by Baxter, John
Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Pedestrian” should have alerted me. It’s set in a future Los Angeles where nobody walks, least of all at night. They huddle inside, behind locked doors—not out of fear so much as inertia. One man defies this custom. Passing house after house with drawn blinds, he reflects on what lies within: “tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.”
One night, a robot police car halts by him.
“What are you doing out?” it asks.
“Walking. Just walking.”
“Walking where? For what?”
“Walking for air. Walking to see.”
The answers condemn him. Who but a madman would walk for pleasure? He’s hauled off for brainwashing at the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.
Veteran Avenue, where I lived in LA, is a long, quiet thoroughfare of low-rise apartment buildings that terminates in the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. Next to UCLA is the square mile of stores, cinemas, churches, and markets known locally as Westwood Village. And a village was a village, whether in Los Angeles or Suffolk. If you measured such things in distance, a walk to the East Bergholt store and to Westwood were the same.
I tried it one autumn afternoon just after I arrived.
It was eerie.
Back in East Bergholt, particularly on the outskirts, houses were scattered, even isolated. A stretch of woodland might separate one from the next. No wonder the English village was such a popular setting for murder mysteries. Even so, on my walks, I’d often encounter another pedestrian, or a man trimming his hedge, and though we didn’t know one another, we would exchange a nod or a “Good afternoon.”
But here in Los Angeles, on a street lined with apartment buildings, presumably all occupied, I saw no one. Worse, I sensed few people had stepped on this sidewalk in a year. In doorways seldom if ever opened, supermarket catalogs and menus for Chinese restaurants had gathered in drifts, yellowed and wrinkled by sun and rain. Crabgrass insinuated itself through gaps between concrete slabs, themselves dusted with grit like sand in a pharaoh’s tomb. Looking back, I saw my footprints outlined. Beyond well-tended lawns, neat signs on sticks poked up at the edge of the flower beds. In England, they would have read Begonia acerifolia or Paeonia abchasica. Here they announced: WARNING! PROTECTED BY HIGH-TECH ARMED RESPONSE.
On that first walk, I reached Westwood on foot but returned by bus, and when, shortly after, British screenwriter Troy Kennedy-Martin announced he was “leaving this bleeding town for good” and offered to sell me his car, I jumped at it. The cinéaste in me was intrigued by driving a vehicle formerly owned by the man who wrote one of the classic car-chase films, The Italian Job, and dreamed up its Mini Cooper pursuit around Turin. But mostly I craved escape from the sidewalks of LA and the paranoia of being a pedestrian.
This being Hollywood, the sale took more negotiations than a remake of Gone With the Wind. Finally, however, Troy, having given up his apartment, moved in with a producer friend for his last week in town. Booked on an early flight to New York, and thence to London, he still needed the car to get to the airport. So we agreed I’d take a cab to his friend’s house, drive him to LAX, and keep the car afterward.
In car-owning LA, cabs are uncommon, particularly at 4:00 a.m. The driver who collected me in the velvety darkness kept the bulletproof plastic screen locked down and shot me the occasional suspicious glance in the rearview mirror. As we pulled up at the address Troy gave me, our headlights washed over an imposing stone entrance and cast-iron gates. Beyond, a gravel drive led up to the residence. Obviously he was one of the producers who made money. Or perhaps he just maintained the illusion by stretching his credit cards, which in California acquire almost infinite elasticity. As one particular billboard advertised along Sunset, with their card you could SEE A MOVIE—OR MAKE ONE.
Only the width of the drive separated the portico of the front door from the guest house, where I knew Troy was staying.
“Just wait here,” I told the driver. “My friend said he’d come out.”
He switched off the motor but left the lights on. The only sound was the tick-tick-tick of the engine block contracting in the chill.
A few seconds later, the mansion’s front door opened, and Troy stepped out. He carried a toilet bag and a towel but was otherwise naked. Wisps of steam wafted from his body as, pink as a new-boiled shrimp, he tiptoed across the drive, pausing in the headlights to peer at us and give a “won’t be a minute” wave.
A moment’s thought would have provided the obvious explanation—finding his own shower broken, he’d used one in the house—but the driver didn’t hesitate.
“Fifty bucks!” His voice cracked with panic.
I’d barely passed the bills through the safety screen before the door locks popped open. An instant later, I stood alone, watching his taillights dwindle into the dark.
This was my Hollywood Moment—that instant when a new arrival discards his former personality and reemerges as a character in the collaborative screenplay that is life in Los Angeles. Survivors swap such anecdotes, like war stories. Richard Rayner, author of The Cloud Sketcher and Los Angeles Without a Map, had just arrived from London in 1992, in the midst of the Rodney King riots, when Granta editor Bill Buford called.
“Get down there,” he ordered. “I want a firsthand report.”
Watching on TV as mobs burned and looted, Rayner demanded, “Do you want me to get killed?”
Buford hardly needed to think. “Not killed,” he said. “Wounded would be good.”
Standing alone in the dark of Bel Air, the smell of burning rubber mixing with the cloying sweetness of night-blooming jasmine, I felt the same synthesis of exhilaration and threat.
