The Existential Englishman Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  PART ONE (1966–69)

  1Abroad! Abroad!

  2Behind Duchamp’s Door: 12 rue Larrey, Ve

  3Street Theatre: 12 rue Larrey, Ve

  4Love’s Labyrinth: 17 rue de Poitou, IIIe

  PART TWO (1969–77)

  5The Empty Room: 17 rue de Poitou, IIIe

  6Stone by Stone: 11 rue de Braque, IIIe

  7One of Us: 11 rue de Braque, IIIe

  8Entr’acte: 24bis rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire, VIe

  PART THREE (1977–94)

  9Laughing Boy: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe

  10The Reckoning: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe

  11Phoenix: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe; 14 rue de Birague, IVe

  12Fallout: 14 rue de Birague, IVe; 16 rue Michel le Comte, IIIe

  Postscript: Full Circle: 16 rue Michel le Comte, IIIe (2014–18)

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  By the same Author

  Also available by Michael Peppiatt

  Preface

  The turquoise lamps flicker and dim, or perhaps my eyes are playing tricks on me after a day’s tenacious reading in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I love this place so much that even if I weren’t deep into research on seventeenth-century life in Paris I would come here simply to watch all the faces bent intently over manuscripts and listen to the concentrated hum of so many minds communing with the past. There’s also an oddly erotic note to the tense, hushed atmosphere, but even when your gaze doesn’t cross that of some raven-haired beauty framed in soft light at a distant table, it’s a unique privilege to be sitting in this lofty, book-lined space founded by Cardinal Mazarin in 1643 and without contest the most venerable, elegant library in Paris.

  For a handful of euros, my reader’s card allows me to come and go as I please to the Mazarine throughout the year. As a young man finding his way Marcel Proust worked here fitfully as a librarian, and next door, under the golden-ribbed dome of this exalted institution, France’s academicians, its immortels, meet to discuss and defend the purity of the French language. Every time I cross the Pont des Arts and contemplate the extraordinary harmony and grace of Louis Le Vau’s building – in my eyes, the architectural focus of the whole Left Bank – I am transposed to another realm.

  I have worked hard today, and before I go home I want to wind down by wandering through the streets for an hour or so. I start walking back over the bridge, thinking I might cut through the Louvre towards the Marais. But a wind whips icily off the darkening back of the Seine as it plunges towards the sea, so I retreat and head instinctively towards the bright lights and human warmth of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  Dusk is falling fast on rue de Seine, and the art galleries and bookshops never look so seductive as when, on a bitter winter evening, their glittering displays of culture are about to be shuttered off for the night. The smell of roast chestnuts wafts across rue Jacques Callot and I’m tempted to buy some in a paper twist and stop off for a draught beer at La Palette, where a few art-world people I know are bound to have gathered in the cosy back room. Then at the bar I espy a dodgy art dealer holding forth to a couple of unsuccessful artists I’ve been avoiding for years, and suddenly the idea of a large glass of white Burgundy at Café de Flore becomes more appealing.

  I pass by the Deux Magots and note superciliously how thronged with tourists it seems, sitting where great writers once sat and even wrote their books. Then I pause reverentially at the crossroads of Saint-Germain, the crossroads of civilisation, or certainly the cradle of what interests me most in modern literature and art, even if those hallowed names, from Joyce, Picasso and Giacometti to Breton, Sartre and Beckett, might not mean so much any more to the crowds of attractive young people milling around the boutiques along the boulevard. At Café de Flore I push back the tightly wedged door and savour the first rush of its wine-scented warmth, scanning the crowd to see if there is anyone I want to greet. No old friends are in tonight, so I shake hands with a couple of waiters and acquaintances, then climb the stairs to the clubby, wood-panelled room on the first floor and settle down at my favourite table.

