In Time

by C K Williams

  It occurs to me to wonder whether what we’re glimpsing now might be the end of adolescence as we’ve known it: as a quest, an exploration into the potentials of a rich adult life. Might we instead be going through a transition at the end of which there will be nothing available to the young but the darkest aspects of adolescence: uncertainty of identity, radical and often futile attempts at self-assertion, an indefiniteness of prospect, an elusiveness of the very concept as well as the attainment of maturity? Perhaps our culture, without quite consciously recognizing it, has come to shape its institutions in so constraining a way that soon we will have no release or respite from a conflict that perhaps once never existed. We will be allowed only to be old, without ever having become adults.

  Paris as Symbol, Idea, and Reality

  1

  The first time I came to Paris, I was nineteen, on a trip around Europe with a friend. I don’t remember how we happened to end up there, but we parked our tiny Renault 4 in the rue Jacob and stayed in what was then a cheap hotel on the corner of rue Bonaparte. It’s difficult to explain to myself, even now, but from the moment we arrived in the city, and especially when I walked out of the hotel and up the rue Bonaparte to the Saint German square, I fell in love with the place and suddenly felt that for the first time in my life I was where I belonged.

  I’d wonder now if it had something to do with the fact that I’d written my first poem a few weeks before and had absurd inklings that perhaps writing was something I would want to do with my life, but even that doesn’t really make all that much sense: I had only the sketchiest idea of the way Paris had affected other would-be or actual writers. It was much more instinctive than that—the city just grabbed me, and attached me to it; I walked through it in a trance of infatuation. I didn’t know then that I was hardly the first to whom this had happened, but by the middle of the next school year, I knew I had to go back, left school, and did.

  I stayed in the same hotel, and despite the exaltation of being in the city, I was often lonely, and when I couldn’t sleep I’d get up and walk aimlessly through the nearby streets. I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t until decades later, when I’d finally notice a plaque on a building on the next street, the rue du Seine, that the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz had lived there for a number of years. Mickiewicz was the greatest Polish poet of the nineteenth century: he fled Poland, which was then under Russian occupation, for Paris and lived there from 1831 to 1855 (though he died in Turkey, where he’d gone to organize a Polish regiment to fight in the Crimean War).

  I learned the dates of Mickiewicz’s stay in Paris by calling another Polish poet, a friend whose name is Adam, too: Adam Zagajewski, who also fled Poland. In the dark 1980s, he went to Berlin, then Paris.1 There aren’t any satisfactory translations of Mickiewicz’s poems in English, but there are many of Zagajewski’s, some of which I (a poet from America, from New Jersey, who also lives much of the year in Paris) helped translate. Zagajewski wrote a poem in honor of still another Pole, Joseph Czapski, a much admired writer and painter, who survived prison camps under the Nazis, then in the Soviet Union, and who when he was finally freed from all that came to Paris and lived in or near it until his death a few years ago. Zagajewski’s poem takes place on the edge of the city, in Saint-Cloud. It begins:

  CRUEL

  In the Parc de Saint-Cloud, birds sang.

  Alone in that vast, narcissistic forest

  that looks out on Paris,

  I pondered your words:

  The world is cruel; rapacious,

  carnivorous, cruel.

  I circled the Parc de Saint-Cloud, east to west,

  west to east,

  I strolled through the leafless

  chestnuts, bowed to the dark, bowing cedars,

  heard pinecones cracked

  by sparrows and wrens.

  No beast of prey in the park,

  other than time, just then changing

  from winter to spring, stripped,

  an actor flinging his costume away,

  in the cold wings backstage . . .

  (Translation by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams)

  The intellectual and aesthetic model and mentor for Zagajewski has been another Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz, born in Lithuania, lived through the Second World War in Poland, and after the war, a committed left-liberal, he became part of the new socialist-communist government in Poland, serving as cultural attaché first in Washington, DC, then in Paris, where he defected from a government he had come to find unbearably oppressive. He wrote a book about Stalinism, The Captive Mind, which remains one of the most spiritually generous anti-Communist critiques we have, and stayed on for some years in Paris, where he’d already visited in the 1930s when he came to seek out his cousin, O. V. Miłosz, yet another Lithuanian-Polish poet residing in Paris, who, a brilliant mystic, lived most of his life there, and wrote his poems in French. After Paris, Miłosz, Czesław, that is, went to Berkeley, where he taught until his retirement. While there, he wrote a poem about that first long ago visit to Paris:

  BYPASSING RUE DESCARTES

  Bypassing rue Descartes

  I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler,

  A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world.

  We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and Bucharest, Saigon and Marrakesh,

  Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,

  About which nobody here should ever be told:

  The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry in,

  Dividing food with incantations,

  Choral prayers recited by master and household together.

  I had left the cloudy provinces behind,

  I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.

  Soon enough, many from Jassy and Koloshvar, or Saigon or Marrakesh

  Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes.

  Soon enough, their peers were seizing power

  In order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas.

