Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  * * *

  I walked out of the film that night knowing that even if I was destined to remain totally feckless when it came to courtship and romance and was too timid a lover to speak as boldly or as intelligently as men and women did in Rohmer, something about the film had enlightened and allowed me to see that in Rohmer everything bearing on love, on luck, on others, on our ability to see through the mirages life throws our way was reducible to one thing: the love of form. His film was classical. It didn’t care about the way things are, about reality, about the here and now, about urban blight, the war in Vietnam, World War II, or about what everyone else was busy filming in the late sixties; it was beholden to and chastened by a higher principle: classicism. A short film where nothing happens and where mind is the plot. This was totally new. I was enchanted. It had never occurred to me until that moment that classicism had never died and that art itself, which is the highest mankind can aspire to, might indeed be just a bubble, but that what’s inside this bubble and what we learn from walking through it is better than life.

  Outside I looked around me. The city looked nothing like Weir’s or Hopper’s that night, or like that of any other painters who had touched up Manhattan to make it their own. I could see it clearly now. Without patina, without art coating its buildings, without layers, the city had no beauty, no kindness, no love or friendship to give; it radiated nothing, meant nothing, to me. This was not my city, was never going to be. Its people were not my people, were never going to be. Nor was theirs my tongue—would never be.

  Watching Manhattan grow lusterless at this hour of the night, I also realized something more disheartening yet: that I was losing France, had lost France, that Paris too was not my city, had never been, would never be. I wasn’t here, but I certainly wasn’t anywhere else either. Nothing seemed to work. The woman I wanted I couldn’t have. The street I lived on wasn’t my street, and the job I had would never last. Nothing, nowhere, nobody. Some words of Dos Passos, whom I’d never even liked, coursed through my mind. “At night, head swimming with wants, [the young man] walks by himself alone. No job, no woman, no house, no city.”

  What I took with me on my subway ride home that night was an imaginary Paris and an imaginary New York, places that weren’t real, where people spoke a medley of bookish French and bookish English and watched unreal things happen to them, almost as though they knew they were being filmed and belonged in a beautifully composed screenplay and had grown to like their lives done up that way, because they too distrusted this thing everyone called brute reality, because brute reality did not exist, wasn’t even real, had no place in the world, because the things that mattered were not real, could not be real. I was not interested in the real world but had never had the courage to say it. I wanted something else. I wanted more.

  I took the subway, not to 96th Street but all the way north to 168th, then crossed over to the other side and took the downtown train home. She and I had done this once, riding the subway north, rushing over the footbridge to take the downtown, and getting on just as the doors had closed the first time and then suddenly reopened barely to let us in. Before she got off at her stop on 157th Street, she kissed me on the mouth. The kiss stayed with me all the way to my stop at 96th Street, then on my walk up 97th, then to bed, and when I awoke the next morning, I could tell it had spent the night with me and hadn’t gone away. It never did. On my way uptown, I knew that after 116th Street the train would bolt out from underground as it comes up for air and races to the 125th Street El. I liked that brief intermezzo on the El before the train chugged its way back underground. I even like watching the train today, when I walk on Broadway past 122nd Street and glimpse the Broadway local suddenly gun its way out of the tunnel like a giant armored vehicle bearing down on the tracks with lockstep speed and purpose, its red light in the front like a watchman’s lantern telling the world that its course and its passengers are once again safe for the night. On the night I discovered Rohmer, I had headed uptown hoping to run into the girl from Washington Heights. I knew that such encounters seldom happened in life. But I liked the thought of it, and I liked the things we would tell each other, and I loved her sprightly repartees each time she’d take my insights about why things hadn’t worked between us and turn them around to show me that, however clever I thought my insights were, there was always going to be another way of seeing things, and that if she had to speak her mind, she’d tell me in four plain words that I was an idiot, a real idiot, because on the night she said her mother might wake up in the adjacent room, all she might have meant was Let’s go to my bedroom instead.

  EVENINGS WITH ROHMER

  Claire; or, A Minor Disturbance on Lake Annecy

  I was thirteen years old when I first glimpsed Claude Monet’s Les Coquelicots, known in English as Poppy Field. It was the first painting I’d ever seen by Monet, and it immediately spoke to me and continues to do so, half a century later. I know the painting is beautiful, but I wouldn’t begin to know why it is beautiful, why it simply transcends almost everything I can say about it, or what precisely stirs the sense of profound harmony that rushes through me each time I look at it. I know it’s the colors, and I know it’s the subject, the disposition, the sense of total tranquility that mornings or afternoons in a country home in Vétheuil are supposed to suggest. All these and more. But I continue to react to it today as I did back then, because, even when I was thirteen, the painting instantly took me back to far earlier years of my childhood. Which leads me to suspect that the painting means a lot to me not just for aesthetic reasons but for reasons that are entirely subjective, personal, biographical—unless, of course, a subjective or personal response, especially among Impressionist painters, is exactly what an aesthetic stimulus is meant to stir.

