by W. S. Merwin
He said he knew a waiter over in Beaulieu who he was sure would lend me a dinner suit that would fit me, and early in the evening Alan, in his dinner jacket, drove us over to Beaulieu, where the waiter was expecting us, with his suit, including shoes, socks, and a black bow tie. I changed in the waiters’ bathroom in back of his restaurant, while Alan and he stood talking, and then we set off for Monte Carlo.
Alan led me to the summer casino, which he said he thought I should see. He had telephoned ahead and arranged for us to be met by the director, a Russian prince whose name I failed to grasp. Alan told me that the prince had been a general under the czar but had lost his estates in the revolution. He and his family had escaped with nothing. We were met by a very tall, imposing, white-haired gentleman who welcomed us and led us through the casino, not yet crowded at that hour, though there were small, intent clusters of addicts around some of the gaming tables. The prince spoke to us both in French, as though he were confiding in us as particular friends, or leading us through a conservatory in some country house of his. He had been, in fact, a friend of Alan’s parents, and had known Alan as a boy, before he occupied his present position. He offered Alan a drink, and we sat in his small glassed office for a few minutes, where the two went through the minuet of inquiring about each other’s lives since they had last seen each other. Then Alan said that we were on our way to dinner, and they assured each other that they would meet again soon. As we left, Alan spoke of the old prince fondly, but alluded to White Russians in general in a way that made them sound undependable and possibly contagious.
He had reserved a table for us in the restaurant upstairs, where the windows looked out over the yacht basin to the sea. There was a band platform. Tables were set around a dance floor. At one table I recognized Eric von Stroheim, Merle Oberon at another, and there were other familiar faces, American and French, from the film world. Alan greeted some of them, and friends at other tables. Several diners stopped to speak to him as they arrived. His conversation was with them, or in his own mind, but scarcely at all with me, and again he began drinking hard, starting with vodka cocktails before he went on to wine. He kept speaking to friends of his at nearby tables, rather awkwardly, and I could hear his voice rising. He was growing irritable, short with the waiters. I found it difficult to talk with him, to keep him on any subject except for the diners that evening, the famous faces, what he knew about them and about others whom he had seen there in the past. His bits of anecdote became more and more incoherent. The headwaiter came over and asked how long he had been at the villa this summer and how long he was planning to stay. Alan rumbled in reply, pleased but disconnected. He began to talk to himself or to some imagined adversary, so that it seemed he was not addressing me or anyone nearby, but heads turned toward us as his voice rose. He called for the bill and said we would leave before the dancing began. He stood up, staggered a few steps, with everyone’s eyes on him, and half collapsed, breaking his fall by grabbing the back of a chair, which tipped over onto the floor. A waiter and I helped him to his feet and over to the entrance desk, where he settled the bill. The car was sent for. He managed to get down the stairs, gripping the rail, sullen and silent. Fortunately I did not have to grapple with him to keep him from trying to drive back to the villa. When we got into the front hall he started up the stairs, swaying perilously but muttering to me to keep away from him.
That night marked the end of the season for him. I drove over to Beaulieu the next day and returned the waiter’s borrowed evening clothes, and told the waiter that we had had a fine evening. It seemed to me when I got back that the villa had entered another age. Alan paid little attention to what happened there. A young woman named Effie Halsey, an art student, daughter of a friend of Alan’s, whom I had met at the Deer Park the year before, came for a few days’ visit and was troubled by Alan’s demeanor and by the atmosphere of the villa. She talked about Alan’s mother and brother, their ruinous behavior resurfacing in the present. She was acquainted with people cruising on sailboats moored in the harbor, and we went out sailing some days, with Peter and Andrew or by ourselves. She sailed down the Italian coast with one of them, and after she had gone Alan left on trips and was away for days at a time.
By the middle of August he was talking about leaving, and about Peter’s return to the States to get ready for the school year. Other guests were expected. Alan arranged for them to stay at the villa whether he was there or not. Josephine and André took care of things in the house. Maria Antonia da Braganza, who had engaged me to come to Portugal as a tutor to her two sons, was expected before long, and Dorothy and I were to stay on at the villa until she came. There was not enough left from my small salary during the summer for us to do any travelling in the meantime.
The day came when Alan’s and Peter’s bags were packed into the Jeep station wagon for the drive to Paris. In spite of Alan’s disruptive, ill-contained core of anger and the unappeased urges that fuelled it, he had tried to be generous and kind, not only to Peter and Peter’s shy and often bewildered friend Andrew, but to Dorothy and me, and in the course of two summers a mistrustful, troubled affection, a dubious, ambivalent rudiment of family feeling, mottled with resentment, had grown among us. It was as evident in Alan’s valedictory behavior as it was in our own. Of course he was saying good-bye to something besides us, to some aspect of his life, some hope, and his gesture was waving to something beyond any of us, and we could feel that too. Peter seemed to be angry about going, and he got into the car and looked away, and they drove off down the road.
