by James Salter
In 1958 or so I came across Girodias’s edition of Pauline Réage’s famous apostasy, the first cool pages of which were like a forbidden door opening and the rest, as I read, unable to put it down, like the shimmering of a fever—not since reading Llewelyn Powys, paragraphs of whose Love and Death I could recite from memory at eighteen, had my legs given way like this. I am not sure it harmed me but it affected me deeply. Though I thought of it a good deal, I rarely spoke about it, and this preserved it for me until one night in the comfort of an editor’s apartment in New York a young woman, when the subject somehow came up, told how she and her friends at camp one summer had read The Story of O and talked about it incessantly. I felt disappointed. If schoolgirls could stroll through it like a book group, what was there to safekeep?
——
There were the early places of Paris, in the beginning, at the bottom, rooms on an inner court with burned-out lights, when the city was unscalable with endless long errands in the rain, handed-down newspapers, and skipped meals. You were alone with little money and not much nerve and a name on a piece of paper—someone working for a steamship line or in the embassy who was never in the office or returned a call. Europe was still impoverished. The plaster was cracking, the drapes worn to threads. Only a year or two before it had been for sale for a carton of cigarettes. The desperation had been vast and the testimony stood before one’s eyes: ancient telephones, outclassed cars, drab clothes.
Later came the Paris of hotels; they made up a kind of gazetteer, names like those of islands, each with its own aura and size. The Royal Monceau, where the plush exhaled an ancient fragrance and my wife and I—we were new to it—reigned in reduced-rate opulence. The France et Choiseul with its barren courtyard and poorly furnished suites; the Calais tucked in behind the Ritz; the hotel where the girl threw Farr’s clothes out the third-floor window when he wouldn’t pay her; the Récamier squeezed into the corner; the Esmeralda, Badoit outside on the windowsill in the cold; the St.-Regis with its dark, gleaming wood and luxury, the light from above; the Richepense just off the Place Madeleine one winter, incredible loneliness, Prunier down the street, where it was too expensive to go; the Palais d’Orsay, hotel of hotels, sentimentally speaking; the Trémoille.
On the glass top of one of the first night tables, in the Royal Monceau, I think, lay a mimeographed list of recommendations provided by the air attaché. There was Androuët, a restaurant judged unique because the meal was made up entirely of cheeses; and another place, where the menu had been inspired by Rabelais, with daring caricatures; also, the Lido (“sit at the bar”). The Mayol, it said, and we went there. It was dank and old with worn seats. Girls badly fed, stage bare, costumes that had lost their sheen, and one lovely pair of breasts as if, amid it all, France was showing what it could be capable of. I searched for them in the program. The photograph there was a poor reminder, like looking at a passport photo. I could not admit what I was doing, of course. I was with my wife and the untrifling general who had brought me to Europe, Robert Lee, and his wife; we were in middle America.
There was the L’Aiglon, narrow and cream-colored, on the Boulevard Raspail, where I stayed when we were editing the film that Irwin Shaw judged weak. The lizard shoes of a famed director, Buñuel, were outside an adjoining door. Misty winter mornings, the cemetery endless beyond the window, the ivied walls. Simone de Beauvoir in her white nurse’s shoes and stockings, her beauty gone, walking to the boulevard from the café on the corner where she often met Sartre for breakfast.
It was the elegance and attitude of Paris, aspects one saw from the first, which appealed to me, venerable things and luxurious new ones, the life of the streets and the life that survives upheaval and death. The old count who lived on Quai Voltaire in the same building with all his daughters and their husbands. There was an American woman who lived across the way and took pleasure in greeting him. One day she said she was going home on a trip, flying to America. The old count seemed interested. “L’Amérique,” he asked politely, “est-ce que c’est loin?” Is it far away?
The proper order of things is that they be seen first from a distance, then up close. Paris, however, could not be seen that way. It was a city of intimacy, by which I mean privacy, filled with the detail of life, moody, and above bowing to any individual. Kerouac went there once, for two or three days, and left saying, “Paris rejected me.”
