One afternoon down by the Bastille I passed a shop selling precious stones and I ducked in to see if there were any in there that resonated. I looked at all the pierres précieuses, yellow and blue and white and pink, and found a banded amethyst, which is meant to protect you against toxic environments. I thought: is this a stone that’s telling me to stay in France, or a stone that offers to protect me when I go back home?
I took myself to a café, and ordered a glass of aligoté with confidence, and looked out at the world. The café is so permeable to the street; it is so open, life floats in and out with the cigarette smoke. The pub is about enclosure and the café is about flow, flux. There are times we need one and times we need the other, and we should be able to choose.
I met up with the writer again one evening towards the end of my stay. He had a little bit too much to drink and tried to tell me that he loved me. His eyes were sad and I forgave him.
Ghosting
Susan Tomaselli
Art is memory: memory is re-enacted desire.
— Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
Dullthudding Barrels, Umbilicus, Mollydount, all stops on the Calypso, Hades, and Nestor lines of the Hibernian Metropolis, a train ride you won’t ever have taken: the railway doesn’t exist. A “subversion of Dublin [which certainly exists] via the peregrination of characters in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses” [same], the Metropolis lives only in map form, and is a merging of Joyce’s text and Harry Beck’s 1931 design of the London Underground map.
Joyce’s novel lends itself well to a mapping treatment — in fact Nabokov sketched one — and Dublin holds a special attraction for Joyceans as both the source and subject matter of Joyce’s genius [witness Bloomsday]. It was the author himself who boasted that if the city “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”.
But I am not in Dublin, I am in Paris after a break-up. It is 2017, and I am walking through parts of Paris, a city I do not know particularly well, using the novel Nadja as a map. I am not attempting a Situationist dérive, instead stop-offs with photo opportunities I will tweet at some street scenes referenced in the book, a recreational simulacrum if you like. Not necessarily key scenes, but locations I will find using only André Breton’s 1928 autobiographical novel of a love affair that I’ve read in advance of the visit.
Frustrated with the diminished sense of reality the world had produced, Surrealism intended to initiate a new humanism, a hybrid reality: “the poet of the future will surmount the depressing notion of the irreparable divorce of action and dream”. Founded by Breton, Surrealism was an idealisation of madness, non-conformism, Freudian free association and “stream of consciousness”, free love, and eroticism. “André? André? … You will write a novel about me. I’m sure you will. Don’t say you won’t. Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us.”
Walking a street in 1926, Breton noticed a young woman coming towards him: “I had never seen such eyes. Without a moment’s hesitation, I spoke to this unknown woman”. She told him she called herself Nadja, “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning”. For several days they met repeatedly, until Breton tired of Nadja’s erratic behaviour (she was declared “mad”) and began to withdraw.
Can you reconstruct the city through this novel? Though the “shape of the city”, Breton acknowledges in his afterword, has already changed and disappeared — “it slides, it burns, it sinks into the shudder of weeds along its barricades, into the dream of curtains in bedrooms, where a man and a woman indifferently continue making love” — and what city doesn’t, I am confident from the Surrealist Manifesto (“if the declarative style, pure and simple… is almost the rule in novels, it is because, as one must recognise, the authors’ ambition is quite limited. […] And the descriptions! Nothing can be compared to their vacuity; it is nothing but the superimposition of images from a catalogue, the author employs them more and more readily, he seizes the opportunity to slip me postcards, he tries to make me fall in step with him in public places”) I will find somewhere.
Breton saw photography as striking a mortal blow to old modes of expression, allowing artists to “break with the imitation of appearances”, and used photographs (not taken by himself) to authenticate his account of Nadja — images of buildings, monuments, shop fronts, portraits, photographic reproductions of letters and drawings — and also reinforce a sense of the pastness of these events, they reflect a particular moment of Breton’s history and a history of the city itself, but could prove useful for my walk. I am using only the text to guide me, and am aware this could go horribly wrong, chasing ghosts, but I’ve made notes.