  Meanwhile the city behaved in accordance with its nature,

  Rustling with throaty laughter in the dark,

  Baking long breads and pouring wine into clay pitchers,

  Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets,

  Indifferent as it was to honor and shame and greatness and glory,

  Because that had been done already and had transformed itself

  Into monuments representing nobody knows whom,

  Into arias hardly audible and into turns of speech.

  Again I lean on the rough granite of the embankment,

  As if I had returned from travels through the underworlds

  And suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel of the seasons

  Where empires have fallen and those once living are dead.

  There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else,

  And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame

  And now I know that the time of human generations is not like the time of the earth. . . . .

  (Translation by Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass)

  In this poem Miłosz uses his experiences in Paris to meditate on the false promises of “universal, beautiful ideas.” The illusion that Paris is the capital of the world, that there can be a capital of the world, that is, a place, any place, that would actually embody those political ideals that the poet refers to as “the universal,” is something Miłosz learned is seductive but, in the end, pernicious, tragic. Still, the democratic ideals inaugurated by the French revolution were an irresistible attraction for young idealists through the turbulent political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they were drawn to Paris from all over the world.

  For example, what is considered by many the greatest novel in Guatemalan literature, a harrowing tale of political corruption and oppression titled El Presidente, was written in the 1930s by Miguel Asturias. Though it takes
place in Guatemala, it was composed in Paris, recited aloud every evening in a Spanish-language bookstore to a group of Asturias’s fellow exiles from Latin America. (Asturias, like Miłosz, went on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.) El Presidente was one of the models for another book, The Autumn of the Patriarch, the author of which, yet another Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez, also came to Paris to live and study and starve, as many of the young writers and artists who arrived there over the generations have starved. (I had the pleasure of meeting García Márquez a few years ago; we spoke of Paris, and to my surprise he told me he hated the city, that he loathed his memories of his time there when he was unknown and desperately poor.)

  It would be interesting to know how many of those who came to the city, as Miłosz says, “dazzled and desiring,” full of grand hopes, have ended up feeling less than positive about it. Another Latin American exile in the thirties was the Peruvian César Vallejo, one of the great poets in Spanish of the twentieth century. Vallejo was a committed Communist, probably because there were no alternatives to the vicious social and political systems in Peru in those days. He came to Paris as a journalist, also went hungry, visited the Soviet Union, returned still poor but full of hope, a hope we know now was frighteningly illusory. At one point he wrote a wonderfully sad poem about himself and Paris, “Testimony,” which has been translated by an Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, who’s also written several poems that take place in Paris, though he’s never lived there for very long.

  TESTIMONY

  I will die in Paris, on a day the rain’s been coming down hard,

  a day I can even now recall.

  I will die in Paris—I try not to take this too much to heart—

  on a Thursday, probably, in the Fall.

  It’ll be like today, a Thursday: a Thursday on which, as I make

  and remake this poem, the very bones

  in my forearms ache.

  Never before, along the road, have I felt more alone.

  César Vallejo is dead: everyone used to knock him about,

  they’ll say, though he’d done no harm;

  they hit him hard with a rod

  and also a length of rope; this will be borne out

  by Thursdays, by the bones in his forearms,

  by loneliness, by heavy rain, by the aforementioned roads.

  (Translation by Paul Muldoon)

  César Vallejo did indeed die in Paris, on a Thursday, in the hospital called Hotel Dieu, in the rain, or so the legend has it. Whatever the truth of that, we can be sure that many poets and writers less well known than Vallejo died in Paris, as well, some in despair, some perhaps still graced with the dreams that brought them.

  The greatest poet of the century in German, Rainer Maria Rilke, came to the city in his mid-twenties, already celebrated. He first arrived with his much older and notoriously unconventional lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Russian by birth, who had been living part of the time there. Rilke had gone off to live in an artists’ colony, where he married, and then came back to Paris, leaving his wife and new child behind. Through his wife, an artist, he’d met and then become the secretary of the renowned French sculptor Rodin, for whom he worked a few years and about whom he wrote a splendid monograph. The building on the rue de Varenne that was Rodin’s last home and studio and now houses the Rodin museum was found for Rodin by Rilke. Rilke wrote many of his most notable poems in Paris, and he also wrote his semi-autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which recounts the difficult solitude he experienced in his new city and speaks as well as any book that’s ever been written about the trials and exaltations of the young artist.

  “I am in Paris,” Rilke’s character Malte writes,

  those who learn this are glad, most of them envy me. They are right. It is a great city; great and full of strange temptations. As concerns myself, I must admit that I have in certain respects succumbed to them. I believe there is no other way of saying it. I have succumbed to those temptations, and this has brought about certain changes, if not in my character, at least in my outlook on the world, and, in any case, in my life. An entirely different conception of all things has developed in me under these influences; certain differences have appeared that separate me from other men, more than anything heretofore. A world transformed. A new life filled with new meanings. For the moment I find it a little hard because everything is too new. I am a beginner in my own circumstances.