It was the skill of Paris to reject one, to make one desirous, just as the tradition of its functionaries at every level was to prevent the city from displaying a false smile. The sternness of the concierges and gardiens gave faith in the power of Paris to endure. The Paris of Atget. Of Brassaï—he was not French; he lived first, as a child, on rue Monge—photos of brothels on rue Monsieur-le-Prince or rue Grégoire-de-Tours; lights of bridges in the mist, not a sound, not even a cigarette dropped in the water, the river stone-still; old Matisse with a nude model, nipples cherry black; the luxurious squalor of the studios, Picasso’s, Bonnard’s; nights of Paris, and everywhere the grandeur, the parade; the game hanging in the butcher shops, the silk clothes in expensive windows, all part of a supplication: Grant unto me, bestow upon me …
On the rue des Belles-Feuilles a car with 77 on its plates—from the rich suburbs to the south—is stopped in the middle of the street, trunk open. Traffic, horns blowing, is backed up behind. Occasionally a man comes out of a building with a box to put in the trunk. Finally, not in any haste, a woman in a long fur coat comes out—the blocked cars are in a frenzy—says a last graceful something to someone, gets in, and drives off without a backward glance. Paris women, their eloquence, their scorn.
In the épicerie another, in jeans and a Levi’s jacket, a turtleneck with a scarf wound insolently about, fine features, magnificent body—brilliant, uncirculated, as they say of certain coins—looking at you without curiosity or shame and then back to regarding the display window. A tall, fair-haired man in a leather jacket is with her. She hasn’t bothered to get in line. She merely tosses back her hair, breathing self-esteem.
Or the blonde in the Closerie sitting in a booth opposite a man, smoking, making slight, continual nods of the head as he is speaking and looking right at him knowingly, as if to say, “Yes, all right, of course,” and even more frankly, “Yes. You can.”
They are not temptations so much as consolations, like the consolation of the proverbial, of things worthy to exist.
In days past you could be prepared for this by taking the boat to Europe, sailing on the France. One stepped into the perfection of the first hours on board, the excitement and sounds, corridors blue with fragrant cigarette smoke, the walls of the ship alive beneath your hand.
I think of the story of Styron and James Jones, who were sailing with their families—it was on the return crossing of the maiden voyage of the France. The Joneses were living in Paris then; they had a house on the île St.-Louis and were traveling with a nanny, their young daughter, and a big dog. The Styrons had children with them.
The two men, invincible, were out all the preceding night in New York. Along the way they met a couple of girls at P. J. Clarke’s and were buying them drinks. Warm feelings drifted back and forth. What are you doing afterwards, the girls wanted to know? Sailing to France, they said, want to come?
The ship sailed at noon. Jones had gotten home at seven that morning; perhaps he’d forgotten some of the events of the night before but as they passed the Statue of Liberty they heard, confirming all fears, shouts of “Yoo hoo!” and saw energetic waving from a lower deck. “Who’s that?” Gloria Jones wanted to know.
The girls had stowed away. Styron and Jones had to sneak down to the purser and buy them tickets, not only for the crossing but, when Gloria found out, for an immediate return.
Gloria and James Jones reigned in Paris for perhaps a decade. They were not the Murphys. They did not have a salon; it could better be described as an open house. James Baldwin might be there, Styron of course, Romain Gary or Jean Seberg, his star-crossed wife. Th
e atmosphere was carefree. There was money, there were friends. Jones never bothered to learn more than a few words of French; there was no need to. His wife had been a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe and had become a figure in her own right; good-looking, rowdy, possessive, she would say and to some extent do anything. In their living room one night an actress slowly rubbed my finger between the tips of hers. She was French. Was I going to make her spend the night alone? she asked, as if it would be thoughtless. I felt I was in the France of Ninon de Lanclos, one of her favorites, brought home to dine and be led into the bedroom—she was not as beautiful as her rivals but she had turned down the offer of a fortune from Richelieu to be his mistress. One of her rules had been never to be bored.
