by Henri Cole
A FEW DAYS AGO there was a large protest near the Hôtel des Invalides, built by Louis XIV for wounded and homeless veterans and as a monument to his own glory. At the center lies a wedding-cake-style gold dome, which took twenty-seven years to build and marks the final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte. Also housed in the galleries is one of the most comprehensive museums of military history in the world.
It was Sunday, and I was out for a walk when suddenly I was swept along by the protesters carrying pink and blue flags. (France is the flag nation of the world!)
Eventually I realized that the protesters were against same-sex marriage and adoptions by same-sex couples. In France, any surrogacy arrangement—whether commercial or altruistic—is illegal. So much pink and blue made me think of the French American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who used these same colors in her work, but these were not the friends of Bourgeois who were shouting, “Neither from a father nor from a mother!,” “One man and one woman!,” “A father is not a mother or like any other!” There were tens of thousands of protesters—angry men, women, and children—because a bill had been passed by the National Assembly and the Senate granting same-sex couples the right to marry and jointly adopt children, and this was supported by the French president.
A couple of days later, the first official same-sex marriage ceremony took place in Montpellier, a university town in the South of France, between two men, Bruno and Vincent, and there were two hundred policemen at their wedding to protect them. Again I thought of Bourgeois and her handsome I Do print, which she produced to benefit the Freedom to Marry campaign in the United States. It’s an abstract depiction, made of dyes on cloth with embroidery, of two flowers joined on a single stem.
When I was a young man during the seventies and eighties, gays and lesbians were not encouraged by society to love, marry, and reproduce. I think this is why, in part, I am so pessimistic about love, human relations, and the possibility of happiness. But this new law is an advancement for the human condition, and France is the fourteenth nation to permit same-sex marriage.
To celebrate, I went out and bought a bottle of champagne, Moët & Chandon, and stayed up drinking and reading Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia, a portrait of a pioneer woman in whose character the strengths and passions of America’s early settlers are rendered. On the horizon, the top of the Eiffel Tower kept me company with its sparkling lights that suggest freedom.
Part VIII
RECENTLY I FOUND Mother’s wartime identity card, and it has become an object of contemplation. Issued in January 1943, by le commissaire de police in Marseille, during the German occupation, it describes her hair as châtain, or chestnut, and her eyes as marron, or brown. She is a student of fifteen and living on the rue de Turenne. Her skin is mat, or olive. There is a smudged thumbprint. The carte d’identité describes her face as oval (ovale) and, more strangely, her nose as average (moyen), with a régulier bridge and an ordinaire base. How odd to find details about Mother’s nose as identifying traits. Was this true for Jews and non-Jews alike? Was this only for immigrants like Mother’s parents, who came from Armenia? Mother’s card is signed by a judge. France has issued a national ID card to all its citizens since the beginning of World War II, in 1940. The law says only that, during an ID check performed by police, gendarmerie, or customs, one can prove one’s identity “by any means,” the validity of which is left to the judgment of the law-enforcement official. From 1942, French Jews had the word “Jew” added to their card in red, and this helped authorities identify seventy-six thousand for deportation as part of the Holocaust. Mother looks happy in her polka-dot dress, her hair pinned back with a barrette, but what is she thinking behind her carefree smile? Does she know that in less than a fortnight the Old Port will be locked down by a vast police operation in which the entire city, except for the wealthiest residential neighborhoods, will be searched house by house to rid the area of “certain elements”? Does she know that six thousand individuals will be arrested, forty thousand identities checked, and fifteen hundred buildings destroyed, leaving two thousand Marseillais on the death trains? Does she know that, in two years, she will marry my father?
My grandmother had seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Her first two children were born in the “old country.” The others, including Mother, were born in Marseille and raised as first-generation French children. Among the babies who were lost was Mother’s identical twin, who came first from the well and was said to be more beautiful.
THIS MORNING, at my neighborhood flea market, I tried on sandals that had the look of those worn by Romans on ancient pottery and in sculptures. With a little mallet, a knife, and nails, the sandal-maker gave them a custom fit and asked my métier, or trade. When I replied, “I am still uncertain,” he smiled. His uncut hair made him look feral, like the wild boy from Aveyron in woodcuts. Because of an early frost, he wore his sandals with socks and complained that his head was too sensitive to the cold. He wrapped it in a raffish calfskin as we talked. He didn’t appear to be a modern man, but seemed more natural and authentic, like a classical poem, and I liked this.
Gazing at my feet as he adjusted the sandals, I remembered hiking—long ago, when I was visiting my uncles in the South of France—down into the Eure Valley on a narrow shady lane, between high walls of stone with shards of green bottle glass cemented in the top edges, at the end of which the landscape opened up dramatically, and rocks and sky shone before me like the fulcrum of a poem.
