We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  Nairn cuts a rum figure of a Virgil, providing tourists with a supremely serviceable Baedeker while encouraging them to lose themselves in the city, like part-time Baudelairean flâneurs. Going off-piste, however, is easier said than done. In a passage reminiscent of Walter Benjamin, he describes an archway, on Rue des Ecoles, “embroidered with posters, inches thick”. The name of French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez — who had died four years earlier — “still peers through”, along with far older “Art Nouveau fragments”. Nairn muses, dreamily, that “something by Toulouse-Lautrec” may even have been preserved under all the layers. Paris, in other words, is a palimpsest; its cityscape always already written. No wonder, then, that the travel writer should long for a blank slate, or, failing that, one that resists easy decipherment. Something akin to the restaurant menu boards he was so fond of, “written up daily in near-illegible purple ink”, or the “inscrutable lettering” adorning bus stops (designed, presumably, to delight and wrong-foot the unseasoned passenger in equal measure). His is not the Paris we will always have, but the one we never will; a city for ever in the process of becoming, like the “magnificent compositions” greengrocers conjure up out of fruit and veg: “a daily, renewable work of art, as valid,” Nairn argues, “as any of the creations that come out of art schools”.

  Defamiliarising Paris — rendering it “near-illegible” — is no mean feat, given the “unthinking respects” successive generations have paid to the city’s “acknowledged sights”. The author recognises, with heavy heart, that Place Vendôme’s reputation is “impregnable”, however much scorn he may pour on the “swishest part” of this “swish city”. Instead, he limns the liminal; points visitors towards less canonical climes, wondering, for instance, why Ménilmontant’s “genuine poetry” remains largely unsung, compared with “over-praised and grossly over-painted” Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  More radically, Nairn goes in search of Paris’s genius loci, which, owing to the city’s “homogenous” and “monolithic” nature, is not rooted in any specific locale. “Specific buildings and specific views” are the “least part” of l’Île-Saint-Louis, he declares, “as they are of Paris as a whole”. Promoting the joys of the river Seine, he reaffirms this notion of a moveable feast: “The actual place is unimportant: there will always be a view of something.

  What counts is water, the gleaming stone kerbs, the angle of a tree, the look of someone else’s upturned feet, their view of your own, the perspective of buildings on the other side”. Likewise, the author’s elegant black-and-white photographs tend to focus on the aura of a site in lieu of the site itself. The Jardin des Tuileries, for instance, is adumbrated by a couple of empty chairs facing each other, like a Ionesco play on a budget.

  Nairn has a penchant for undistinguished locations, where “there is almost nothing to look at in the usual sense’; where space spaces out and place can take place. In an entry not included in the present edition, he praises Quevauvillers’ features, “all lying around waiting for nothing to happen”. Nothing happened with a vengeance, when he and his wife, high on hiatus, spent a “very wet day” near a suburban station “not going to the Air Museum”: “In London it would have been a misery; in Paris it became The Day the Rain Came, luminous and isolated”. Numinous too. There is a Zen-like quality to these mini epiphanies — these lulls in the topographer’s relentless perambulations — which signals a fleeting sense of arrival: “the moment you give up and relax, the city will accept you. All you have to do is put your arse on a café seat, park bench, or low wall, and look”.

  Transmuting the infra-ordinary into the extraordinary is Paris’s party trick, hence the “magic-city” sobriquet. It is “a memorable experience,” Nairn enthuses, “to have banality transform itself into ideal as you sit and look, hear, smell, and taste — the whole city is urging you to greater depth of feeling, the opposite effect of a Birmingham”. The humdrum is magicked, by dint of “atmosphere”, into the everyday sublime; a transformative experience that leaves visitors feeling “more alive”: “You and the city, together, have built an event which is neither personal nor impersonal”. Once tuned into, Paris achieves a flow state, where everything is “plugged in” while remaining a “vehicle for the expression of millions of disparate desires”. This version of the French capital is resolutely “on the side of life” unlike many of the fusty, musty national monuments — “desexed”and “stone-cold dead” — which Nairn inveighs against. It provides “pure urban freedom”; a framework within which “life can take what shape it likes”, allowing “full space for your private world”. It is perhaps best exemplified by the Tuileries, where I am writing this, sipping a cheeky rosé: “These are enchanted groves for world-citizens, where each gesture has its own weight and space: absolute, unimpeded by any outside influence: assessed by its own nature and no other — whether it is a kiss or a system of philosophy. […] Not bad for a thick copse and some gravel; but that’s Paris”. I think we can all drink to that.

  1 This is a revised version of “A Zen Guide to Paris” which appeared in the New European, 27 July-2 August 2017, pp. 38-40.

  Donut

  Will Ashon

  1. I don’t know much about Paris. I felt like I did, but I was kidding myself.

  2. In truth, I don’t know much about anything. When I’m feeling bullish about this I wonder why our children are made to sit in school sports halls to be examined on knowledge briefly learnt and soon forgotten when they can look it all up on the Internet. When I’m feeling less bullish I have to admit that, personally, I’m nowhere near young enough to be a digital native, that my phone is not an outboard brain, and that my ignorance is much deeper, much more complete and perfect, than any other part of my personality.

