Orphic Paris

by Henri Cole

  Claire’s father was only forty-five when he died, and her mother didn’t learn of his destiny until after the Allied forces had defeated Nazi Germany. During the war, the Hôtel Lutetia, on the boulevard Raspail, had been a lair for Nazis in command, who were housed, fed, and entertained there, but after the liberation of France, ironically, it became a repatriation center for those who survived the death camps. Today, a discreet plaque commemorates this sad history and says that the joy of those reunited with loved ones could not erase the grief and pain of families who waited in vain for the missing.

  Later, walking home, we stopped at a florist where a quotation from Rilke was prominently displayed: La racine a beau tout ignorer des fruits il n’empêche qu’elle les nourrit, which means “Although the root doesn’t know anything about the fruit, it feeds them.” Claire and I agreed that we feel this way about poetry—that we are only roots feeding a fruit, which is language, and we have no idea when or if the fruit will grow. Still, we feed the fruit, as a stream feeds a river.

  MY UNCLE MARIUS, Mother’s older brother, loved canaries, and when he was eighty, ailing from a bad liver and nearly blind, his birds continued to delight him. He had seventeen birds in all—each with scruffy blue and yellow feathers—and their black, anxious eyes made me think of the randomness of my travels.

  Paul Bowles, the American expatriate composer and author, once said, “Moving around a lot is a good way of postponing the day of reckoning. . . . When you’ve cut yourself off from the life you’ve been living and you haven’t yet established another life, you’re free. . . . If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re even freer.” I thought about this statement today at Deyrolle, the taxidermy shop, where I go often and ponder the pretty, sherbet-colored canaries.

  Years ago, with my uncle Marius, I visited Château-Gombert, a small village northeast of Marseille, where my grandfather is buried with his cousin, one above the other in a crypt, as if sleeping in bunk beds, each with a little ceramic oval portrait on top of the tomb.

  Near the end of the war, during the Nazi occupation, my grandfather loaded the family’s most cherished possessions onto a mule-drawn cart, and with his wife and children walked from Marseille, where they lived, to Château-Gombert to wait out the bombing of the city by Allied forces.

  AT DEYROLLE there was a handsome nightjar, a bird I know from poems by Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson, a medium-sized nocturnal bird—with long wings, short legs, and a very short bill—that nests on the ground, where its feathers are camouflaged and resemble bark and dry leaves, making it invisible at night. It is also known as a nighthawk, whip-poor-will, or goatsucker. In Plath’s “Goatsucker,” she writes of the vulgar notion that the bird sucked milk from goats at night:

  Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear

  The warning whirr and burring of the bird

  Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard

  Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder.

  Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer

  Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered

  By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias Devil-bird,

  Its eye, flashlit, a chip of ruby fire.

  In her diary, Plath wrote, “Spent a really pleasant afternoon, rainy, in the library looking up Goatsuckers. . . . I have eight lines of a sonnet on the bird, very alliterative and colored. The problem this morning is the sestet.” In her sestet, Plath rehabilitates the “ill-famed” bird (with flat head and overly big eyes that are necessary to see in the dark) that “never milked any goat.” Like a naturalist, Dickinson carefully observed flowers, animals, and birds. Her poem is more cheerful than Plath’s, and in fascicle 12 she gives it the title “Pine Bough.” It is one long sentence:

  A feather from the Whippowil

  That everlasting sings—

  Whose Galleries are Sunrise—

  Whose Stanza, are the Springs—

  Whose Emerald Nest—the Ages spin—

  With mellow—murmuring thread—

  Whose Beryl Egg, what School Boys hunt

  In “Recess”, Overhead!

  Dickinson had probably found a whip-poor-will feather, which brought on a meditation about the nightjar, in French called engoulevent—coming from engouler, meaning to swallow, and vent, meaning the wind—because when the nightjar flies it opens its mouth wide and swallows the wind to catch all the bugs it can. In English the nightjar owes its name to the harsh, discordant, jarring sound it makes from its perch in the dark leaves in the stillness of night.

  I decided that three hundred and forty euros was too much to pay for a taxidermied bird that is a death omen and sometimes associated with insomnia and madness.

  Part VI

  THE CLOUDS ROILED across Paris today as if in a Constable painting, and I walked to the English-language bookstore on the rue Princesse to hear Shirley Hazzard read from her new novel, The Great Fire, about the atomic bombing of Japan. The little upstairs reading room was crowded, and it was difficult not to think about what would happen if there were a great fire there. Hazzard read a brief, painful excerpt about war and then answered questions for an hour. Since the Australian ambassador was present, there was much talk of Sydney, where Hazzard had attended school. She did not explain why it had been twenty years since her quietly sorrowful novel The Transit of Venus was published. And in each of her answers, she mentioned her deceased husband, Francis Steegmuller, the American author, translator, and Flaubert scholar.

  In her memoir, Greene on Capri, Hazzard says of her friend, the taciturn English author Graham Greene, “When friends die, one’s own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers. . . . Yet I hope there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him—not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well—on an island that was ‘not his kind of place,’ but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.”

