Across the river to the rectangular, banklike hotel, the Palais d’Orsay with the no-longer-used station just beside it. It was there I often stayed. There was a restaurant, perhaps a bar. The hotel is no more, but by a happy chance the building still stands, as part of a museum, and is thus preserved without. The lobby has disappeared for me, and the hallways, but the large windows in the rooms I still see clearly and the long curtains sailing inwards as a storm, with terrifying thunder and bright electric flashes, came across the city one afternoon like disaster or the outbreak of war. The sky became dark. The curtains blew wildly and rain prickled us, sacred and unforgettable.
I loved you very much, that is to say, often and a great deal. Your slender back, leaning forward in the bath, your immense femaleness. I never met your parents, of course — just as well — though we did meet the mother and sister of one of your wealthy suitors, and the baron who was another, and eventually, when he entered your life, your husband. That was much later. You revealed a new world to me, something called the Old World: style, sensuality, and betrayal, in the end no one of them less precious than another.
To write of someone thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up. I suppose this is true of experience as well — in describing a world you extinguish it — and in a book of recollection much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again.
There remains, though, in the case of those years in the movies, a kind of silky pollen that clings to the fingertips and brings back what was once pleasurable — too pleasurable, perhaps — the lights dancing on dark water as in the old prints, the sound of voices, laughter, music, all faint, alluring, far off.
DÎNERS EN VILLE
IN MANHATTAN, in the lower right-hand corner, I had found a place in which to write, a room near the river, within sight of the cathedral piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was on Peck Slip, a broad street near the fish market, strewn with trash and ripped wood by the time I arrived each morning, but quiet with the work of the day by then over. I wrote in this room with its bare wooden floor and ruined sills for a year — it was 1958—struggling with pages that turned bad overnight.
I was thirty-three years old and knew no other writers. There were some artists in the neighborhood living in lofts with girlfriends or wives, and around the corner, up dank stairs smelling of urine and landings heaped with rubbish and torn mattresses, was a dedicated sculptor, Mark di Suvero. He had the entire floor. The windows were unwashed and a few bare bulbs provided light. Sculpture of ambitious scale stood here and there. In one corner, up near the metal ceiling, was a bed mounted on four tall columns. It was warmer up there, he explained, and you couldn’t, if you were tired, just casually flop down. Also there was nothing devious about venery — you had to help her up, there was full complicity. Nearby was the potbellied stove, which supplied heat and on which, comrade-like, we sometimes cooked dinner, fish usually — he swept the store downstairs in return for food — sautéed with onions.
Di Suvero had been, glamorously I thought, born in Shanghai, the son of a diplomat, and the family had lived there until just before the war. There was the hint of aristocratic background, a palazzo in Venice that unfortunately they no longer owned.
“It was sold?”
“The Fascists,” he calmly replied.
He had a saint’s face, lean with a blond beard and blondish hair, “so handsome and understanding,” a museum woman explained, and he lived as a young animal lives, above the impurity of his surroundings, working only — he was a good carpenter — for enough money to get by; the rest of his time he kept for himself. We walked the streets after dark searching for the discarded things, barrels, scorched beams, rusted chains, that his sculpture was made of. The pieces had lofty titles, Orpheus and Eurydice, bent nails and splintered boards. I was not in a position to recognize their parentage in constructions like Picasso’s Mandoline et Clarinette of 1913, unpainted scraps stuck together, or Violin, exploded and crude, and they were far more abstract, but I liked to talk to di Suvero. I was certain of his authenticity, probably because I felt I had none myself. I was from the suburbs; I had a wife, children, the entire manifest. Even in the city I found it hard to believe I was working on anything of interest. Di Suvero was the opposite. Unburdened and inspired he could do as he liked, see no one, work until dawn. His face remains before me, the face of that year, energetic and pure.
Over New Year’s I was away for a few weeks and when I returned he was not there. His door was locked. In the evening the windows were dark.
There had been an accident, I learned. He was in Roosevelt Hospital, badly hurt. It had happened in an elevator, he’d somehow been crushed. They had him on a cot, face down, his forehead supported by a canvas strap and he could see a visitor by means of a small mirror on the floor. He was paralyzed from the waist down. All the youth and pride. It was like going to visit the gravely wounded.
When I came into the room I did not notice the mirror. Then I saw his eyes which were waiting for me in it. One could see the violence of the injury in his eyes — the whites were gone, they were beet red from hemorrhage. His spine had been broken but not his will. He had vowed that no matter what the doctors said, he would walk again. He talked about a major architectural competition he was planning to enter, he had even begun building a model.
In another hospital on the other side of town my father was dying. It was months before I saw di Suvero again. His legs in steel braces, unsteady, threatening to fall, he nevertheless managed to come to the Peck Slip room which I was just giving up. The book I had been writing was finished. The Arm of Flesh, it was called. I was confident of its title. Two women in cocktail dresses, brittle, chatting women, were having a drink with me to celebrate. Their talk flowed around a restrained di Suvero. I had the impression his opinion of me was being revised.
I did not see him again. I heard about him occasionally. His work was now in museums; he had become unpredictable and angry. On a panel at the Guggenheim he had suddenly gone wild, cursing the audience, crying, and threatening. Perhaps it was the result of painkillers, narcotics; he broke up the presentation. I thought of the beautiful god he had been. There are men who feel they are owed nothing. He exemplified that so completely. His self-denial encouraged me.
He had given me a book of Rilke’s poems in which there was one, “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” that seemed to have been written for me to read it. The poem described, in a restrained way, a beautiful statue in what I remember as the quiet green of a park, the perfect limbs, the grace. It came within a moment of going on too long until its final surprising line which was simply, You must change your life.
—
It was a difficult process, the changing. Only a few people offered any encouragement, even unknowingly. Kenneth Littauer was one. Littauer and Wilkinson was the firm, its name printed on the frosted-glass door. Down on the street were clothing stores and traffic. White-haired by the time I knew him, a former editor like his partner, Littauer knew France well. He spoke French perfectly, at least inside the door of the St.-Denis, a small restaurant in the East Fifties that he favored, where, teeth blackened from his pipe, he chatted in slang with the headwaiter. He wanted to se débarbouiller, he said, to wash up. “Oui, mon colonel.”