My point of departure is the Moulin Rouge, Boulevard de Clichy, where I turn hard and head for Rue Fontaine, and to Breton’s house at No. 42 squeezed between a burlesque theatre and the Carrousel de Paris offering a “cabaret and diner spectacle” (both closed). The apartment is marked with a plaque that reads: “JE CHERCHE L’OR DU TEMPS”. I take a photograph with my phone. I remember reading a newspaper article on the auction of the contents, that it was crammed almost to the point of bursting with a fine collection of Surrealist artworks and had become a museum to a movement that loathed museums. I am looking for Nadja, but so far am finding only Breton. I move on, down the street and through Place André Breton, passing No. 20, where Georges Sand and Chopin lived, and come to No. 6, a location mentioned in the book. Regarding my own reflection in the glass, I read from a passage in the book:
But for me to descend into what is truly the mind’s lower depths, where it is no longer a question of the night’s falling and rising again (and is that the day?), means to follow the Rue Fontaine back to the Théâtre des Deux Masques, which has now been replaced by a cabaret.
The theatre hasn’t existed since 1924, it has again been replaced and is now a restaurant called, appropriately enough, Les dessous d’Orphée.
Across Rue Saint-Lazare:
For a change I decide to take the right sidewalk of the Rue de la Chausée-d’Antin. One of the first people I happen to meet there is Nadja, looking as she did the first day I saw her. She advances as if she didn’t want to see me. She seems quite unable to explain her presence here in this street where, to forestall further questions, she tells me she is looking for Dutch chocolate. Without even thinking about it, we have already turned around and go into the first café we come to [there is a café called L’Eden on the street]. Nadja keeps a certain distance between us, she seems rather suspicious. For instance, she looks into my hat, probably to read the initials on the band, though she pretends to be doing it quite unconsciously, it being her habit to determine certain men’s nationality without their knowing it. She admits she had intended to miss the rendezvous we had agreed upon.
I move on, take a wrong turn and end up going too far along Boulevard Haussmann, passing under the canopies of the grands magasins. I am lost. I pause in a square, tweet a picture, and someone responds, tells me that part of Bertolucci’s The Conformist was shot there. I’m starting to wonder how authentic Breton’s roman-vérité is. Recalling Jane Jacobs on maps (“we are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality”), I am reminded of “trap streets” — deliberate errors placed in maps by cartographers to dissuade plagiarism — and of the fake Paris that was built during the First World War to confuse German bombers, complete with a sham Champs-Elysées, Gard du Nord, wooden replica factory buildings, illuminated by Fernand Jacopozzi (the man who went on to light the Eiffel Tower with the Citroën logo).
While I have my phone out, I message Dublin-based Croatian photographer Dragana Jurišić who I know is on a residency in the city. “I’m in Paris for a few days, there’s birthday drinks for J. on Friday, Hotel Edgar, Montparnasse at six, you should come along if you are free.”
“It’s my birthday dinner too. In La Petit C
élestine on Seine [sic] on the fourth! How many of you? Do you want to join us — there’s about fifteen of my crew.”
“I’m not sure how many of us, possibly six. Will let you know.”
“Super. This is a good fun place. It’s €35 for three courses and it’s a late-night place, my Columbian friend’s chef friend.” She added, “I would love to join forces, could be more fun”. She asked if I was in Montparnasse right now, and if I fancied a drink. I told her what I was doing with Nadja. “We are at a cemetery,” she added.
Jurišić has been assembling a novelist project, My Own Unknown, using, as a starting point, a found photograph of her aunt who left Croatia and fled to Paris in the Eighties, where, rumour has it, she worked as a prostitute and spy. One chapter, “L’Inconnue de la Seine”, features an unknown young woman whose body was taken from the Seine, and whose death mask became an object of fascination for both the public, and for writers and artists like Man Ray, Nin and Camus. Both female protagonists in Jurišić’s work are not entirely real, and she is here to continue work on their, and by extension her own, fictionalised biographies.
