No one seemed to mind the lack of authenticity. This shrine of a shrine, housed in a tiny building with small windows and rickety shutters on the Quai de Montebello—what Anaïs Nin once described as a Utrillo house, weak of foundations—is a sanctuary of thought and literary aspirations, a throwback to a lost time. I was reminded of this the minute I met Whitman.
When I arrived at his shop, suitcase in hand, he was on the floor rummaging through cardboard boxes of paperbacks. There was little of the whiff of legend about him. He was thin, gray-haired, his face the color of porridge, his eyes beady, his fingers long and dirty. One of the first things he said to me as I introduced myself was that he was one of the illegitimate children of the great American poet Walt Whitman, hence the name. I tried imagining him as the love child of the great poet.
He then told me that, at nearly seventy years of age, he had recently become a father himself. His daughter was the offspring of his relationship with a woman about forty years his junior. “Met her here,” he said, his voice hoarse and crackling. “Like I’m meeting you.” He had called the baby Sylvia, after Sylvia Beach, of course.
This was a place dedicated to a memory of Paris as la bohème, and accordingly Whitman had two requirements for potential lodgers: you had to be an artist and you had to be living hand to mouth. I was an undergrad, but a published undergrad, my poems in the overwrought style of T.S. Eliot having made it into some of my university’s literary publications, so I coolly told him that I was a poet and therefore an artist (check). I assured him I was penniless—it was why I was bed-hopping in Paris, in search of cheap accommodation (check again). I said that come fall, I would be moving permanently to Paris to begin my life as a writer at an English-language magazine. I was certain of it (double check).
“Okay, you can stay. But you have to earn your keep. Everyone here either works in the bookstore or cleans up. You can clean up. Starting tomorrow. I’ll show you your bed.”
We walked together past a dry wishing well at the center of the store, into which some backpacking tourists were throwing coins. “Live for Humanity” was carved at its base. We continued to the back, past bookshelves yielding to the weight of novels, biographies, cookbooks, art histories, and children’s stories crammed together with no apparent system of organization, and soon stumbled upon a hidden circular staircase that Whitman told me led to the communal bedrooms upstairs. It bore another slogan: “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise.”
I later learned that Whitman had been the original hippie. After pursuing Latin American studies at Harvard, he had dropped out and gone on a seven-year odyssey through Central America. The hospitality he received as a longhaired stranger among the poor shaped how he in turn treated strangers like me with an unquestioning generosity.
He caught me staring.
“I have always been a communist,” he bellowed. “Like Christ. Like my father.” I assumed he meant Walt.
“I believe in the religion of art. The rule of freedom. It’s why I left America. The puritan work ethic, the need to succeed, to be rich, richer than the next guy. But you don’t just earn your living in this life. You live your life.”
We climbed the stairs and entered a loftlike space whose walls were lined with books, arranged alphabetically. By day it was the bookstore reading room, a sprawling second floor littered with faded chenille pillows and equally worn divans with colorful crocheted blankets thrown insouciantly on top. At night when the store was closed, these were converted into the beds on which Whitman’s acolytes of art would lie in order to be closer to their dreams.
One was already there, sitting cross-legged on his makeshift bed. Whitman grunted an introduction. This was Paulie, from Tallahassee, Florida, my new roommate. Whitman beamed in his direction and called him a surrealist. With his clipped black hair, knee-length shorts, and dazzling orthodontic smile, he did not look like a radical to me. Whitman softened the gruff voice he had used with me. He practically cooed at Paulie to show me his work. He was either right proud of him or, well, quite fond of him, at least. Paulie reached down to pull out a black leather portfolio from underneath the divan. One by one, he laid out a series of rectangular papers displaying intricate drawings of imaginary worlds inhabited by man, beast, and what looked like intergalactic spacecraft. “I am a postcard artist,” Paulie said, surprising me with the novelty of his métier. When Whitman left the room, muttering something about the baby needing changing, Paulie patiently handed me miniature after miniature, delighted that I went willingly into his condensed world.
Why small? I wanted to know. Because the world is too big to know it intimately, Paulie responded. All he ever wanted, he said, was intimate knowledge of a thing. “Don’t you want that, too?”
Yes, I wanted intimate knowledge. I wanted also knowledge of intimacy. I looked at him, quizzically.
I was to be shacked up with him, it seemed. He on one side of the room, me on the other. There was a softness about him as he bent down to put away his postcards. My mind zigged and zagged like a pinball in an arcade game. Him? Me? I shook my head clear of its annoying clanging. Paulie was talking to me. He was waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” My face blazed hot with embarrassment.
“I was saying, if you weren’t too tired, would you care to go for a walk with me down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It’s my first time in the city, but I’ve walked a few times, now. It’s cool. I’d like to share it with you.” I guessed that’s what’s known as southern charm.
He had a winning smile, despite the braces. “Sure,” I said. “I can sleep any time.”