  JAMES LORD speaks often about friendship. The other day, when he was sick in bed and wearing red pajamas, I visited him. His hair was tousled as he spoke, and while listening I noticed the view through a little window behind him, which I opened at his request.

  One could see the Louvre on the other side of the Seine. And the ornamental gold dome of the Institut de France, which houses the Académie française, established in 1635, suppressed during the Revolution, and restored by Napoleon Bonaparte. Somehow I doubt that there are many poets among its forty members, called “immortals,” who have official authority over the French language.

  James was speaking about Jean Cocteau, whom he met during the summer of 1950 at the urging of Picasso. But Cocteau “was not a generous person,” James insisted, because he had “little capacity to empathize and listen.” Is there any quality more important to friendship than the ability to listen? It is a sweet, reasonable way for us to show our love for one another. James is a civilized man with a genial capacity to listen—he is not ponderous or pedantic. As we conversed, I thought about the small group of friends and mentors who have helped me to explore the darker corners of the soul through poetry, which is one of the functions of lyric poetry. Or, to put it another way, I thought about how friendship has helped me speak to both the pleasures and pains that constitute a life. With his steady kindness, James, too, encourages me onward.

  About my enemies, I have little to say. William Butler Yeats famously observed that “we make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” So if there are enemies, perhaps they reside within and are, paradoxically, a gift to the poet. Sometimes, when I read a poem, if I sense no conflicted self—insolent, prating, hurt—I’m left thinking, Is that all? I remember the metaphysical poet George Herbert, in his poem “The Windows,” saying, “speech alone / Doth vanish like a flaring thing, / And in the ear, not conscience ring.”

  What matters in the life of a poet is the life of the imagination, and friendship—not bitterness or
resentment—can nurture the thirsty soil of the poet’s mind. In her friendship with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop found a more autobiographical structure for her poems. And Lowell found in Bishop an alternative to the dense, symbolic early style he favored. This is no surprise, really, since the composition of poems is born out of the composition of lives. It was Yeats again who said, “Friendship is all the house I have.”

  IT IS EARLY SPRING in Paris, and the Judas trees are bleeding their sublime pink blossoms. This afternoon I went looking for 14, rue Clauzel, the address of the small paint shop where Cézanne ordered his oils—burnt lake and Prussian blue and cobalt and chrome yellow and cinnabar green—to fill canvases with the unmistakable brick-shaped brushstrokes that are his signature, in mirage-like depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Château Noir, and the deep, dark woods at Bibémus where he often walked alone.

  Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, and others all displayed their work in the small shop window. This is where they started off.

  “I HAVE NOT MANAGED to become intimate with anyone here. Today, when the sky is overhung with grey clouds, I see things even more in black,” Cézanne lamented. But the American painter Matilda Lewis remembers the pleasure of his company at the lunch table:

  His manners at first rather startled me—he scrapes his soup plate, then lifts it and pours the remaining drops in the spoon; he even takes his chop in his fingers and pulls the meat from the bone. He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table. Yet in spite of the total disregard of the dictionary of manners, he shows a politeness towards us which no other man here would have shown. He will not allow Louise to serve him before us in the usual order of succession at the table; he is even deferential to that stupid maid, and he pulls off the old tam-o’-shanter, which he wears to protect his bald head, when he enters the room. . . . He prefaces every remark with: “Pour moi” it is so and so, but grants that everyone may be as honest and as true to nature from their convictions; he doesn’t believe that everyone should see alike.

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE RINGS, I snatch it up, thinking it will be Octave calling. Is he the being I’ve been waiting for?When he visited last week, he brought The New Yorker, and together we sat on the steps of the Panthéon, from which one can see out over all of Paris, and slowly we translated some paragraphs, laughing at each other’s errors. Earlier in the week, I’d left a message saying I missed him. He is sweet, intelligent, and shy. I hope we can be friends. Why is it that after he leaves I feel like an object again—without any soul?

  I have only twenty pages left to read in James Lord’s Picasso and Dora, and I will be sad to finish it. It’s the memoir of a young American falling under the strange, potent spell of Picasso and his friends. I admire James for writing such an unflattering self-portrait, in which he appears conceited, wounded, and occasionally mean. There is a special poignancy to the tale of a gay man who loves a woman but cannot offer her the intimacy she craves and deserves.

  YESTERDAY, after Octave left, I could still smell him everywhere in the apartment. On the sofa pillows, in the tea towel, on the telephone receiver, and in the gorgeous red-black dahlias he brought.

  Was this the odor of friendship asserting itself mysteriously in the absence of the man and calling attention to my solitude? I remembered Emily Dickinson’s letter to her dear friend Elizabeth Holland:

  Dear Sister,

  After you went, a low wind warbled through the house like a spacious bird, making it high but lonely. When you had gone the love came. I supposed it would. The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone.

  Shame is so intrinsic in a strong affection we must all experience Adam’s reticence.

  But what shame is this exactly? Shame of the hunger for friendship? Of taking pleasure in the divineness of another?