  After the first glass of wine I begin to relax, as if I’d walked through a wall into another, calmer dimension. The working day has faded perceptibly into evening, and I reflect on what other pleasures might be at hand. With my wife travelling abroad all week, I’d be glad to have a light supper here rather than face the snacks I wolf alone off the kitchen counter at home. Meanwhile, the terrace of Brasserie Lipp, ringed round with golden lights and rosy patio heaters, glows invitingly on the pavement opposite. I can almost hear the hubbub of elegant Parisians inside, nonchalantly relinquishing their haughty chic to put away a hearty meal. Once I start musing on the relative merits of Lipp’s entrecôte with crisp frites and its tender cassoulet, washed down with draughts of the house Bordeaux, the decision is quickly made. I pause only to pick up a copy of Le Monde from the kiosk outside, then realise, as I slip into a seat at the centre of the bustling brasserie, that I’ll barely glance at the headlines once the spectacle here begins to unfold.

  All Paris is already filing in, the rising starlet and the ancient pop star, the notorious duo of decorator queens, the august men of letters, the élite lawyers and society doctors courting wealthy widows, the scandal-dogged politicians with their reproving wives or hard-eyed mistresses. The new episode of nightly drama, mercifully closer to farce than to tragedy, is under way. Some factions amongst the diners fall into each other’s arms while others pointedly cold-shoulder former partners or lovers, initiating new alliances as they eat. Meanwhile, like a conductor who can no longer keep to the podium, Lipp’s maître d’ wafts grandly through the melee, greeting the favoured few unctuously while hissing orders to the squad of white-aproned garçons following him round.

  I’ve seen it all before, in numerous permutations, with once-famous participants who now exist at most as footnotes to eras long bygone. But somehow the familiarity is part of the attraction, and there is always an unexpected element, a sudden spat between client and waiter or an American heiress in dark glasses newly squired by a famous fashion gay, to offset the round of outrageous gossip and intimate exchange. I roll the last glass of claret round my tongue and watch every antic from my ringside seat, avidly but discreetly, since the whole charade can be closely followed in the huge mirrors that line the walls.

  At that moment, as I choose a fine-spun Armagnac to cap my meal, I know why I spent more than half my adult life here – and why, after an interim of twenty full and happy years in London, I decided to come back and live in Paris again…

  The book that follows describes my lifelong attachment to this bewitching, temperamental, exasperating city and the deep love-hate relationship that binds me to it. It charts my faltering progress in Paris from 1966 onwards as an arts journalist, writer, editor and, briefly, magazine owner and publisher, blending my personal experience of the city’s differing facets and moods with sketches of the memorable people I have known here as well as insights into the secret places in this ancient capital that fascinate me most.

  But my story, my confession, derives essentially from the interaction of person and place, that constant and unpredictable osmosis, and the complex ways each influences the other. Paris undoubtedly formed me, changing my outlook and moulding my reactions: my awareness of history and the arts, my relationships with other people or, perhaps above all, the sense I have of my own identity, which would have been fundamentally different if I had spent those decades elsewhere. Dusk seen from a bridge over the Seine, for instance, is a far cry from the same early evening experienced on the Embankment or
indeed watched from a skyscraper on Lake Shore Drive.

  You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you. You are caught in a constant exchange which alters your thoughts and emotions in unforeseen ways because your relationship, particularly with a place as deeply layered and many-sided as Paris, is not just one relationship: it is every kind of relationship, because the city constantly encircles you, embracing and rejecting you without warning, revealing itself as it reveals you, mirroring you, remembering you, mimicking and mocking you, just as you might mimic and mock its peculiarities and pretensions when you escape elsewhere – as if fleeing a possessive spouse – and enjoy the illusion that for a moment you are beyond its tentacular grasp.

  That relationship also deepens in time, of course, like any meaningful union. The Paris that visitors see as they flit between museums has nothing to do with the street where you have woken up, drunk your coffee and gone your daily round for years. You know the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. Your eye has run over all the façades, taking in the doorways and the courtyards. If you know the stones, you remember many of the staircases since you once ran up them eagerly to see a friend or a lover (or dragged your feet on your way to dentist and accountant). You also recognise scores of windows, grand and mean, on piano nobile or perched like seated dogs on rooftops, where people you once knew moved confidently, waving, calling out to you, even if you no longer see them because they moved away, fell out of touch or died.