  Then Rilke writes, as though it explains anything unclear in what he’s just said: “Do you remember Baudelaire’s incredible poem, ‘Une Charogne’? Perhaps I understand it now.”

  It can seem strange and unlikely to explain so many tangled emotions by a single poem. Yet it and several others from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, particularly “Le Cygne,” “Les Sept Vieillards,” and “Les Petites Vieilles,” are among the most influential artistic productions of the nineteenth century and were essential to the inception of a new vision of art and life, what has come to be called much too often and reflexively modernism. Rilke, in Malte, makes what I believe is the most succinct and accurate statement of the responsibilities and opportunities of the art of modernism. “It was [Baudelaire’s] task, he writes, “to see in this terrible thing, seeming to be only repulsive, that existence which is valid among all that exists.”

  This is the beginning of “Une Charogne,” translated by William H. Crosby.

  A CARCASS

  Do you recall the thing we saw once, my own,

  One summer morning fair and fresh:

  The pathway turned and there, upon a bed of stone,

  A great hulk of decaying flesh,

  Its legs upthrust to mock female lubricity,

  Seething and sweating its pollution,

  Its open belly, cynically and carelessly

  Venting a gaseous corruption?

  The sunlight burned intensely through the rottenness

  As though to render it well done,

  Returning thus a hundredfold of Nature’s largesse

  By multiplying what was one;

  And God in heaven gazed up this splendid corpse,

  Luxuriating like a flower.

  The horrid stench had almost felled you in the gorse,

  So overwhelming was its power.

  Flies in droves descended on that putrid belly

  From whence exuded black brigades

  Of larvae trickling slowly like a liquid jelly

  From end to end along its shreds;

  All of it heaved and fell as smoothly as the sea

  And writhed and rustled in its motion;

  One might surmise the corpse, breathing uncertainly,

  Survived in the proliferation.

  2

  Although presumably the majority of writers who came to Paris came for the sake of their art, there are other reasons why so many came and continue to come. Mickiewicz’s flight to the city had nothing to do with his aesthetic aspirations: he was a political refugee, and though it’s interesting to wonder whether he ever read Les Fleurs du Mal, which was published while he was in Paris, for him the city was a refuge, a sanctuary, a base of operations. It was also that for the great German poet and social critic Heinrich Heine, a refugee from other sorts of political and cultural oppression. The fact is that despite the conservative reactions to the French Revolution that continued on and off through the century, France more than anywhere else had incorporated the ideals of the democratic revolution in its very tissues and remained a place of relative freedom. There’s another plaque on a building, near where I used to live in the Tenth Arrondissement, that quotes something Heine, who lived in the building, wrote just after he first arrived: “If someone asks how Heine is doing in Paris, tell him, ‘like a fish in the sea.’ Or better yet, tell him that when a fish in the sea asks another fish how he’s doing, let the second answer, ‘Like Heine in Paris.’”

  The image of the city as both a political refuge and a shining symbol of ideals of toleration has persis
ted. The first major poet who wrote in English of the new age of revolution was Wordsworth, who, still a very young man, happened to arrive in France for a walking trip the day before the Bastille fell and came back a year or so later. Not long afterward he expressed succinctly the best ideals of the revolution in his autobiographical poem, “The Prelude”:

  Distinction lay open to all that came,

  And wealth and titles were in less esteem

  Than talents and successful industry.

  Wordsworth also coined the phrase that encapsulated that time of amazing hope better than anything else: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” (It was perhaps especially blissful for Wordsworth—he fathered an illegitimate daughter while he was in France.)

  Among others who migrated to the city later on was Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam during and after the Vietnam War, who was also a poet and had studied in Paris, where he worked for a time as a busboy in a restaurant. The great Syrian poet Adonis has lived for many years in Courbevoie, just outside the city, and more immigrants arrive all the time: Kurdish refugees from Turkey and Iraq; Tamil driven here by the endless civil wars in Sri Lanka; political and economic immigrants from various African, Arab, and sub-Saharan countries and from the Near and Far East, Eastern and Central Europe—just about everywhere.

  American writers for the most part have had the luxury of not having to flee to Paris but, instead, choosing to live there, everyone from James Fenimore Cooper to Henry James to James Jones. Henry James wrote to a friend on arriving: “I am turning into an old, and very contented, Parisian: I feel as if I had struck roots in the Parisian soil and were likely to let them grow tangled and tenacious there.” And much later the raucously candid and endlessly energetic Henry Miller fled his depressing Bohemian life in New York for Paris, writing on his arrival: “I love it here, I want to stay forever . . . I will write here. I will live quietly and quite alone. And each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book . . . The streets sing, the stones talk. The houses drip history, glory, romance.” Miller stayed on for a number of years, until he was driven back to America by the impending Second World War, and he did manage to get out into the world a little, as anyone knows who’s read the gloriously tumultuous Quiet Days in Clichy.