  The painting reminds me of our summer house not far from the beach. A lot of wild growth, lots of bushes, and a few slopes took you from that house to a road that led to a tiny pathway filled with poppies and jasmine that eventually led to the beach. In the painting there are two characters in the foreground: one is a child, the other a grown woman. The boy is me, of course, and the woman, my grandmother. I think of the woman in the painting as my grandmother and not my mother because my grandmother was an even-tempered and very composed woman, whereas my mother was loud, tempestuous, and passionate. As in Monet’s painting, we walked beneath trees and a clear, luminous sky dotted with bright white clouds, and at the very top of a rise, possibly a hillock, sat a house. I am unable to remember whether the house on the hill was owned by a Russian lady—most likely aristocratic, since I was always told to behave in her presence—or whether it was ours.

  The painting evokes a sense of plenitude, of leisure, comfort, even happiness and serene idleness unknown to post-world-war Europe. I don’t think I ever revisited that house past the age of five. Yet suddenly, at the age of thirteen, I was yanked back to that summer house as though reminded that, in those years, my life too had been serene, safe, and harmonious. In that house in those years my grandmother would prepare pastries and cakes, and we would sit downstairs in the garden at a round table with an open umbrella standing in its center. In the morning we sat there and had a little snack, and in the afternoon it was tea, while my grandmother would talk about the past as she kept to her needlepoint, always her needlepoint. Not a ruffle in our lives then. If I am giving a prelapsarian vision of those years, it’s because the painting by Monet suggests nothing less. The real world is so thoroughly shut out that it is difficult to imagine that Poppy Field was painted two years after France’s most humiliating military defeat of 1871 against Prussia, immediately followed by occupation, the collapse of the Second Empire, the Paris Commune, the capture of Napoleon III, and the payment of exorbitant war reparations. None of this is in Monet’s painting, just as none of the calamities my family was to face by the time I was thirteen are lodged in my memory of the house on the hill.

  Like all great art, what Monet’s Poppy Field does is not so much allow me to project
, to graft my own life, onto Monet’s painting, but to borrow from his painting hints and aspects of my own life, to discover and see better and more clearly the arrangement, the logic, the highlights of my life, to read my life in the key of Monet’s painting. The process here is less one of projection than of retrieval, not of discovery but of remembrance. I could go a step further and say that Monet has taken scattered moments of my early childhood and redesigned them for me to see in his painting something like a distant echo of my own life. Monet has simply taken memories of that house on the hill and given me a better version of life in a house that is no longer really in either Vétheuil or in that place where I spent my boyhood summers. It is no longer even on his canvas. It is and will always be elsewhere.

  * * *

  When I saw Claire’s Knee in May of 1971, I immediately recognized the film’s summer setting as Lake Annecy, although I’d never been to Annecy before. I couldn’t even tell whether what I was sensing from the film was an echo of Monet or of our old summer house. Maybe it was the lakefront, or the table in the garden around which people could sit and talk, or maybe the birds chirping in the first few shots of the film, or just the ambient silence hovering near a large body of water. But for some totally intractable reason, my childhood and Monet’s painting or something neighboring the two had come alive. I might not have made the connection at the time or didn’t quite know what to do with it even if I suspected a connection; perhaps I felt it was extraneous to the film and therefore irrelevant. Not incidental, however, but just as inexplicably braided into the film was my plan to fly to Paris later that summer to spend a few weeks with my grandmother. With Monet’s painting in the back of my mind, I watched the semi-familiar setting of this film cast both a shade of remembrance on the scene as well as an undefined presage of my forthcoming trip to Europe. For a moment I was holding three tenses in my hand: Monet’s Vétheuil coupled to our summer house in the past, the present moment inside the 68th Street Playhouse on Third Avenue, and the immediate future awaiting me in France.

  None of it was real, of course. The Monet painting was just an illusion, the 68th Street Playhouse was crowded with people eating popcorn, and my grandmother’s studio on rue Greuze was slightly bigger than a maid’s room. But the movie seemed to deflect reality and provide instead, without my knowing exactly how, a far, far better world.

  Claire’s Knee was my second Éric Rohmer film, and I’d gone to see it a few weeks after seeing My Night at Maud’s. I had loved the scene and the conversation in Maud’s bedroom and asked my cousin, who had seen both films, whether a similar scene occurred in Claire’s Knee. Her answer couldn’t have made things more irresistible: not only was there a similar scene in Claire’s Knee, but all of Claire’s Knee was like that one bedroom scene in Maud.

  As had happened on the evening I went to see Maud, I was alone that Friday night. And perhaps seeing the film by myself, undistracted, was exactly what I needed in order to let Rohmer speak to me.

  The film was set in Talloires, which should not have surprised me, since Rohmer’s films after The Sign of Leo and his first few shorts seldom take place in Paris. People may travel to and from Paris, yet Paris seems strangely peripheral. Paris, which sits at the heart of almost every French film and novel, is suddenly displaced, marginalized, almost questioned, as though another reality with totally different orientations were about to be proposed. And this, as I was to see, is true of Claire’s Knee as well. Something is very tacitly examined; it deflects or at least defers but certainly challenges conventional French perspectives.