I return to the text and plot where, and what, I need to do next. I walk down Boulevard Malesherbes, past La Madeleine, and into Rue Saint-Honoré, looking for a somewhere I’ve forgotten. I have to go back to the book. “Suddenly, while I am paying no attention whatever to the people on the street, some sudden vividness on the left-hand sidewalk, at the corner of Saint-Georges, makes me almost mechanically knock on the window. It is as if Nadja had just passed by.” On to Rue Royale, Rue Saint-Florentin to Place de la Concorde, and I duck inside the Jeu de Paume to take in an exhibition by “realist Surrealist” photographer Eli Lotar, whose work appeared in Bataille’s Documents.
Toward midnight we reach the Tuileries, where she wants to sit down for a moment. We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. “Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there’s that broken spurt again, that fall and so on indefinitely.”
This fountain is off today. I was sure they passed the Louvre, but I can’t find it in my notes. I take a picture anyway, with the corner of the book present, just in case. Across Pont Neuf (which I can find in the book) to Île de la Cité:
The Place Dauphine is certainly one of the most profoundly secluded places I know of, one of the worst wastelands in Paris. Whenever I happen to be there, I feel the desire to go somewhere else gradually ebbing out of me, I have to struggle against myself to get free from a gentle, over-insistent, and finally, crushing embrace.
It is a punishing twenty-eight degrees, the scribbles on the back of my hand are dissolving, the Post-it notes that mark the book are as brittle as dead butterfly wings: “She enjoyed imagining herself as a butterfly whose body consisted of a Mazda (Nadja) bulb toward which rose a charmed snake”. I withdraw, decide to call it a day and abandon my wander (and my plans to meet Dragana), the futility of chasing a dead love revealed.
An Exhausting Attempt at Finding a Place in Paris
Steve Finbow
Against the imaginary advice of Charles Baudelaire, my choice of footwear when flâneuring is flip-flops. I’ve flâneured in London, New York and Tokyo wearing my trusty Havaianas. At the beginning of summer, the blisters beneath the straps rise and burst, the scabs fall off and two hard ridges of skin form above my medial cuneiforms.
I had three days in Paris to revisit places and to discover new sites. One of these was the Musée Maillol, which had an exhibition of the works of Foujita, a Japanese artist who lived in Paris in the 1920s. The walk from Arcueil would take over an hour. I planned to have a break in Montparnasse cemetery to photograph writers’ graves. I had done this eight years ago, but most of the photos had been lost.
The first time I visited Paris was Christmas 1981: Vietnamese food, amphetamine suppositories, cans of 33 Export for breakfast, naked women, a policeman pulling a gun on us, a bruised penis, Man Ray’s Cadeau, a man on the Métro with a cyst in binary orbit with his head. But, as Barthes wrote, “What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past?” For reasons I won’t go into, I didn’t visit Paris again until 2008. It was Paris’s fault: I blamed it for destroying my life — a life which, in hindsight, I had already been slowly eradicating.
On that occasion, I slowly warmed to the city. We stayed at a hotel near the Square Michel Foucault. We had a passable time and had drinks in the Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp. I bought Edmund White’s Genet: A Biography from Shakespeare and Company. I didn’t read a page and no longer know its whereabouts. On that visit, according to a notebook, “Paris begins in fits and starts, shorts out, static, flickers, shrugs and begins again. Fractal. Mist lifting off water. Graffiti. The statue of Michel de Montaigne, seated, wearing what look like ballet shoes”. Over the past seven years, I have been to Paris on three occasions, once staying in the refurbished Beat Hotel.
It was July 11; the weather was overcast with patches of sun, a breeze made it perfect walking weather. There’s not much to write about the journey: noisy traffic, ugly buildings, Bartholdi’s Lion of Belfort. I reached the triangle formed by La Rotonde, La Coupole and Le Sélect and walked to the cemetery. Graffitied on a column: SDF75, my initials and the year I first read Arthur Rimbaud.