29
The days that followed were a kind of interregnum, a time apart, filled with an unmoored, indigent freedom, and with quiet and room. André served us our meals at the villa, out on the terrace as before, but he lingered to talk. I sat in the kitchen gossiping with Josephine, trying to imagine her own youth, not far from there, and the German occupation, which she remembered vividly. I had a room to try to write in, day after day. An Austrian-born physician, Alan’s doctor in New York, had been invited to spend a few days at the villa. He came with a tall, willowy young English woman, his current girlfriend. They settled in easily, entertained themselves, and were agreeable company. Mrs. McCormick, who was staying nearby, came with Muriel and took us on an excursion to Éze, and to lunch at La Réserve de Beaulieu, and afterward to visit her friend Lord Beaverbrook at his villa. On another afternoon she took us to Juan les Pins, and to Antibes and the Picasso museum, and to see Nicholas de Stael’s paintings.
Downstairs from our rooms at the small villa, Mme. Fratacci recovered gradually. I sat in the kitchen with her, a few times when I saw her there and she asked me in. She was a very quiet woman, staring at a prospect of loneliness, but though she was somber she was not depressing. Her daughters were attached to her like shadows, too timid or too withdrawn for me to be able to coax them into conversation of any kind. Georges neglected his wife and knew it, and seemed unable to imagine doing anything differently. He sat at the kitchen table and had nothing to say to her either in French or in the Nizzarte patois that was her childhood language, and which they had usually spoken when they were alone together. The kitchen, filled with helpless good intentions, would rapidly become suffocating, and if Georges was there he would get up cautiously, as though he were afraid of stepping on something, and lead me out. We would walk into the village, with him talking, perhaps, about Alan and his problems, or about his métier, the world of the arts, Giacometti, Cartier-Bresson, but never about his own life and marriage.
By the time Alan left I was calling almost every day at the tiny house that Georges Belmont had rented for the summer months, overlooking the inner bay of the cape, between the thumb and the palm. The principal room of the house was the everything room. An unmade bed occupied most of it, with Georges’s typewriter on a kind of card table in a corner, by the door to the bathroom. Georges’s wife, José, was often there when I arrived, in her underwear, smoking. She was never not smoking. Georges allowed gaps between cig
arettes, but often worked with one smoldering in the ashtray beside him. José had a low, hoarse voice that would have been attractive if what she said had not been almost invariably pejorative, caustic, discontented, and impatient. Her chronic disappointment was directed at Georges, not for any specific shortcomings but as the habitual tenor of her address to him. I found her hard to be around from the beginning, but fortunately she spent as much time as possible down at the beach with their two- or three-year-old daughter, Sophie, in the little sandy cove just below, and when she left, Georges and I could sit and talk. Those days inaugurated a friendship that would last, despite José’s abrasive accompaniment and my own peregrinations during the years that followed, for over half a century.
Georges’s English was fluent, grammatically flawless, with a ready, precise, rich vocabulary. It was English, but American English and American writing were certainly not alien to him. His barely noticeable French accent enhanced its charm. He had learned English as a student, perfecting it at Trinity College, Dublin, where he had been a schoolmate and close friend of a young man named Samuel Beckett, who at that time was known chiefly for his first book, a critical study of Proust. Georges talked of his friend Sam, and of Joyce, during the years when Sam had acted as a kind of secretary for Joyce in Paris, and the three of them, for some time, had met almost daily. Sam, he said, had taken to imitating Joyce in many respects—small mannerisms, turns of speech, Joyce’s walk and clothes. Georges noticed that he had picked up Joyce’s physical hesitancy that was a result of his eye trouble. Then he could not help observing that Sam’s feet were bothering him, to the point where it was painful for him to walk, and that the condition seemed to be getting worse. He brought up the subject with Sam, who at first dismissed it, but finally admitted that he had been wearing shoes the same size that Joyce wore, and they were a couple of sizes too small for him.
For a while, Georges said, Joyce had wanted to go, every Sunday morning, to one particular church, to Mass and to sit through the sermon. They had not been sure why, and had even wondered whether the creed that had surrounded his childhood was exerting its claims, years later. Every Sunday after Mass they would go to a café and sit drinking white wine, and Joyce tended to be quite silent at those times. He would sit with a cigarette between his lips, the ashes dropping off and rolling down his front. It went on for weeks, and then one Sunday, at a moment when they were sitting there saying nothing, Joyce raised his head and began a tone-perfect imitation of the priest’s delivery, phrase by phrase, the manner, the rhetoric, the argument and exhortation flawless. The performance, besides filling Georges with admiration, had led him to ponder how it could be that the imitation was so much more compelling and alive than what it was imitating.
