More or less, I thus inherited Paris. The cards he jotted on are gone, but I still remember landmarks like a seaman who has seen, briefly and just once, a secret map. Curtained restaurants. Bourgeois streets. The nightclub he liked that has long since closed — it had violinists in dinner jackets and a bar of generous dimensions where after eleven-thirty girls who had failed to find a client for the evening would show up, girls like those on the train in Maupassant’s story, of whom the old peasant woman says, “They are sluts who are off to that cursed place, Paris.”
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 …