——
Slowly I rose to a view of it all, by rooms, apartments, and iron balconies—I passed from window to window and scene to scene. In the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire the river was very close with the long, gray curtain of the Louvre on the other side. Something overcame me there; I lay in bed trembling; my arms and legs ached. My skin was so painful I could not be touched. Unsteadily I descended in the elevator, by chance with a youthful Norman Mailer, dark-haired and silent, his health and fame unshakable, perhaps on his way to the Joneses’. I had flu, I thought, but it was more than that, I merely could not recognize the symptoms: it was hepatitis. I lay in the hospital for weeks, at first in a delirium and then through long days, sometimes reading in an Encyclopedia of Diseases and waiting for the report on the latest analysis of my blood. The starched white of nurses is a comforting thing and so is the daily paper. It had been winter when I was stricken—February—and shakily I emerged at last into the spring of 1962.
——
Europe gave me my manhood or at least the image of it. It was not a matter of pleasure, but something more enduring: a ranking of things, how to value them. What other men found in Africa or the East, I found there.
Europe was not only a great world but also a smaller one, populated by only a few of one’s countrymen, sometimes in the form of mysterious exiles. The real inhabitants took up no space. Eventually you might come to know a few of them but often in an imperfect way. Their language was their own, and with it a definition of life.
But a part of one’s never completed mosaic, in my case a crucial part, is found abroad. At the fingertips of my memory, so to speak, are the wide rivers with towns and sometimes cities along unruined banks; the ancient cathedrals; the silent courtyards of old hotels where the car is parked, an early waiter or two in the dining room. Live for beauty, Cyril Connolly’s dream. Evening is falling in Paris and I sit on a green wooden bench on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt—it’s 1975—opening the first letter in a week. It’s about the book Light Years, not yet published. She has read it for the first time in its entirety. A stunning letter that flutters in my hand like a bird as I read it over and over. Cars are rushing homeward. My darling, I must simply say … Nothing is like that moment. Everything I had hoped for.
Kant had four questions that he believed philosophy should answer: What can I know? What may I hope? What ought I to do? What is man? All of these Europe helped to clarify. It was the home of a veteran civilization. Its strengths are vertical, which is to say they are deep.
The thing it finally gave was education, not the lessons of school but something more elevated, a view of existence: how to have leisure, love, food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, streets, all new and seeking to be thought of in a different way. In Europe the shadow of history falls upon you, and knowing none of it, you realize suddenly how small you are. To know nothing is to have done nothing. To remember only yourself is like worshiping a dust mote. Europe is on the order of an immense, unfathomable class, beyond catalogue or description. The young students are exploring sex, the older ones dining, the faculty is being carried off to the morgue. You progress from row to row. The matriculation, as an English king once said of the navy, will teach you all you need to know.
——
Lunch near the Odéon. Paris day, a table by the window, handwritten menu, noon blue sky. The chef, who is probably the owner, is visible in the small kitchen in a white jacket and toque. Between orders he reads, with the calm of an historian, the racing page of the newspaper. I don’t imagine him betting, not today, not at work. He’s engaged in study.
I think back to repudiated years and a man I once saw in a dirty movie house near the Gare de Luxembourg. The lights had come on after the first film. Silence. There were ten or twelve men sitting there in the theater, waiting. He was much older than anyone else. A wonderful head of white hair, like that of a restaurant owner or horse trainer. He pulled out a newspaper and began to read it, leisurely turning the big pinkish pages. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of them turning. A man who ate solid dinners and had a dog; perhaps he was a widower. He had seen a lurid presentation of three young bourgeoises and what unexpected things befell them, an impure work less interesting than its title. When the lights went down again he folded his paper. You could see his fine, impressive head in the darkness. I thought then of a lot of people for no particular reason, people who would never be found here. I thought of Faulkner one year when he was trying to work as a scriptwriter, driving down Sunset Boulevard on the way to work, unshaven, his bare feet on the pedals and bottles rolling on the floor. I thought of the Polish doorman, very tall, who used to work at the entrance to my parents’ apartment building in New York. He’d been a lawyer in Poland before he fled, but it was impossible here; it was all different and he was too old. He didn’t have much to do with the other doormen—they scornfully called him the Count. I thought of Monte Carlo and the woman at the roulette table who had asked me for chips. Afterwards we had some drinks at the bar. She wanted to show me something in her room, the clippings of her before the war when she danced at the Sporting Club; I was able to pick her out in the chorus. The English were there then, she said, and she had gone with them; some were lords.