And so we strangers, both newly hatched from the cocoon of university life and both around the same age, became instant companions by dint of being in Paris at the same time, and on the same wavelength. We were both drawn to Paris by a quest for immortality through art, an idea that the city, filled with old buildings affixed with plaques commemorating artists who had come there before us, took great pains to highlight. We walked shoulder to shoulder down the tree-lined boulevard, past the Sorbonne and its student bookshops and cafés, aimlessly talking, gamely probing ideas about life and art and existence. Most of this came through a discussion of his work, which I asked him to describe to me. “I use the smallest of brushes,” he explained. “I observe the smallest of details.” He wasn’t alone. He said that there were dozens of artists like him around the world. Paris was just the first stop in a world mini–art tour. Next stop, he told me, was Finland. I was speechless. I had never heard of anything so peculiar. He asked me about myself. I grew self-conscious. If he was an observer of the smallest detail, what would he observe about me? I even became aware of the twists my mouth made when I talked. His sea-green eyes poured right through me, like water.
“Are you an artist, too?”
Artist. I rarely allowed myself the label. But with this earnestly creative soul by my side, I grew emboldened. “Er, yes, well, I write.” He encouraged me to tell him more. We were sitting on a bench at the southern tip of the Jardin du Luxembourg. In front of us was the Fontaine de l’Observatoire, a bronze sculpture of four women holding up a globe representing the four continents. Paulie hadn’t been to the park before but he knew this flamboyantly public work of art. He remembered that the fountain was in Gigi. I had seen the movie but couldn’t recall the sculpture. I told him so. But I did know about the artist, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and told Paulie his work also decorated the facade of the Opéra, depicting the spirit of the dance. “How do you know that?” he asked.
I didn’t want him to think I was the type of tourist who memorizes guidebooks, but I was. I believed I knew everything there was to know about Paris—from an outsider’s perspective at least—by studying it first in books, as I had done on my last trip to Paris. Alone, I had done the walking tours suggested by Fodor’s. I had perfected a surface knowledge of the city. Now I wanted intimate knowledge of the thing, as Paulie had so intriguingly put it. I just had to open myself
up to the people who inhabited it. “I love dance,” I ventured, “and I take care to know as much about it as possible.” At that point he reached over and removed a piece of hair that had stuck to my lips. A dog’s whistle of sexuality sounded deep inside my brain. I hoped no one else heard it but me. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s windy in Paris today, isn’t it?”
We stopped at the Closerie des Lilas, the celebrated Montparnasse café where Verlaine and Ingres and a whole host of Paris artists used to come, and sat on a pair of cane chairs on the outdoor terrace, shielded by a large awning overhead. I grew worried after a taciturn waiter handed us a menu. A coffee cost almost triple what I was used to paying. Paulie must have sensed that I couldn’t afford a place like that. He said, “Please. Order anything you want. My treat. I’m going to have a Coke. With lemon.” I said I’d join him, and thank-you.
The sky-high prices underscored that the café was a tourist magnet. I looked around. The terrace was decorated with potted trees, and garlands of vines at the entranceway created a sense of shelter. I noticed others like me, wide-eyed and sitting stiffly, not knowing exactly how to act in a place that was both a clip joint and a slice of Parisian cultural history. When the Cokes arrived, Paulie raised his glass and proposed a toast. “To art,” he grinned. “To art,” I said. He felt like a kindred spirit. I relaxed and told him about my last four years in Toronto as an undergrad, studying hard, exercising even harder, running eleven miles a day around an indoor track, which he, sucking languidly on a straw, couldn’t believe. I explained that I kept myself in a constant state of preparedness in anticipation of the day I would finally leave the ivory tower and go mano-a-mano with the real world lying just beyond the walls of my book-strewn room. But why so punishing? he asked me. I said that I had been a scholarship student, expected to maintain an A average if I wanted the university to continue paying for my education. I said that I had been in fear of sliding. I had nothing to fall back on should I fail. And so I had sunk deep inside my imagination, scribbling verse and envisioning lives not yet lived. Lives I believed would unfold in Paris, far from the sterile existence I had chained myself to.
“Oh come on, it couldn’t have been that bad,” he teased. “Look at you. You know how to be the life of the party.”
I soldiered on, wanting to convince him that my life outside of Paris really did suck. I told him about Toronto, describing it as a city of concrete and steel girders, where the streets were denuded of trees and flowers and other symbols of vitality. Toronto, I continued, was where you couldn’t drink in a restaurant, not even a glass of wine with dinner, after ten o’clock on a Sunday night. It was where art was seen as frill and where hockey, in the form of a dried-up team optimistically called the Maple Leafs, was what passed as the pinnacle of culture.
“Toronto’s a blighted landscape littered with impersonal strip malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, and desolate pothole-marked parking lots that seem to stretch on forever.” He laughed at that. “No, seriously,” I said. “It’s a soulless place, where I was certain the fire in me would be snuffed out if I stayed.”
“But how did you know, then, that you wanted to be a writer?”