  To console myself, I set off on foot for the Louvre and wandered about the museum’s long salons until I came upon Théodore Géricault’s Dead Cat.

  Was this young, slim cat Géricault’s? How deeply affected he must have been by the death of this dappled friend—so affected as to commemorate him or her for all eternity, with its exhausted head hanging over the bench’s edge (Where am I? Find out where I am!). I hope that making the painting assisted the artist—engaging with a beloved animal’s corpse, the light illuminating its soft fur, casting shadows from its legs—Géricault’s art hopelessly confused with his life. I hope that, after he completed the painting, the love came.

  Part VII

  RETURNING TO the Montparnasse Cemetery, I found the polished black-granite sepulcher of Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, at the age of seventy-one, from a rare blood malignancy. “Cancer = death,” she wrote in her journal thirty years earlier, after being diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, which required a radical mastectomy. Though Sontag lived with cancer for many years, she never admitted that it was possible she might not survive, except in her private journal, where she was less victorious, writing, “People speak of illness as deepening, I don’t feel deepened. I feel flattened. I’ve become opaque to myself.”

  Because death was not a subject she discussed with her son, the writer David Rieff, he was forced to improvise after she succumbed, so he shipped her body on the same Air France flight that she’d taken many times from New York to Paris, a city she found rapturous. A decade later, I am a literary tourist at Montparnasse. Cemeteries, after all, are for the living. The leaves were turning in the wind, and grit from the narrow walkways blew in my eyes as I searched for Sontag’s grave. Those buried near her are named Flamery (as in flamme, meaning flame, ardor, or passion) and Testu (perhaps pronounced like têtu, which means obstinate or stubborn). A stubborn passion or an obstinate flame is a good thing to accompany a writer for all eternity.

  In the 1980s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when I was a young man living in Manhattan, Sontag published her important story “The Way We Live Now,” which depicts the responses of a group of New Yorkers when they learn that their friend has AIDS. Like Sontag, the story’s protagonist believes that his will to live counts more than anything else, and if he really wants to live, and trusts life, he will live. But he is mistaken—all the determination in the world and a “utopia” of friends cannot suppress the terrible HIV. When one of the protagonist’s friends brings him a little Guatemalan wooden sculpture of Saint Sebastian, he explains that, where he comes from, Sebastian is venerated as a protector against pestilence,symbolized by the arrows lodged in his body. All we usually are told about the early Christian martyr is that he was handsome, with eyes searching upward, bound to a post, and shot with arrows—but there is more to his story. In fact, when Christian women came to bury him, they discovered he was still alive and nursed him back to health. For this reason, Saint Sebastian remains a protector against plagues.

  At the Louvre, there is an excellent depiction of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), who lived during a time of incurable diseases. The saint is observed from an unusually low perspective, and two archers represent the profane pleasures, in contrast to the faithful Sebastian. A small fig tree grows at his feet, a sign of his sweetness and of the salvation to come.

  At the end of Sontag’s short story, she observes that “the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or photo you can’t show ‘still.’” In a poem, too, you can say, He is still alive, or, I am living still.

  Not far from Sontag’s pollen-coated grave are the remains of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who died at the age of forty-six of an unknown illness that was probably malaria. In a poem, Vallejo wrote, “Today I like life much less / but I’d like to live anyway . . . / I’d like to live always, even flat on my belly.” He shared Sontag’s desire to live no matter what, even if this meant being uncomfortable or unhappy. Fighting for life until the very end: this is thei
r fraternity.

  WALKING HOME LATE, I stopped to observe the stately buildings along the Seine. Everything had a pinkish glow, and as I stood admiring the view a tall, mannish woman approached holding a large bottle of beer and a cigarette. She spoke with a deep voice, while exhaling smoke, and there was a strange acknowledgment between us, as if we’d met before, though we hadn’t. Her face and hands were dirty, and she motioned for me to follow, so I accompanied her to a corner of the park, where we were joined by two of her friends, who rubbed their hands anxiously and looked at each other. I thought they might be the three Graces, the charities known in mythology—Charm, Beauty, and Joy—one of them giving, one of them receiving, and one patiently in wait. Alcohol and life on the street had made the two men softer than their female companion. When I realized that what they wanted was for me to open their beer bottle, I promptly unscrewed it and handed it back to the man with shaky hands, but he insisted I take the first swallow, so I did. A little later, when I left them, one of the Graces was already sleeping under a purple blanket.

  MY FATHER was a farm boy from Rockingham, North Carolina. His parents were sharecroppers. They received a house and groceries in exchange for labor. They grew peaches and tobacco. Both of my parents had high-school educations and took classes at night school to improve themselves. The military enabled my father to see the world, including Paris. He received a Bronze Star for exemplary conduct in ground combat during the Rhineland Campaign. Many of my father’s ancestors were classified as “mulatto” by the American census and lived in the township of Wolf Pit, in the dusty sand hills of North Carolina, where Father is buried. The gravestones of his ancestors are made of poured concrete and have misspellings, but they are darkly beautiful.