In Time
Page 21
Probably the most notorious of the Americans who’ve lived in and written about Paris is Ernest Hemingway, who first came as a young journalist but returned many times. Later, he would say of those first sojourns, when he had just begun to write fiction, was still poor and newly married to the first of his several wives, as the happiest time of his life. He circulated in the community of writers who lived there then. Among them were Gertrude Stein, who influenced Hemingway in the development of his prose style, Ezra Pound, and later Hemingway’s sad literary sibling F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, like quite a few others, came to Paris to find a party. Find one he did: it went on for years and all but destroyed him. Hemingway—he was an awful hypocrite—despised Fitzgerald for his flightiness, but certainly the festive aspect of Paris, its wildness and bohemian libertinism, was a good part of the seductiveness the city held for him, too. Hemingway tragically never did manage to leave his own party behind him, to abandon his arrested adolescence: his wealth and fame gave him the opportunity to maintain his jejune self-indulgence until it destroyed him.
Pound, coming almost directly from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a poem in Paris, about Paris, that would come be regarded as the signature poem of the imagist movement.
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound commuted between Paris and London for decades. He became friends with Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company (the name of which, if not its serious spirit, still endures), convinced her to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses, then invited Joyce to come to Paris, which of course Joyce did, to stay for the rest of his life.
T. S. Eliot had arrived before he knew Pound and remained long enough to write some of his poems in French. They’re mostly very undistinguished, but a passage of one,
Phlébas, le Phénician, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain:
Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure . . .
Eliot translated it and it became part of the section of The Waste Land called “Death by Water.”
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and the loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
The list of American writers who’ve come to the city, some to stay, some to be nourished by it and take their experiences home with them, is impressive. Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Paul Bowles, passed through; Chester Himes and James Baldwin came to escape the intolerable racial tensions in America; Elizabeth Bishop set some of her early poems there; John Ashbery and Paul Auster came to do what amounted to apprenticeships before they returned to New York; Diane Johnson still lives part of the year on rue Bonaparte, and the great Canadian Mavis Gallant came and never went back.
From the rest of Europe, too, the talented and tormented migrated to the city. The brilliant Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva came in the twenties, and lived in the Russian exile community, mostly in miserable poverty, through the thirties, until she finally went back to the Soviet Union during the very worst time of Stalinism, and finding life there even grimmer than she’d conceived it could be, committed suicide. She’d written at length about Paris, and one of her poems recalls Pound’s.
READERS OF NEWSPAPERS
It crawls, the underground snake,
crawls, with its load of people.
And each one has his
newspaper, his skin
disease; a twitch of chewing;
newspaper caries.
Masticators of gum,
readers of newspapers.
And who are the readers? old men? athletes?
soldiers? No face, no features,
no age. Skeletons—there’s no
face, only the newspaper page.
All Paris is dressed
this way from forehead to navel.
Give it up, girl, or
you’ll give birth to
a reader of newspapers.
(Translation by Elaine Feinstein)
Another Russian poet, Yvgeny Esenin came as well, dragooned from Moscow by his paramour, the American expatriate dancer Isadora Duncan. When I first came to Paris in the fifties, Duncan’s brother, Raymond, still managed the eccentric art institute he and Isadora had established on the rue de Seine, and you’d see him walking the streets of that neighborhood in the Greek robes and sandals that were the getup of some of his and his sister’s more curious fantasies.
Later, the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, also living in Paris, would write about Duncan leaving the Soviet Union, which she had idealized, glamorized, propagandized for, and then jilted, taking poor Esenin with her when she left:
Unfortunately she had to bid farewell to the Land of Hope
as consolation she took a costly poet with her
the half-conscious Esenin cursed loved howled
Poor Esenin, who was still nearly a child, driven to distraction by Duncan’s carryings-on, went back to the Soviet Union, and shot himself in a hotel room. So many suicides.
The roster is vast. The Romanian Celan, the Hungarian Radnóti, the Czech Kundera, the Argentine Cortázar, and the South African Breytenbach. Even some of the most innovative Japanese poets of the century spent time there, and several years ago the Nobel Prize was won by the Chinese novelist and painter Gao Xingjian, who has long lived in Paris.