(Two years later, when Georges was living in a villa at Villescresnes, just south of Paris, I stopped to see him, and while I was there Beckett came over. It was the day of the publication of Molloy, and he and Georges were feeling celebratory. Beckett had been told that there were to be some good reviews. José told him confidentially that she quite liked the book but was “not convinced,” as she put it, by his French, which she said he wrote like a foreigner. And then she went out somewhere, and Georges suggested that the three of us make gazpacho for lunch. Beckett was given the job of slicing the cucumbers. I watched him with something approaching amazement. His slices were so fine they were all but transparent, and they were perfectly consistent from one end of the cucumber to the other. Years after that I wrote to him from London. I had been asked to put together a program of contemporary poems for the BBC Third Programme, and I greatly admired the few poems of his that I had seen and wanted to know whether he might have others that had not been published. In my letter I said that he probably would not remember me, but that we had met at Georges’s house, and the three of us had made gazpacho. I told him how I had admired his slicing of the cucumbers. He wrote back that, as far as poems were concerned, the cupboard was bear [sic], but that he did indeed remember that day, that lunch, the cucumbers. “I was thinking,” he wrote, “about my mother.”)
Georges had also become a close friend of Henry Miller’s and had translated several of his books. He knew a good deal of contemporary American fiction, both literary and popular. He was a modest, gentle, hardworking man, who was trying to use his long hours of daily translating to buy himself a little time to work on poems and a novel of his own. I felt that he was somewhat at the mercy of his circumstances, his marriage among them, though he dealt with them without complaint and with a steady flow of energy. His mind, his perceptions, the language in which he expressed himself, were fine, authentic, and judicious, but he seemed to live with an ultimate doubt of himself, to suspect that he was a shadow of others.
A friend of his, renting another small, brand new-dwelling on that side lane, was an Irish novelist named John Lodwick, who had been in that part of France during the war as a clandestine operator for the British armed forces. He had been parachuted into the region to maintain contact with the Resistance and to assist in sabotage against the Germans in the late stages of the occupation. While there he had met Jeanne, a beautiful, already ravaged woman, who said little but obviously possessed a powerful character, and lived with a deep rage, which John ascribed to her experiences during the war, when she had been raped by the Germans and had seen them murder several members of her family. He said that she had been able to take it out on several of the Germans before they left, but that had scarcely soothed her or reassured her about what life had to offer. He had fallen in love with her just the same, the moment he met her, in the Resistance, and had returned to her as soon as he could. They had a little boy named Malachi, still in his crib.
John liked his red wine at all hours of the day. Usually he did not show the effects of it until near sundown, when he was apt to be preoccupied and irritable. He had published some short fiction, and a book about amphibious commando operations during the war, which had received a good press and some success, and he had carefully assembled a large scrapbook of press cuttings, which he liked to display. It was the one object to which he seemed particularly attached. All three of us loved the writing of Joyce, and talked of it, and about Joyce himself. John shared my fascination with Camus and Mann. He had not yet read Doctor Faustus but had been reading about it, and knew the central story, and asked about the book. At one point he wanted me to say whether, if—like the composer who was the protagonist of Mann’s great novel—I had been offered a period of years of artistic fulfillment in exchange for something I thought of as my soul, I would have accepted. I was startled by the question, and answered that I thought I would have had difficulty believing in the “devil’s” offer at all, and the authority for making it. I thought that if the talent and urge and character were there to begin with, such a bargain would be meaningless. If they were not there, no “bargain” could help. John seemed troubled by my answer and I could not tell why, but there was something about him that suggested a man possessed and struggling with forces that he could not control.
These took the form of recurring violence, a theme of violence in his life, and occasional glimpses of it in his demeanor and his expression, like the fin of a shark. It was there in some of the stories he told, and he told them at all hours of the day, sometimes starting, apparently, out of nowhere, and when he told them I could not help but listen. Many had to do with the war, the clandestine operations against the Germans, which had filled several of his most formative years. They told more often of escapes than of encounters or confrontations or moments of engagement. More than once, according to his accounts, he had made his way out of France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, after completing operations for which he had been sent into the region. Once, he said in a story that he returned to and that clearly haunted him, he had got to the border near Andorra and had run out of money. A man there, who he knew worked in the black market, lent him some, to get him over the border. His creditor was taking a long chance, but John was planning to be back.
The man was a Jew, who hoped to escape also, before he was caught, and would need the money, he said, to be able to buy his way out if they did catch him. John did come back on his next trip and learned that the man had lost the gamble, had been caught and deported, and John felt a complicated, ineradicable responsibility for it, and was sure that the man had not escaped sooner because he did not have the money John had borrowed from him.
On one of his trips out, John said, he and two other men were escaping by foot over a high pass. They had been hiding by day, travelling at night, for most of a week. One of the others was a man with whom he had been on missions before and knew relatively well. The other one had joined them later. They did not know much about him, he was not much help, and he kept getting on their nerves. They told each other that he was only too likely to make some stupid mistake and get them all caught. They were short on sleep and food. John and his friend found that they really did not like the other man. They saw it in each other, in the way they watched him and referred to him, and they admitted it to each other with their eyes, and eventually with words. Up on the high trails they began to wonder how far they trusted him. They decided to get rid of him and call it an accident. They picked a moment at night, in a high wind, and at a precipitous ledge on the trail they pushed him over.
So John said. I wondered, though, not always at the time but afterward, how many of John’s dramatic stories, or what parts of them, were true, and how much of them he himself believed.