  Seduction and desire, which have been the bread and butter of all French narratives, are also displaced. In My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee, as I would soon find in The Collector and Chloe in the Afternoon, the leading men are either about to get married or are already married and have at best either the most reluctant interest in the women they are drawn to or find themselves being pursued by women whose tentative, indirect advances they already mean to turn down. At most, they might go through some of the familiar motions of courtship, because the situation makes them unavoidable or because they have no sense of how else to behave in the presence of an attractive woman.

  These urbane, worldly, hard-bitten former Lotharios have mended their ways and are trying to hold back. I, on the other hand, at just barely twenty, was desperately trying to practice what these men were seeking to unlearn. They were embracing chastity; I couldn’t wait to cast mine off. Like Adrien in The Collector, they were reclaiming their “calm, their solitude”; nothing could have stifled me more than my calm and solitude. They welcomed their monk’s bedroom; I hated my monkish existence in my parents’ home.

  I did not have enough experience with women in those days and was forever fascinated by, not to say envious of, Rohmer’s accomplished men who had known, loved, and been loved by women and are finally eager to embrace wedlock and marital fidelity. As Jérôme, played by Jean-Claude Brialy, tells Aurora in the film, “I have become indifferent to all other women.”

  And yet, despite all of these men’s pious claims of wanting to stave off sex, their old, philandering ways are so ingrained that nothing could feel more natural to them than to reach out and hold a woman in the most ambiguous embrace. I envied them their unhindered friendships with women. Time after time in Claire’s Knee we witness Jérôme, a French cultural attaché stationed in Sweden, holding his friend Aurora when he explains to her why he is marrying Lucinde. Jean-Louis, in My Night at Maud’s, comes uncomfortably close to Maud and then stares into her eyes ever so intensely in what everyone is asked to believe is a sexless moment between a woman who is lying half naked in bed and an ex-womanizer who is now determined to remain chaste. Similarly, Frédéric in Chloe in the Afternoon caresses and kisses Chloé in what we are meant to assume is no more than the physical contact between two Parisian friends who are pleased to speak intimately about their lives.

  I missed French intimacy and was suddenly realizing while watching the film how distant was that world from Third Avenue New York, where people always needed “space” and refrained from touching unless they were already lovers. Part of me wanted to think that perhaps this was why I was alone on a Friday night at the movies.

  * * *

  Rohmer’s men inhabit two worlds: the more or less philandering world of their younger days, which they’re leaving behind, and the exclusively monogamist life they are hastening to enter. This is what made his films so unusual and what drew me to him at so young an age. His men and I shared more than I suspected, but only if you reversed the equation. They were inhibited because they knew where things went if you didn’t stop them; I was inhibited because I hadn’t found the courage to let them take me there. They thought as much as I did about the opposite sex, and they, as I, were totally familiar with the paradoxes and ironies punctuating every human impulse. “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of” (Pascal). I liked their disabused, almost blasé, frank, and frequently self-indulgent yet unsparingly shrewd and canny insights into desire and human nature; they spoke my language if only because they resisted the commonplace and, instead, provided a skeptical view of conventional notions prevalent during the late 1960s and early ’70s. I also liked that they, as I, balked before temptation. But they balked because they chose to fight it; I balked because I didn’t know how to yield to it. They were trying to evade a woman’s advances; I was trying to spur them on.

  But there was one unassailable difference between us. Their knowledge came from experience, mine from books. They were tired of the same landscape; I had scarcely traveled in it. What bound us—superficially, perhaps—was our bookish love of the French moralistes of the seventeenth century who read human nature in the key of paradox. Everything Rohmer’s characters say goes against the grain. They may be tirelessly unscrambling the makeup of the psyche and are constantly out to steal elusive insights into themselves and others, but their rarefied and polished probes are frequently the product of a form of s
elf-deception that is not easy to pinpoint because it is couched in so much eloquence. I knew enough about contradiction to see that what I envied in these adults was more than simply their knowledge of the world or their profound distrust of appearances; it was the ease with which they assumed that identity was a tangle of contradictions that are held together by cadenced phrases. Rohmer is a contrarian. I was a contrarian. I loved seeing it in someone else. I wasn’t sure what the connection was between us, but I knew there had to be one.

  Rohmer’s men lived in Western Europe in a style I longed to copy and that took me back to Monet’s house on the hill, to my grandmother, to me and the walks through tall grass, to those endless afternoons of leisure, comfort, and ease—it was all there. Jérôme himself owns an old house surrounded by trees and wild growth; this, as he tells Aurora, is where he used to spend his summers as a boy. I, on the other hand, lived with my parents and held a part-time job in a machinery shop in Long Island City. Jérôme was a touch foppish and smug, but he was perfectly accomplished, held the perfect job, was perfectly well traveled, looked perfect, and had perfect friendships and a perfect girlfriend who was soon to become his wife; in short, he led the perfect life. He even wore perfect clothes. What he wore had so impressed me that, after seeing Claire’s Knee, I desperately tried to find a shirt like his. When I did find it, it cost me a fortune. Wearing it, of course, made me feel that I already belonged in Rohmer’s world.