There is a standard phrase for moments like this, often employed with a rueful shake of the head. Mentally, I used it now.
Only in Los Angeles. . .
Chapter 7
Hemingway’s Shoes
I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something, or seeing people doing something that they understood.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Moveable Feast
After the aversion therapy of Los Angeles, it took my Paris doctor to get me back on my feet.
“Do you take any exercise at all?” she asked.
I stopped buttoning my shirt long enough to show her my hands.
“I bite my nails a lot.”
She stared, fish-eyed, over the top of her glasses. Not great laughers, the French, and Odile, my doctor, even less so. Interestingly, there’s no French equivalent of the phrase “bedside manner.” On the list of medical priorities, putting patients at ease and allaying their fears rates somewhere below selecting a fabric for the waiting-room curtains.
“For your age, your health is not bad,” she conceded, “but you should play some sport.”
“I detest games.”
Memories crowded back of enforced sports afternoons at school, daydreaming in the outfield during interminable cricket matches or rugby games. Not daydreaming too much, however, since, as in all forms of sport, stretches of tedium alternated with flurries of violent activity. Years later, when Michael Herr in his Vietnam memoir Dispatches defined these same characteristics as typical of war, I understood the hidden agenda of school games. The claim by the duke of Wellington that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” no longer sounded nonsensical.
“Join a club sportif then,” Odile suggested.
“Even worse!” Club sportif was Paris-speak for “gym.” The experience of others suggested it wouldn’t help. While he represented The New Yorker in Paris, Adam Gopnik tried one. Many exercise machines were not yet installed, and those that were didn’t always work. Nor did the club provide towels—though such a service was, the receptionist explained, “envisaged”: sh
orthand for something that might take place in the future. They did, however, present him with a welcome gift that reflected exactly the Parisian concept of health—a bag of chocolate truffles.
Carrying the battle to the enemy, I asked, “Do you exercise?”
Odile didn’t blink. “My weight hasn’t changed since college. Nor my blood pressure. But if these were my figures . . .” She tapped her computer screen with her nail. “ . . . I would probably take up the marathon.”
As a concession, I walked home down rue Gay-Lussac and rue Soufflot, rather than waiting for the bus.
For the first time in a while, I paid attention to the Parisians passing me. Slim and erect, showing barely a gram of excess fat, they stepped out briskly, as full of good health as they were of croissants, foie gras, fried potatoes, steak, red wine, and cheese.
How did they do it?
I reviewed the physical state of the Anglo-Saxon expatriate community. Pale, slouching, sagging, habitually out of shape—we were a sorry advertisement for the intellectual life. It was little consolation that some notable physical wrecks preceded us: Gertrude Stein, chronically obese, thanks to the cooking of her companion, Alice Toklas; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, invariably plastered; Henry Miller, who, if he took any exercise at all, preferred the horizontal variety, in bed with a prostitute; and shuffling James Joyce, who went everywhere by taxi, always at someone else’s expense.
But then, as if to counterbalance single-handed the combined weight of this dropsical pantheon, there was Hemingway.
Back in the 1920s, when he lived on Place de la Contrescarpe, he would often have passed along this very sidewalk. It took little imagination to imagine him doing so now; I heard that light but forceful boxer’s footfall as he moved to overtake me, fists clenched, arms powering, breathing deeply, perspiring but with energy undiminished by the kilometer-long walk—thinking, perhaps, of the beer and potato salad he’d enjoy for lunch at Brasserie Lipp.
Then he was past, leaving a scent of leather and fresh sweat. I watched his figure diminish, the fabric belt across the lower back of his old-fashioned tweed jacket tightening over those tensing muscles, notebook showing in his right-hand jacket pocket, his mind swimming with visions of trout in Michigan streams and the dust and blood of the bullring. I could hear him sneer, as Bill Gorton sneers to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises: “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”
He was out of sight now, across rue Saint-Dominique, on the last downhill stretch to where the Medici Fountain spouted clear water in the sun. To his left was the green glory of the Luxembourg Gardens. Then under the colonnade of the Odéon Theatre, pausing for a few minutes to browse the booksellers’ stalls. And after that, across Place de l’Odéon, and into rue de l’Odéon, descending to the little shop with the wooden sign hanging over the sidewalk, the sober face of Master Will Shaxsper. . .
Ernest, I thought, I need your shoes.
Chapter 8
The Importance of Being Ernest
Turning up from St. Germain to go home past the bottom of the gardens to the Boulevard St. Michel one kept Shakespeare and Company to starboard and Adrienne Monnier’s Amis des Livres to port, and felt, as one rose with the tide toward the theatre, that one had passed the gates of dream—though which was horn and which was ivory, neither of those two rare friends would ever undertake to say. Why should they? It was enough for a confused young lawyer in a grand and vivid time to look from one side to the other and say to himself, as the cold came up from the river, Gide was here on Thursday and on Monday Joyce was there.
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, quoted in Paris in the Twenties by Armand Lanoux
Anyone who lives in Paris ends up spending a lot of time walking. That’s particularly true if you live, as we do, in the sixth of its twenty arrondissements, or municipalities.
The sixth, or sixième, is Paris’s Greenwich Village or Soho. Historical and literary associations don’t simply litter the streets; one has to climb over them. Between 1918 and 1935, you might, standing on the corner of rue Bonaparte and boulevard Saint-Germain, with the Deux Magots café at your back, have encountered Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, William Faulkner, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, James Joyce, William Faulkner, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and scores more. Today, it’s the most expensive district of the city. A square meter of floor space, the area covered by a single armchair, costs $15,000, but in 1922, as Hemingway wrote in Esquire, you could live here for a year, rent, food, and drink included, for $1,000.
Hemingway came to Paris briefly as a wounded veteran in 1918, returned as a reporter for Canadian newspapers in 1921, and lived at a number of addresses on the Left Bank for seven years, writing the novels and short stories that established his reputation. He often visited our building and ate at the same restaurants where we still eat today. We even knew a few of the same people. No wonder I was taken with the sixth.
Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company
Like everyone, I’d been seduced by A Moveable Feast and its picture of a bohemian paradise, inhabited by a handful of charmed foreigners whom the locals—those few who got a mention, mostly barmen and whores—held in awed respect. Reading Henry Miller’s memoirs, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris, and Memoirs of Montparnasse by another Canadian, John Glassco, you could almost believe only expatriates lived there. They casually referred to the sixième as “the Quarter,” almost as if a wall surrounded it, within which, as with Jean Gabin in the casbah of Algiers in Pépé le Moko and Charles Boyer in its U.S. remake, Algiers, normal laws didn’t apply.
Most of these memoirs were written thirty years later, following a second world war. Distance lent enchantment. Looked at from postwar Europe, impoverished and split by political disputes, it was too easy for Beach, Miller, and in particular Hemingway to believe the sun had been warmer back then, the conversation wittier, the drinks more potent, the women more beautiful, the city cleaner, more honest, more innocent. “When spring came,” wrote Hemingway, “even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness, except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
The opinion of those “very few” mattered a great deal. When Scott Fitzgerald behaved badly at the Antibes home of his rich friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, they formally barred him for a week. It was bad enough that they specified the period of exile, like grounding a teenager, but worse that Fitzgerald, when his sentence ended, slunk back into their circle.
Or take the famous incident of Hemingway “liberating” Odéon.
In July 1944, Paris, abandoned by the Germans, had not yet been claimed by the advancing Allies, who’d held back to let the French march in first with Charles de Gaulle leading the parade down the Champs-Elysées. As his entourage passed through Montparnasse, writer Leon Edel noted the damage done to its famous cafés, the Dôme, La Coupole, and the boarded-up Rotonde. “Across the gay glass fronts of another day, chairs and tables were heaped up in earthquake disorder. Down the way, at the Gare Montparnasse, Nazis in field-green were surrendering in terror or glum despair. It was strange, stranger than all fiction, to encounter at that moment, in the July twilight, scenes of a dead past.”
Hemingway bypassed Montparnasse and came straight to Odéon. He hoped to salvage something of the Paris he had known before he left for the United States, Cuba, and fame. As Beach tells it,
A string of jeeps came up the street and stopped in front of my house. I heard a deep voice calling “Sylvia!” And everybody in the street took up the
cry of “Sylvia!” “It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway!” cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs; we met with a crash, he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people in the street and in the windows cheered. He was in battle dress, grimy and bloody. A machine gun clanked on the floor. He asked Adrienne for a piece of soap, and she gave him her last cake.
Stirring stuff—but, alas, mostly invented. When I first moved to rue de l’Odéon, our octogenarian ground-floor neighbor, Madeleine Dechaux, still recalled that day, but not the way Beach describes it. A young woman in 1944, she watched the new arrivals from her first-floor window. Hemingway didn’t shout for Sylvia. Instead—sensibly—he called up to Madeleine, asking if there were any Germans on the roof. She told him they had all fled, and by the time she walked through her apartment and out onto the stairs, the travel-stained group of mostly teenaged cameramen and journalists were crowding the lobby.
In Madame Dechaux’s memory, Hemingway didn’t race up the stairs. Instead, Adrienne descended to greet him while someone went to fetch Sylvia from where she was then living. She and Monnier hadn’t shared the Odéon apartment since 1937, when Adrienne began an affair with the young photographer Gisele Freund. Monnier urged Hemingway to wait there for Beach. Instead, he drew her aside, by the big green-painted radiator that still today feeds heat up the stairwell.
“Just tell me one thing,” Madeleine Dechaux heard him murmur. “Sylvia didn’t collaborate, did she?”
It was a revealing moment. Beneath all his bluster, the unsure adolescent in Hemingway continued to fret about what “the very few” might think.
Chapter 9
The Boulevardier
In all classes of society, one finds plenty of people who, full of mad presumption or in a deplorable abuse of the French language, call themselves “flaneurs” without understanding the first elements of that art which we do not hesitate to place next to music, the dance, and even mathematics.