This was the Paris I remembered. It had history, presence. The Paris I had just walked through was merely present. This is not true of New York and Tokyo; cities that perpetually rebuild themselves. Nodality. In my old notebook, I found, “Why do I chase ghosts? As if I could smell Jean-Paul Sartre’s foul breath on the waiter’s apron or William Burroughs’ farts on the Rue Gît-le-Cœur”. Yet, I had asked to be photographed next to a sign at the Hotel des Grands Hommes where André Breton and Philippe Soupault had written Les Champs magnétiques.
Before I’d left the hotel, I’d looked at Facebook, the current and precarious depository of our memories, to check which photos of graves I had: Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Tristan Tzara. I didn’t have those of Jean Baudrillard, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Checking the map by the gatekeeper’s office, I saw that Emil Cioran was also buried here. This was important as I was writing a book in which he was key to the main argument.
The Baudelaire cenotaph was easy to find: it looms up over the tombs like a ship’s figurehead. I also planned to visit the Hôtel de Lauzun, where Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier had formed the Club des Hashischins. Why am I so obsessed with photographing writers’ graves and the places they had once lived? D.H. Lawrence in Ravello, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Berlin, John Keats in Rome? What am I experiencing when staring at a tombstone, a blue plaque or a notebook under a duty vitrine? Nothing, really. If anything, they are things to see because I don’t want to see other things. While living in Sapporo, my favourite place to visit was the Hokkaidō Museum of Literature. I didn’t read Japanese, so understood little about the exhibits.
I found Sartre and de Beauvoir’s grave. It was littered with train tickets. I’m not sure why. I crossed the cemetery and rediscovered Beckett’s grave. According to the map, Cioran’s was close — one plot over. I looked at every grave. I clambered over some to check names. It wouldn’t be found. I downloaded the map. Division thirteen. I checked the sign. North of the Sainte-Beuve memorial. Nowhere. Cioran: “It is not easy to be nowhere, when no external condition obliges you to do so”. But he was nowhere. He wasn’t somewhere.
I went to Le Falstaff: Beckett used to drink there. I walked to the museum. The galleries were busy, Foujita’s work barely visible among the crowds. People didn’t look at the artworks — they stood in front and photographed them. I didn’t stay as long as I had planned to. I walked perfunctorily along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, past the famous cafés, down Rue Danton to the Seine, along to Shakespea
re and Company to buy a copy of Tao Lin’s Trip. After twenty minutes, the staff couldn’t find a copy. I left. I walked past the sign for Square Michel Foucault, through the Jardin du Luxembourg and back to the cemetery. I retraced my steps. Cioran: “There is no such thing as time, there is only that fear which develops and disguises itself as moments…, which is here, inside us and outside us, omnipresent and invisible” and because I couldn’t find the grave. It had become omnipresent and yet remained invisible. After half an hour, I gave up and walked to a bar in Arcueil where I realised I didn’t have a book to read while I waited for my never-on-time girlfriend. I took out my phone, googled “Cioran’s grave” and found it: “Emil Cioran Rasinari 1911 – Paris 1995”. And beneath that “Simone Boué 1919 – 1997”.
The next day was hot. I caught a train to Saint-Michel– Notre-Dame and walked to Shakespeare and Company. They hadn’t found the book. I purchased a copy of Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and crossed the bridge to the Île Saint-Louis and stared at the Hôtel de Lauzun. Cioran — “Anxiety is consciousness of fear, a fear to the second degree, a fear reflecting upon itself” and “Inspiration in reverse, anxiety calls us to heel at the slightest impulse, the slightest divagation”. I was anxious because I hadn’t found his grave, I felt that — although he was important to my work — if I couldn’t find his grave, his writing would be reverse inspiration, the work would never be finished.
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