You were constantly—perhaps that was it—meeting people without money, people who amounted to something. Sometimes the more they didn’t have, the more they amounted to.
Rising above the rest and very much of her class was a woman in London. She was a countess, though fallen from the heights. Her family name you would know instantly, that of Germany’s greatest chancellor. Tall, with beautiful hair, she had once been a model for Chanel.
She’d been at a party one night where there was a film director, “this Joe Lozey,” as she pronounced it. “I hate him,” she said, “he’s a bastard. He was saying what a great film was Death in Venice. I told him it was a beautiful painting but boring. He got very angry. ‘Just who are you?’ he said.”
Yes, who? Only the real crop of Europe, she might have answered, the originals from families centuries old. She was already a barbiturate ruin, breasts thin and drooping, skin beginning to go. She ignored it. Her eyes were heavily made up, her mouth curved down. She had a low, commanding voice and liked to laugh. Her words were slurred but her eyes were still clear, the whites startling. She had been deflowered at fourteen by her uncle, and later, even after marriage, was the mistress of writers. She was imperious but very fine. She was also, in large measure, indifferent. She knew quite well what the world was, and in a sense, coming from a great family, she was responsible, but she could not be expected to control fate or the crowd. She was a woman who had loved deeply, and for years brought flowers to the grave of the writer, James Kennaway, whose photographs were in her marital bedroom. “He was buried standing up,” she said. Her hands trembled as she talked and lit one cigarette from another. She was outspoken, impatient, and her wake stretched a long way back. Being with her was sometimes annoying but somehow it gave one enormous courage, the courage, really, to die.
——
I’ve left out the Kronenhalle and the hotels above the town in Zurich; Sicily; Haut de Cagnes; London in the evening and girls in Rolls-Royces, faces lit by the dash; the German dentist in Rome—the
bombing of North Vietnam had just begun—“Good, bomb them,” he said as he picked up instruments, “bomb them all.” I’ve left out the place in Paris that for a long time was the essence of the city for me, oddly enough a household, that of the Abbotts. He was an old friend who had remarried, and his new wife, Sally, was young and like a sheaf of silver. Witty, taut, she was like a new child in school who had come from some unnamed but difficult elsewhere, someone who made friends and also enemies quickly and who cut a swath; Nate was her second husband. He had been a dashing Air Force colonel, a pilot in the war, and now was the European representative for a large company.
Their apartment, in the 16th, was majestic; the living room opened into a kind of dome. The sofas and chairs were comfortable, the doors everywhere eight feet high. Late one fall, the year of the Berlin crisis, we came up to Paris, four or five of us, from Chaumont, and that evening had drinks with them in the apartment. The city was black and gleaming, wonderfully cold. Nate drew me aside at about nine-thirty or ten. “Why don’t you take them to the Sexy?” he said—it was a favorite of the president of his company.
I forget how we got there; there were photographs outside. I went in first to have a look. It seemed a place of style. “How is it?” they wanted to know when I came out. “Great,” I said and we entered. “He comes here all the time,” I explained.
There were a number of good-looking women. I think a band was playing; there was a bar. “Give me three hundred francs each,” I said to them knowledgeably, “and I’ll pay all the bills.” Women were already introducing themselves. I could see Weiss and Duvall, neither of them inexperienced, exchange a brief glance as if to say, here goes. The money was gone after the second round. It seemed unimportant. It was like the night before the France sailed. It went on and on, and though portions remain bright, where it happened is unknown. I’ve looked for the street a number of times; it is gone.