Tucked away in that sleepy place was what looked like a hermit’s farm or a mill, with grazing horses and a river circling around. The burnt-orange ceramic roofs of the buildings sloped whimsically, and small puffs of smoke rose from a chimney. It was the Romans who first camped there, under the tall trees, and discovered the pure and abundant Eure springs, which they transported via an immense aqueduct. Roosters were crowing as I arrived, and I could hear the comforting sound of mineral water cascading from the fountain into the riverbed. As I got down on my knees and drank from the source, it was as though this were the original place of all the earth’s water, which flowed languorously, and after many days and many kilometers, like a long capillary running through a body, reached the muddy Seine.
IS IT UNETHICAL to write about family and friends, presenting only my own side of the story? I am reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s letter to Robert Lowell after the publication of his controversial collection of poems Dolphin—which is half memoir, half fiction—in which he appropriates his ex-wife’s letters written under the strain of his desertion. “I’m sure my point is only too plain,” Bishop wrote to him.
Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,”. . . . One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them . . . etc. But art just isn’t worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins’s marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian,” even, certainly than a poet.
I’ve always believed that poetry exists in part to reveal the soul’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice, and endurance. For some of us, this satisfies a basic human need, like air or water, but a poem must also have music, imagery, and form. Because there is a kind of nakedness or authenticity in poetry that is associated with truth, on many days I haven’t the guts for it, and I fail. But when I succeed, there is nothing in life—except love—that equally verifies my existence.
WALKING PAST THE LOUVRE this evening, I observed a film being shot with the façade of the museum as a backdrop. One of the best-loved French films of all time is Les Enfants du Paradis, released in America as Children of Paradise, and recently I watched the restored version with Octave, who, like many French people, has seen it many times. Though it was made in 1945, during the German occupation, there is no evidence of war. It is set in the
nineteenth-century theater world and tells the story of Garance, a beautiful woman who is loved, in quite different ways, by four men: a mime, an actor, an aristocrat, and a criminal.
In French, the paradis is the top gallery of the theater, where the working class responded boisterously to the actors onstage. Watching the hundred-and-ninety-five-minute film, I, too, was in paradis. My favorite line of dialogue is: “If all the people that lived together loved one another, the earth would shine like the sun.” It is spoken by the sensitive mime, a romantic Pierrot figure and a character with whom it is difficult not to identify, since each of us has, at one time, been a sad clown pining for love. The French symbolists saw Pierrot as a fellow sufferer on the difficult road of life, where his only friend is the pale moon and where eventually he dies from too much soulfulness.
Children of Paradise is preoccupied with the struggle between feeling and thought. Since our hearts are always too cold and our heads too hot, it is difficult for us to find the correct balance. “I’m sorry I think too much,” one character in the film admits. Fortunately, the heart can sometimes pick up signals the head misses.
Sometimes, in my friendship with Octave, I feel such an intense, almost dreamlike sweetness, I must take a step back, or away, into reality . . . I must remind myself that, in fact, all the people on the earth do not love one another and the earth does not shine like the sun. In part, I come to Paris because I am a dreamer. It is a place where I am able to escape the shadows—a “place of clear light, like poetry or freedom,” to quote Seamus Heaney’s poem “Oysters,” about an evening spent in the West Region of Ireland, which was for him a place of refreshment and renewal. In the poem, Heaney is eating a meal of oysters with friends as the Atlantic Ocean light is coming up, and he is carried away beyond himself. The poet must dwell in silence, he believed, but also in “clamor and comradeship.” At the poem’s conclusion, Heaney, not wanting to be “too trim a poet” of mere nouns, says,
I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
Part IX
IT IS TOUSSAINT, or All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation for Catholics and a national holiday in which the custom is to visit cemeteries and venerate the dead with flowers, so I sought out James Lord at Montparnasse Cemetery. In France, chrysanthemums are the flower associated with death and therefore not brought into the home. Searching for James in that garden of death, I struck up a conversation with a gravedigger from Dublin who seemed eager to speak English. He was thin and spoke with a cigarette between his lips. His eyes seemed large inside his head, like in a Cocteau drawing. He was pushing a wheelbarrow around the cemetery but volunteered to escort me down a long, dusty path between the forgotten tombstones of Division 6 to James’s grave. The gravedigger lay a potted chrysanthemum on the pink marble sepulcher, and when I shook his hand in gratitude, I could feel the dry soil of Paris, the same soil that Baudelaire was able to transform into rhapsodic poetry.
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH JAMES helped keep me warm during a long, damp winter in Paris. This is what writers do—we keep each other warm—during periods of solitude when we are writing. After James died—at home, of a heart attack, at eighty-six—a letter came, saying, “You give real, true flowers, for which I am grateful as a friend can be. I, alas, can offer only the make-believe variety.” Included was a small, Matisse-like drawing made with ballpoint scratches at 4 AM, when he was sitting, sleepless, on the edge of his bed.