  3. But even allowing for my general ignorance, I don’t know much about Paris.

  4. I’ve been to Paris. I’ve been to Paris a number of times. School trips, summer holidays with parents, visiting friends from university, staying with friends of friends, work trips, visits for important parental birthdays, trips with children. I have driven and been driven — in cars and on coaches — travelled by ferry and train, hitchhiked, flown, and taken the Eurostar, a carriage of which my son decorated with vomit. In the future I will go on weekend breaks to fill the gaping hole created by my children leaving home, weekend breaks to escape from the crush of my children returning to live at home, trips for anniversaries and birthdays too monumental to imagine just yet, trips to visit old friends I’ve not sat down with and talked to in twenty or thirty or, eventually, forty years, trips with grandchildren, and finally a pilgrimage to visit one last time, unsteady and with shaking hands, my favourite sites from all the other trips.

  5. One of the only things I “know” (by which I mean “have read”) about Paris is that by placing all its poor people in the suburbs (banlieues) beyond the city’s limits, it has hollowed itself out and become a theme park, a Disneyland of beauty and culture, a palimpsest of a living city. What I’m saying is, Paris is a donut. Or rather, Paris is the donut’s hole. Living in London, this used to make me feel superior, until I realised that, by different means, the same thing was happening here.

  6. I also know (by which I mean I’ve read) that Paris used to be the centre of the art world, but that New York took over. And that there was some connection — mainly involving the cost of living — between points 6 and 5. Artists, it is commonly held, like affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate.

  7. Which is to say, you can’t be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either. And if you think you can, you’re not really an artist at all — have never written a manifesto in blood, or run naked in the snow with a belly full of absinthe, or shot someone or yourself or, in general, caused revulsion and outrage amongst the bourgeoisie.

  8. Neither can you be an artist inside my head, which, now I come to think of it, has more than I would like to admit in common with Paris. It is the hole in the middle of a donut and all the interesting
stuff involving poverty and world cuisine and semi-derelict real estate is going on around it. All the knowledge is certainly going on around it. It is peripheral to me. I am maybe also peripheral to it, but that’s less important right now.

  9. Not only does that make my head a theme park, a Disneyland of beauty and culture, but it makes me a tourist in it, too, visiting only on important anniversaries, going always to the same café for the same disappointing coffee, drunk always with half an eye on posterity, on the people who sat here before. By which I mean mainly my younger, prettier, more idealistic — and in retrospect, idealised — self.

  10. Although, of course, the architecture of my mind is less impressive, and the stories to be told about my mind less colourful, and no one else — no one, not one — travels here on pilgrimage. My streets are empty and hence both ersatz and perfectly preserved.

  What Was His Name?

  John Holten

  I miss my pre-internet brain, but that doesn’t help anything. We can only go forward.

  — Douglas Coupland

  1.

  What was his name? Something beginning with S, Samed? Said? He had North African heritage, his father may have been Algerian or Tunisian. So much is lost in the passing of time, and back then — when I was just out of university and once more in Paris to be a language assistant — time seemed slow and I was listless, although looking back, over a decade later, it was anything but empty. Time was full, but that doesn’t sound right: things just happened even though boredom crowded in and threatened everything. That’s why I became friends with this guy, S, who was training to be a pilot. We met in a bar down the hill from the Panthéon, whose internet I was using as I looked desperately for a flat. It must have been late September and — for whatever reason lost to those winds of time so destructive to the preservation of the impulses which create human will — he started a conversation with me, probably because he wanted to improve his English (of course we never spoke French) or maybe because he was heartbroken and recently single and loneliness and boredom threatened him in a way that made him want to have fun or in any case not sit at home but travel into Paris from wherever it was in the suburbs he lived, driving his parents’ car to reach the quiet, boring streets of the Latin Quarter, and we exchanged numbers, and I can’t remember what we talked about in that initial meeting, or indeed much about any of our conversations, that is the point, I can’t remember anything about what happened the rest of that night, not where I slept even, homeless as I was at the time. So much is lost to memories that only fade because they were never important in the first place.

  I realise I can go through my Facebook friends and find this guy, I’m pretty certain that when I joined Facebook, around six months after this meeting, I reckon, we became Facebook friends. Indeed, he could have been one of my first friends on the network. But I won’t, not for now.

  Darkness shadows everything, the edges are bathed in it, because as I recall the next time I heard from him I had found a place, and this would make it October. He probably texted me and suggested we should meet up, and I agreed, bored as I was sitting at home in this, my new home. I was probably happy that someone reached out to me at all, that I had a friend in the city.

  We met somewhere along Rue des Écoles, I cannot remember exactly what the meeting point was, but I remember he picked me up in a car and I found this odd, as I had few friends in my life then, like now, who drove cars, especially in the city. And we went for beers. That’s mostly what I remember we did. That’s all we ever did in fact: sometimes in bars, those tacky bars around the Latin Quarter that were dull and anachronistic in a weird 1980s way, or increasingly we would drink bottles or cans of Kronenbourg bought in an alimentation générale on Rue Saint-Jacques and sit on the steps (were they steps or just the kerb?) at the Panthéon, and this felt good as this had been my neighbourhood when I first lived in Paris a couple of years earlier, a student down the hill, an occupant of the embarrassingly named Rue des Irlandais at the former Irish College for Catholic Priests (it’s not every day you get to have sex in a building in which you know the Pope had also once dreamed… the same Pope that would die not long after these events).

  I cannot recall how many nights we met up, I guess it must have been a good handful: we’d meet, get some beers, drinking either on the street or in his car, then maybe head to a bar ostensibly to look for women to talk to and fulfil the separate dreams we both harboured but surely never fully articulated. The exact details we talked about I have no clue: he slowly revealed that he had lost a girlfriend and still loved her or at least missed her or at least pined for her in that stubborn male way of not having what he thought he still wanted yet was perfectly powerless to regain. Once, we drove to the Right Bank and made a foray north of the city and he showed me her house, or maybe it was the house they had shared, up near Montmartre, on the edge of the city’s famous hill, what feels like its only hill, and I remember a switchback street lined with a thick laurel hedgerow (which seems improbable in the city but Paris is like that, it’s full of rebus material at every turn — as are memories of Paris, they are the greatest dreams of all) and this hedgerow was lit yellow from the lights of his car (and the make of his car? No idea, though I do believe it was silver, a saloon car, and we smoked in it) and this night-time pilgrimage ultimately made for a depressing and sad trip.

  I’m pretty certain that on the way back we drove down another very oneiric road (which makes it a very Parisian road) but whose name I cannot immediately recall and, resisting the urge to look it up on the internet, comes shrouded with the outlines of activity in that city, in the dark of night: buying Kronenbourg beer and mustard-flavoured crisps in a Monoprix en route to some party or other; reading about it in some work of literary criticism as an example of getting the details wrong (because we all know that fiction is built upon the ability to deploy correct though innocuous details to monstrous ends) and how a writer had the protagonist of his thriller escape the clutches of the gendarmes by driving down its one-way street the wrong way which — the observation could be a translator’s or Paul Auster’s or Douglas Kennedy’s, the latter being one of those writers bizarrely so loved by the French if nobody else — proved the point that one must know the city, must observe the details, must transmute the world of knowable facts otherwise we’re lost in the world of dreams and bullshit, much like these half-reminiscences of S, a faceless Frenchman I once befriended and haven’t thought about properly for many, many years, who indeed I didn’t much think about even when I was in his company. I bought a box of condoms from a vending machine — now this is civilisation — some months later, in the middle of the night, along the same street whose name I’ll shortly look up on the internet. In my mind this street is always bathed in the green-tinged, art-nouveau-framed dark shadows of night; it is depopulated and the scene to the above useless memories: it is a Parisian street, a boulevard. And who cares, who gives a toss what it is called? What this particular street in Paris means to me and this piece of writing is the half-thought-through maxim: making an art of everyday life is the aspirational art of living in Paris, everything else is tourism and good literature is not comprised solely of tourism.

  I know that I’d get lost looking at a map of Paris, I would spend minutes if not hours scrolling over it, peering into its streets that are half-formed in my mind, half-formed because the memory of them was never really there, they were never known even when I traipsed along the very same streets in the middle of the night for hours at a time. When I first decided I needed to go and live there, to overreach the tourism of the literature I loved, when I was a teenager, I would spend time reading novels, all those tourist novels from a hundred years previous, and then mark out the routes of characters on some old family atlas: Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, Place de la Contrescarpe, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, Clichy. I read Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris before I had ever stepped foot in the place (and before I could properly read): the streets were never going to exist
as the mundane streets that real city streets must condition themselves to be, they have function and are functionless at once, everything else, to put a weight on one or the other is to be a soldier or a tourist, two extreme ends along a destructive continuum. The only thing that destroys an old city is the erasure of memory, ergo history will be the destroyer of Paris.

  Trying to think about what else I got up to with this guy, this perfectly nice Frenchman who wore clean, light blue jeans and whitewashed runners, who had a tight head of black hair, a trim set of locks… I cannot think of anything at all. That was it, a random set of nights of two people with little in common hanging out because both are young and both are at a loose end, though loose in very different ways, one recently single or heartbroken, the other excited by the city and all that the city had recently promised them. They are young, and open to the world. He was going to be a pilot, and I know from years after, via Facebook, that he did become a pilot.

  Later, things happened, time passed: October moved into November and then December came around, invariably I met other people and eventually life took me away from Paris because I found Paris boring.

  2.

  Now I turn to the internet: I’m going to beat the algorithm and go through all my thousands of connections manually in order to find this distant memory. After an hour of scrolling through these friends, I cannot find him. There is a good chance that I have missed him — a kind of blindness kicks in when you start to go through ten years of Facebook friends. Scrolling through the collection of people I have gathered on this part of the internet, it occurs to me how random, and also how predictable, it is — the defining antinomy of our online lives perhaps. Perhaps he has left Facebook. Or one of us unfriended the other.