  All this, as your months in a city turn to years and the years to decades, binds you to Paris as it can bind you, in my experience at least, to no other city. Paris has been a haven for me, providing a vast historical backdrop against which I have had the stimulus and independence to become as closely as possible the person I wanted to be. In certain ways, as the city seeped into every crevice of my existence, the experience made me more consciously English as I reacted against the change in language, habits and culture that moving to a foreign country entails. The change felt all the more radical since I spoke French almost exclusively and, when I worked in the late 1960s as an arts editor at Le Monde, I began to write my articles and reviews in French. This linguistic volte-face did not last, but the contrast between my adopted city and the Englishness into which I was born has made me question and adjust many of my unconscious assumptions, just as a tree would adjust when transplanted to a different climate and soil if it were to survive at all.

  My admiration for Paris’s architectural beauty and its resonance as an historical, literary and artistic capital has not only been repaid in incalculable volumes of visual and intellectual pleasure. Little by little, and often without my even being aware of it, it has formed the way I look at the whole world. It has trained my eye, sharpened my sense of aesthetic comparison and made the past come vividly alive. Where once I might have settled down happily in a modern metropolis of straight lines and skyscrapers (and no one loves Manhattan more than myself when there on a brief visit), I soon grow ill at ease in places that have no far-reaching history.

  Now I need the tangible reassurance of centuries, to touch a stone or a doorway and think of all the generations that have come before, in wigs and beauty spots, breeches and crinolines. I want to walk along the river banks remembering snatches of Baudelaire, listen to Piaf in a seedy Montmartre bar, see the city from certain angles through Degas’ eyes. And I have: Baudelaire, as well as Apollinaire and Prévert, lend themselves admirably to being quoted by the Seine, and once I espied through a dusty window in a courtyard on rue du Temple a room full of exquisite adolescent ballerinas at practice that looked like a Degas pastel set suddenly into motion.

  Like that dusty window, the past hangs lens-like over my everyday present, distorting and enriching it. I am delighted to know, for instance, that people in the building where I live at present once drew their water from the ancient canopied well that sits in our cobblestone courtyard, and that when it was an inn called ‘A l’enseigne de l’Ours et du Lion’ (‘At the sign of the Bear and the Lion’) in the fifteenth century, travellers used the well-preserved mounting posts to get off their horses, tethering them to the big iron rings still fixed into our walls.

  But of course living in a city is not made up just of enticing historical perspectives. Feast my eyes as I may on noble façades festooned with armorial bearings and triumphal swags overlooking exquisite formal gardens, I have also slept in tenements where the walls were paper-thin and the squatting latrines communal, eaten (often not badly) in the cheapest student canteens and talked (often with profit) to vagrants, rag pickers and rubbish collectors. I have clothed some of them, and once there was a down-and-out of roughly my size whom I used to see regularly in the Marais dressed from head to foot in my cast-offs, winkle-pickers, flared trousers and all, a relationship that cooled when I caught him eyeing the new raincoat I was sporting with undisguised concupiscence.

  I have been at the Paris Ritz, sipping champagne, and on the French dole, queuing up with Arab and other immigrants. If I had to endure being routinely humiliated by petty officials when paying my tax or renewing my residence permit, I could always remind myself that I was a regular guest at the American ambassador’s residence (‘Come more often, stay longer,’ one jovial incumbent told me encouragingly). I have escaped my humble lodgings where neighbours’ bickering drove me to distraction to dine with Sophia Loren or Catherine Deneuve, as well as a serene princess served by footmen in livery. But even if I could I should hate to live continuously in luxury and privilege. The luxuries, the grandeurs, have no meaning without the drudgery and misères of the daily round, and life itself loses its bearings if you are too cut off from the common lot. But this, I have to say, rarely becomes an issue in Paris, because even the most exalted are never that far from the street; and here, in the street, all life is on display, all human conditions visible and every drama played out.