In the only picture I have of him he is a ghostly figure sitting on the little white sofa in his studio at 19, rue de Lille, the same address at which Max Ernst lived with his wife, the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Looking at the photograph now, I am reminded of what James wrote about “the very difficult, almost oppressive” portrait Giacometti made of him: “When in solitude I did look at it . . . I recognized that this was a portrait of extraordinary power and intensity, a work which clearly appeared to have been devised for eternity, uncannily reminiscent of the purpose and effect of the Egyptian art which Giacometti admired more than any other, thus an image over which hovered the adumbration and presentiment of death. . . .”
JAMES DID NOT THINK there were any first-rate living painters—at least, not any of Picasso’s stature. When I asked him about Francis Bacon, he said he was a stylist, “not first-rate, though a nice man.” About the second-generation abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, who often smeared paint with her fingers and who wanted her paintings “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower” and “coy young girls,” he said that they had been friends until her heavy drinking had caused a break. After he sold the painting he owned by her at Sotheby’s, he received an inquiry about the provenance of the work, and the buyer turned out to be Mitchell herself. James said he owned no first-rate paintings. He believed a drawing could be a masterpiece and that the ability to recognize a masterpiece was innate, but that an appreciation of art could be cultivated. The same is true for poetry, of course.
STROLLING ON THE RUE DE SEINE, I was approached by a woman who pretended to find a large gold ring on the pavement right at my feet. She held it up before me with a surprised look, hoping I would naïvely pay her for it. I was on my way to visit James, and when I recounted the incident for him, he laughed out loud, saying, “My dear, that is the oldest trick in the book.”
At the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, I often watch, with a different sort of naïveté, a small, grainy video of a unicorn. Neither male nor female, the mythological unicorn represents purity, and it lives somewhere between heaven and earth. The museum also has unicorn droppings on display. I think a sense of wonder is good for the poet, but a little of this goes a long way. I confess that I still feel childlike amazement before the brutality of the world, but also before its beauty. Call me an unrealist, but maybe I am in fact an ultra-realist.
IN 1952 James helped save from destruction Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. Local authorities wanted to tear it down and build a high-rise, so he raised money from wealthy Americans to preserve the pilgrimage site. On the day I visited the atelier, the northern gray sky mirrored its neutral walls. A large crucifix was hanging prominently. French country chairs with straw seats, baskets of onions, dusty bottles, and human skulls were arranged in a curator’s idea of Cézanne’s still lifes. Tapestries were draped across the easel. Withered fruit and flowers reminded visitors that Cézanne spent weeks, even months, finishing his paintings. Two prints—one by Poussin and another by Delacroix—were displayed above a high shelf. The Delacroix, a triangular composition that recalled Cézanne’s views of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, was a romantic depiction of a lion devouring a horse, whereas the Poussin, a landscape of shepherds in Arcadia, was more meditative. Cézanne, we were to understand, married the virtues of these two artists and made something of his own. A dense thicket pressed against the atelier’s garret-style windows. Hidden in the corner was a tall door, only about a foot wide, through which Cézanne removed his large canvases of bathers. In the atelier there was a solitude bordering on somberness. Eating a fig from a large tree beside the entrance, I remembered a letter Cézanne wrote to his son, in which he said, “As for me, I must remain alone, the meanness of people is such that I should never be able to get away from it.”
MY LANDLADY IN PARIS says that her grandfather knew Cézanne, and that there exists a French expression—Jamais saint n’a fait miracle dans son pays—that translates as “A saint never performs miracles in his own country.” This describes the city of Aix’s coolness toward Cézanne, its native son, during his lifetime. Perhaps the same was true in the early careers of writers such as Seamus Heaney, in Northern Ireland; Joseph Brodsky, in the Soviet Union; Derek Walcott, in colonial Saint Lucia; and Wisława Szymborska, in Iron Curtain Poland—because they were poets whose poems were definite and self-sufficient, rather than incomplete, hanging in space, or lost. Pierre-Auguste Renoir said Cézanne was “a lone wolf ” and a “real person.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY for James Lord called him “an intimate of Picasso and Giacometti,” and it reported that he is survived by “his longtime companion and adopted son.” When I knew James, he was working steadily on a new memoir about his experiences as a gay man during World War II, about which he said, “I’m not holding back, though I could never go as far as you do!” When he said this, it took me a moment to understand that he meant it as praise. He often apologized for talking so much about himself, though I encouraged him to do so.
Thinking about his expatriate life, I remember an episode in the book Six Exceptional Women in which he recounts a visit with Alice B. Toklas during her final years—this was in the sixties, before James had settled permanently in Paris. We forget that Toklas lived for twenty years after Gertrude Stein died. James describes “a small apartment in an ugly modern building,” somewhere on the outskirts of the city. He finds a woman living “with regret and desolation,” but not because of the ugly circumstances in which she finds herself. He writes:
