Burning the Days (31 page)

Also recommended was the Hôtel Vendôme, in the neck or perhaps the knee of the Place Vendôme. That time I passed it by, but the approach to it I later knew almost step by step. On the corner where rue de Rivoli and rue Castiglione meet, Sulka, an expensive men’s shop. Past it, walking towards the Place, the sidewalk that is a mosaic of small tiles, cracked and sagging. Then the English Pharmacy and farther on, still beneath the shadowy arcade, at the corner, the tobacconist. The shop, though changed, is there still, dark marble around the display windows, in which there were pipes, lighters, and small gifts, perhaps a few guidebooks. Within, however, to one side in a tall case were books of the Olympia Press and the even more disreputable—with, as I remember, pastel instead of green covers—titles of the Obelisk Press and the Traveller’s Companion.

Here, unhurried, one could browse for hours. Ordinary life drowned, went under. On the street outside, often cold and wet, it seemed, were passers-by in overcoats and expressions of care, but within the shop one leafed through pages in a kind of narcotic dream. I bought
Our Lady of the Flowers
here,
Tropic of Cancer,
of course,
The Ginger Man,
as well as Beckett, de Sade, Burroughs, and, later, Nabokov. The publisher of these distinguished books, Maurice Girodias, eventually closed up and was forced to go into exile.

He deserves more than a hasty footnote. He seems to have been a sort of lanky Falstaff, close to writers in their poverty and youth, probably not honest in his dealings, and cast aside by them later on. He may have had defects, but I was not able to see them on the one occasion I was at a dinner with him. His bitterness was unintense. We talked about the irony of it all and he was able to smile. For practical purposes he was still virtually in exile, he said, living
in the 20th Arrondissement somewhere past Père-Lachaise, with Paris nearly out of sight.

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. The 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.