  So the book that follows is above all a book of deep intimacy, its love and gratitude mixed with flashes of sudden rage, like lightning in a summer sky. After all, is there a relationship, with a person or with a city, that does not decline from time to time into irritation, anger or even despair – that makes you long for the stately parks of London, the jolting energy of New York or the easy-going civility of Lisbon?

  I would naturally not pretend that in my short span and limited activity I have had any significant impact on Paris in the way it has had on me. The city is vast and if not eternal it goes back for millennia and may well last for many centuries more. But I believe, presumptuously perhaps but not insincerely, that the Paris the following account evokes will in turn have its effect, and that anyone reading this book will come to see the city from a uniquely personal viewpoint, in a changed light.

  This memoir is structured around the half-dozen addresses I’ve lived at in Paris, from Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the old, royal area of the Marais, which became and remains my favourite quartier. If, at one level, this confession chronicles my precarious progress in Paris from junior editor to magazine publisher, describing my encounters with certain memorable people I have met in the city, it also reaches deeper. Paris’s present can only be understood in terms of its past, intimately embedded in every keystone of every archway of its ancient centre. So the memoir also delves into various historical strata, some a few decades old, others reaching back to the licentiousness of the pre-Revolutionary Palais-Royal or even the Romans when they built the Arènes de Lutèce, one of the city’s most evocative, hidden spaces. It includes portraits of Parisians I knew well, including the writer Michel Leiris, the painter Jean Dubuffet or photographers like Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and sketches of others passing through the city, from Graham Greene and Marlene Dietrich to Sonia Orwell, David Hockney and Jasper Johns. There are also regular tributes to the heroes I associate with Paris, the patron saints that I kept in mind above all when the going got tough, whether Victor Hugo and Degas, or Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and Alber
to Giacometti.

  My story is neither a paean of praise nor a critique of the City of Lights, but one writer’s record of an intimacy shared over half a century and a fascination with a culture so fine it illuminates and transcends the present. From my present perspective that time now seems either to have flashed by in a brief jumble of images and sensations, or to stretch out in countless, meandering directions. There were peaks and troughs, as well of course as infinite longueurs – that mass of cloudy, forgotten hours that makes up so much of every human life.

  But I wanted to play it all back to see what shape it would take once written down. I wanted to play it back, sometimes fast-forwarding, sometimes pausing to explore half-remembered faces, feelings and events, to find out how things crystallised, to unearth what really remained.

  Michael Peppiatt

  Paris, May 2018

  PART ONE

  (1966–69)

  1

  Abroad! Abroad!

  ‘Are you Michael Peppiatt?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, cautiously.

  The voice on the other end of the telephone is guttural, almost comically so, as if someone were faking an exaggeratedly heavy, Germanic accent.

  ‘Are you really Michael Peppiatt?’

  ‘Yes, I really am,’ I tell him. ‘I’m Michael Peppiatt.’

  I can’t think of anything more convincing to say. But in my own mind a doubt has already crept in. The name sounds made up, even a bit preposterous, like a name in a play. What was it, anyway? French? Anglo-Norman?

  ‘I am delighted to meet the real Michael Peppiatt at last,’ the voice continues. ‘The real Michael Peppiatt.’

  This is getting annoying. I quickly run through the people I know who might go in for a telephone prank like this, then I realise, regretfully, that they’re all too old now. I’m just about to put the receiver down with a sharp, sarcastic remark when the voice explains that this call concerns the will of a relative, a first cousin once removed I’ve never heard of, who has died intestate in Switzerland. The voice asks me to name several closer relations of mine, including my paternal grandmother, born in Dornach, a small town near Mulhouse, in 1882. I comply and this appears to tick the right box, since the voice then reveals itself as belonging to a lawyer in Zurich and confides in me that I am due to receive an inheritance. By the time the overall amount has been divided amongst all the rightful heirs, the voice continues, the sum will not be ‘princely’, indeed it will be modest and subject to fees and taxes.