanted to be seen as incapable of a graceless line or an inconclusive paragraph. Everything I wrote had to have rhythm, to sing, and of course most of the time whatever I came up with no more than mumbled. Obviously I wanted to fly before I could walk, that is in the nature of any ambition, but what I could not understand – I barely understand it now – is that I had to wait almost to the end before I was given wings. And part of that, it has to be said, was caring less, seeing the relativity of all things and accepting the risk of making a fool of myself. And from being barely able to bring a first line to fruition, I began to surprise myself by how fluent I could become, latterly writing a thousand or more words a day like someone who had found drink or God and for whom limitations no longer existed, even if keeping up that pace for a week or so, without going out or seeing anyone, left me feeling terminally ill. Rather than the poet, as Jaime Gil de Biedma had prophesied years before, I had at last become the poem.

  That doesn’t mean, quite clearly, that what I write has any merit or quality. It means only that I have written – in the sense that Jaime Gil once defined every writer’s fundamental impulse: ‘I write in order to have written’; and this comes as the most profoun
d liberation for me after so many years of self-inflicted silence. In Beckett’s pared-down phrase, it is the only thing that counts, even if all we do is to leave ‘a stain on the silence’. There is little to be found in favour of ageing, which is like a debilitating disease spreading inexorably through one’s system, but it does allow for a certain clarity of hindsight: you cannot call it wisdom – to my mind, it’s closer to resignation; yet in the very distance that has been covered by a long life a pattern, the pattern in the carpet, emerges. I had to live before I could write, I had to live my life almost entirely before I had the subject that I wanted to write about, that I could write about with the most insight and accuracy.

  In writing there are moments when you go beyond yourself and touch on something bigger and grander. Those are the moments, I realise now, that I live for, that I have always lived for even before I felt them originating in myself, in my own writing, because I first experienced them as a very young man reading other writers – or, more precisely, hearing Shakespeare and Keats being read out by my wonderful English teacher at school. That was exactly where the fascination began: watching, hearing the words dance and sing in the shafts of sunlight illuminating the old, panelled room with its desks carved with generations of names in School House. That magic transported you to another realm, freeing you from the humiliations of being an adolescent dressed in blazer and boater and imprisoned in a boarding school. And afterwards nothing proved more seductive than the idea that you might revisit that hallowed realm, however it came about – in a first kiss, in hearing Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ just as it began resonating through provincial England or, indeed, opening a particular book, reading a particular poem, and being transported back to that heightened, poetic realm.