I then told him about working nights at the Varsity, the student newspaper, where I said my real education had taken place, inside a white, gingerbread-trimmed Victorian house facing the library we called Fort Book. The plaster fell off in chunks from the walls, and the furnishings were threadbare. But that was where I felt the formation of a new identity exploding under the influence of caffeine, trail mix, and aggressive rock and roll piped in from the surly campus radio station located on the floor above the newspaper’s offices. For three years, almost all my undergraduate life, I had been dance critic, reporting on performances in and around Toronto and gaining recognition within the community at large as someone who knew what she was talking about. I had loved my studies of Donne, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Blake, I said. But over time the newspaper and its rickety tables topped with Underhill typewriters became all-important to me. Journalism was the glittering light of a key that would open doors to the real world, I said. And my ticket to a job.
“That’s why I’m in Paris,” I said. “There’s an English-language publication here called Passion, run by Canadians employing Americans, if you can believe it, all of them expats. I’m going to track them down. I’m going to ask if I can work for them. Beg them, if I have to.”
“So, Passion’s your destiny, is it?”
I blushed as he paid the bill.
Later that night, back at Shakespeare and Company, we continued our self-excavations. He told me he wanted to be the next Paul Klee. I told him, not imaginatively, that I wanted to be the next Ernest Hemingway, once a Paris-based reporter for the Toronto Star. Settling into our respective places at opposite sides of the upstairs room, our conversation shifted again to art. We spoke of Brancusi and Satie and jazz. Paulie asked me if I thought art needed to be esoteric to be considered worthy of the title. “Is good art the result of impulse and imagination? Or is it a system of codes that only the initiated can or should access?”
I laid my head on my pillow. Hell if I knew. But I decided in that instant to put my money on the inner life. “It usually starts with a dream, doesn’t it? A vision of an alternative life?”
I was yawning now, and not just because all this art talk was wearing me down. I had not yet recovered from my transatlantic flight, and desperately needed sleep. I lay on the makeshift bed, and my head brushed up against the wall of books behind me. I turned to read the spines. Author names beginning with B: Beardsley and Beckett and Bemelmans. I didn’t know who Bemelmans was, except that it was the name of a Toronto bar where people danced on tables, their panties swinging over their heads. I said the name, “Bemelmans,” out loud.
“I know who he is,” said Paulie drowsily. “Ludwig Bemelmans is the author of the Madeline series of books for girls.” Oh yes. The young girl, ward of a convent run by a Miss Clavel, inhabiting Paris and all its wonders.
“Who’ve you got on your side?” I asked.
“Rilke,” he said. And before he could say more, in walked Whitman to bid us goodnight. “It’s lights out,” he boomed. The literary life as boot camp.
I lay in the darkness thinking of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, about how in life you are never supposed to look back, and wondered if it was a mistake coming back to Paris, thinking I could make it there. I also thought of the stranger lying across the room from me. I wondered if something would happen, instead, with him. He was awfully still and quiet. Was I expected to make a move? I lay frozen, contemplating rejection, fearing the noise we might make. I suddenly wanted to write in my journal, to make sense of it all. I felt myself breaking away from my past. I was embracing, at long last, maturity. But when I gently called out Paulie’s name, he didn’t answer. He was already fast asleep. I was afraid that I would wake him if I turned on the light. And so I started thinking about our day, going over what had been said and unsaid in the dying light of a Paris afternoon.
I had been reckless in telling him about my mother, about how for this trip to Paris she had bought me a new racy red leather jacket plus a pair of black silk pants that she envisioned me wearing on the dance floor of some chic Parisian nightclub. She had never been to Paris but she understood the city as being synonymous with thrill. For the last four years she had been trying to get me out of the study hall and into the discos, where she had been going in search of a good time. She was in her early forties then, in her prime. She regarded Paris as an ally in her goal of turning me into a woman she could relate to—a fun-loving party animal, not the frowning, would-be intellectual darkening her couch with a book in hand each Christmas break.
“You need to get laid,” she said concernedly, as if prescribing me an aspirin for a headache. I couldn’t believe I had told him that. What had I been thinking? In Toronto I was something of a recluse. In Paris I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I felt ridiculous. And I needed to pee.
Being careful not to disturb Paulie, I tiptoed out of the room we shared, hands feeling my way along the bookcases. I found by touch the railing of the spiral staircase leading down several stories to the only facilities allowed us disciples of art—a Turkish toilet in the basement. I hoped I would make it in time. I made my way down the stairs guided by my sense of smell. What a stench! I couldn’t see the footholds that allow you to anchor yourself just inches away from the hole into which goes the day’s visits to the café. I must have been off a bit, because I felt the urine spray against my legs as it hit the floor. I quickly leaned forward. And then my head hit a grille on the door. I was looking out at the street. People were walking by, oblivious to my straining. The moon was full, and I could see Notre Dame in the distance. Paulie had got me thinking about point of view. And here I was staring out at a landmark framed by my little window on a toilet door. As a vision of Paris, poetic and noble and true, it was a unique perspective. It quelled my aching brain enough to allow me to fall asleep once I got back upstairs.
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