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There seems to be obvious question here, which is, Why? What is it that has made Paris over these last hundred and fifty years or so the place to which so many have been drawn? Certainly there are other great cities in the world; some have had their moment as thriving artistic centers, but only Paris seems to have consistently maintained its allure. It’s often been said that there’s something about the way Paris wears its passage through time, one might almost say flaunts it, that is intrinsically inspiring. e. e. cummings, who, though he lived the rest of his life in New York, recalled forty years later the Paris of his youth:
I celebrated an immediate reconciling of spirit and flesh, forever and now, heaven and earth. Paris was for me precisely and completely this homogeneous duality: this accepting transcendence; this living and dying more than death or life. Whereas—by the very act of becoming its improbably gigantic self—New York had reduced mankind to a tribe of pygmies, Paris (in each shape and gesture and avenue and cranny of her being) was continuously expressing the humanness of humanity. Everywhere I sensed a miraculous presence, not of mere children and women and men, but of living human beings.
It’s been said that the history Paris is embedded and embodied its very stone, rather than in the cultural and personal memory of which the buildings of a city are a symbol. But, however compelling, this is only a metaphor. Rome, in fact, is older than Paris and manifests its age just as or even more dramatically. And though Rome has had its moments as the place for which artists longed (many Frenchmen among them), most recently the reasons for this seem to have less to do with Italian culture and more with the delightful Italians. New York, too, has at times been a locus of aesthetic creation and commerce—as it is now—and London, too; and Florence and Amsterdam have had their moments as well. Yet though each city certainly has its urban splendor, none has so fused its history with its artistic heritage, and none has conveyed through the voices of those who’ve dwelled in it the mysterious sense of being a cosmos in itself, a unique and infinitely promising reality, a reflection, or an enactment, of essential mysteries.
Walter Benjamin, the German critic and thinker who meditated so profoundly on the new age of the modern, took Paris and Baude
laire as the key to a comprehension of its many disparate and perplexing contradictions. The city always intrigued him; he wrote in his “Paris Diary” in 1929: “No sooner do you arrive in the city than you feel rewarded. The resolve not to write about it is futile.” Benjamin, too, suffered from the city’s tendency to inflict solitude: “The rendezvous to which loneliness, that old pimp, invites me.” But he goes on, almost ecstatically:
Of course—what an easy matter it is to overlook this city! It is as easy as overlooking health and happiness. You can’t imagine how uninsistent it is . . . Just think how the streets here seem to be inhabited interiors, how much you fail to see day after day, even in the most familiar parts, and how crucially important it is, more so than anywhere else, to keep crossing from one side of the street to the other . . . What is the source of this unassuming exterior that seems oriented toward the needs and talents of the most insignificant members of society?
Benjamin is particularly acute in understanding the larger implications the new vision of the city implied. Describing the Parisian panorama, he speaks of “an enormous crowd in which no one is either quite transparent or quite opaque to all others.” This remains an illuminating description of walking the streets of any modern city. Again, about Baudelaire, but really about any enthusiastic urbanite: “Baudelaire loved solitude, but he wanted it in a crowd.”
(Benjamin in another context quotes the French poet Paul Valéry on the same theme. Valéry, Benjamin points out, “has a fine eye for the cluster of symptoms called ‘civilization.’” Valéry writes of city life: “The inhabitant of the great urban centers reverts to a state of savagery—that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminates certain modes of behavior and emotions.” Benjamin comments on this: “Comfort isolates,” a scarily prescient observation about what it is to live in a suburb, that most recent avatar of human social organization, in which isolation, under its code terms “privacy” and “self-sufficiency,” is promulgated as the primary virtue of social and political being.)
Until the nineteenth century, no one wrote of the city, Paris or any other, for its own sake: the gathering of stone and souls that comprised the urban reality was incidental to the events going on among them; the city’s nature wasn’t a mystery, it was simply taken for granted. If a character in a Molière play goes out into the street, the name of the street won’t be mentioned, and neither will anything else about it. The urban space is the passage from one place to the other, and the city is merely the repository of these passages; what happens of importance happens indoors.
What occurs in the nineteenth century, around the time of Baudelaire and after, that so changes the very definition of the city, for the artist, and everyone else? We well know there are many cultural and political factors: the social order had undergone a profound rearrangement when government by democracy, in whatever form it took in particular countries, became the referent for political aspiration. Religion, as a part of the same shift, became a much less active force in people’s lives: religious belief as the primary element in ethical considerations was becoming being radically questioned, and a new belief in the aesthetic as a moral force in its own right was evolving.
On a more pragmatic level, the economic texture of society was changing: the way goods were manufactured and bought and sold, as well as the environments in which people confronted or evaded one another in this new system of mass commerce and popular consumption. The department store was invented, to which the burgeoning middle class came to see and be seen as well as to shop. People in the new commercial reality became more visible to each other, and the split between rich and poor, the exalted and neglected, became much more evident.
In Paris, this new visibility still was hidden behind the old structures of the city. Freud developed his geology of the mind with its “unconscious” later in the nineteenth century, but Paris already seemed the city that best embodied the distinctions implied in Freud’s nomenclature. More than any other modern city, it was a place of concealment, in which every building has a courtyard, or two or three—inward, often dark places where lurk things unseen and possibly—in those days probably—forbidden. And the city still, despite Haussman’s sanitization of it, has narrow lanes and alleys that abruptly slice through rows of presentable facades, where things go on about which one doesn’t like to think too much, as, according to Freud, one doesn’t like to consider too closely the similar secret places in the self. In the way it conceals certain activities, and reveals others, Paris is perhaps very like modern consciousness itself. As Benjamin says, you have to pay crucial attention, you have to keep crossing the street. The facade, that which is before your eyes, is merely picturesque, and therefore incidental. You have to go more deeply in to find what’s really before you and what might be behind you.
So Paris came to seem to many of those who came to it not merely a place where the unconscious can be enacted but an unconscious in itself, seductive and menacing, a realm where desire is frankly manifest, and the violence behind desire always drones as a shadowy resonance. And though it’s true that the gentrification of Paris has muted much of the force of all this—the courtyards are as likely as not to have art galleries or clothing boutiques in them as anything else—there are still neighborhoods where certain shadowy passageways are definitely uninviting to exploration.
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To what degree artists or writers affect changes in a culture is of course a complex question. Was Baudelaire manifesting in “Une Charogne” social tendencies that were already underway, or was he, however indirectly, inventing them? We can’t know for certain, but we can know that by the time Rilke’s Malte was reading the poem, and reconceiving himself through it, the poem and the world of consciousness it implies had become central to the aesthetic world.
The most crucial element of the poem, and of its method, is quite evident. As Rilke remarked, it was certainly the most repulsive poem that had ever been written, but its project he notes, its purpose, is the transformation of the repulsive, and by extrapolation, of ordinary reality as well, into the beautiful. And the poem is indeed beautiful: formally elegant, its grotesque, repellent images are lush; it’s both a love poem and a meditation on mortality and temporality—and beauty.
But its transformative force is what’s most striking: the hideously rotting carcass, its decomposition, the description of what swarms over and around it are the perceptions of a poetic mind that, precisely because it can transfigure such horror into a moral meditation, is vastly different from anything before it. It is this radical transformation that characterizes the aesthetic choices and the moral norms of the age of the modern in which we still live.
For in the modern, the transforming imagination itself becomes moral. Always before, imagination had served intellect. From a strictly ethical perspective, the beauties of art were ultimately most useful in illustrating and illuminating conclusions already effected by theological or philosophical reflection. Now, though, the imagination in its transformative mode takes the realm of the moral as its dominion, too; it assumes the traditional functions of religion and philosophy as its own. The modern, we might say, as Baudelaire conceived it and as Rilke elaborated it, is just the imaginative transformation to which I’ve alluded.
In the literature of the modern, the principle means of transformation is metaphor, and metaphor in itself implies a consciousness that differs in essence from logical reflection. In metaphor, the positioning of a perception or sensation in relation with another apparently unconnected to it implies, actually demands, the existence of a mysterious, unpredictable, nonrational process in the mind, something that exists previous to consciousness and is inexplicable to it. The rational aspects of consciousness, intellect and logic can’t predict the movements of the imagination as it moves through its metaphors. In modern poetry, more than those of the pas
t, this is particularly striking because here metaphor works primarily by bringing together not similar things but things that are radically unlike.
This is the beginning of a poem Rilke wrote in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Might anyone, by means of any train of logic, have predicted its metaphor?
THE FLAMINGOS
With all the subtle paints of Fragonard
no more of their red and white could be expressed
than someone would convey about his mistress
by telling you, “She was lovely, lying there
still soft with sleep.”
(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)
The place in the mind from which the metaphor came to Rilke is a place simply not available to ordinary thought. In this new epoch in which imagination is in some senses set free, the mind is intrinsically less constrained than it had ever been.
Only a few years after Rilke, Apollinaire, and then the Surrealists, would make the passionate commitment to metaphor—and the unconscious that metaphor implies—the foundation of their epistemology and the aesthetic morality they elaborated from it. Apollinaire is its chief theoretician, most notably in his masterpiece, “Zone,” which begins:
In the end you are weary of this ancient world
This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower or herd
Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek
Here even the motor cars look antique
Religion has stayed young religion
Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port Aviation
(Translation by William Meredith)
Bridges like sheep, the Eiffel tower as a shepherdess, religion as simple as an airplane hangar? In Apollinaire, the city, Paris particularly, and its inhabitants become the vehicle of the imagination; anything and everything can become not what it believed it was, but the vehicle of a metaphor, its irrational element, whose workings are like those of dream.