When I left at last and saw, on the quai, with the cars rushing by, a typically French beauty poster—this one for Lancaster sun cream: a perfect girl’s bottom, bare and in full color, five times normal scale, with a gold sheen in the summer light—I was pathetically grateful for the sight of something humanly beautiful, curved and soft to the eye. French civilization is all the more a miracle, given the obstacles the French put in its way.
The curious thing about all of Mitterrand’s grands projets—the Bastille Opera, the pyramid of the Louvre, above all, this library—is that though they are big, they don’t feel big. They don’t feel big the way the dinosaur museum feels big, the way the Parisian monuments of the last century still do, even when those old monuments are actually smaller than the new ones. The new grands projets don’t feel big so much as claustrophobic and confusing and stifling—emotionally trivial, small. The grands projets of the last century were either the biggest of their kind or else a kind unto themselves. The Eiffel Tower maintains its aura of height partly because it really is tall and big and partly because there is still nothing like it anywhere else. (The radio masts and post office towers and skyscrapers that have been built since and that in some ways resemble it really don’t, since its form is uniquely feminine—not phallus into sky, but skirt into bodice into long throat.) The pyramid of the Louvre, though, looks like a shopping center, a mall, because that kind of Plexiglas and aluminum architecture has been done so much bigger elsewhere.
There is here a fundamental lesson from a thing, a leqons des choses. Architecture at its most successful passes from stuff (bricks and mortar and metal) through things (buildings) all the way to thats, single unforgettable objects, instantly recognizable, the thumbprints of the world. Their closed, permanent, pyramid-like thatness is its glory. Paris has perhaps more thats—the tower, the Louvre, the arch, the palace—than any city in the world, a greater concentration of distinctive monuments. Yet despite its best efforts, the grands projets fail to achieve the requisite thatness. They fail because of their comparative smallness, of course, when compared with other things in our mental library, but also because they lack something else, a kind of confidence in the things they enclose. The last thing the new Opera makes you think of is music; the last thing the new library makes you think of is books. The paleontology museum is at least a semi-that, so filled with stuff that has been dignified into things, animal dust made hard and significant, that it becomes a that by virtue of the immensity of the thingness it encloses. The new library, the Bibliotheque National, isn’t even a thing, much less a that. It evokes, after you have experienced it, merely a huh? and, like all failed monuments, in the end resolves in memory merely into a vast and barren and echoing Why?
I realized this year that the appeal of jazz in France, and the reason for its holding a place so much higher in the French estimation than in America, where it remains a cult enthusiasm, is the exact equivalent of the American appreciation of impressionism (which held, and to a degree—look at the way the pictures are shown at the Musee d’Orsay!—still holds a much higher place in the American estimation than in the French one).
Jazz, like impressionism, gives dignity to comfort. Resting in an apparently artless myth of bourgeois pleasure—Gershwin and Kern melodies play the same role for the great jazzmen that the outdoor cafés in Argenteuil played for Renoir and Monet—jazz, like high impressionism, reaffirms the simple, physical basis of powerful emotion and removes it to a plane of personal expression that we recognize as art; it gives us a license to take pleasure in what really provides our pleasures. You play “All the Things You Are” and you are playing the beautiful tune, and you are playing more than the beautiful tune, in the same way that Manet is painting just the asparagus and more than the asparagus without venturing into asparagus symbols or the grand manner of the asparagus. But the tune is there, even if the more pretentious kind of jazz critic doesn’t like to admit it, just as the asparagus is there, even if the more pretentious kind of art critic doesn’t like to admit it. A Bill Evans playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” like Manet painting a lemon, is a stuff into things—into more than things, all the way into thats.
In every period, every century, there is one art form or another that is able to combine simple affirmation of physical pleasure with a quality of plaintive longing, and this becomes the international art form of the time. Living abroad convinces you that just as French painting was the event of the nineteenth century and Italian painting of the fifteenth—the one universal language—American popular music is the cultural event of our time. It is the one common language, the source of the deepest emotions and the most ordinary ones too. The taxi driver hums the riff from “Hotel California,” and the singer Johnny Hallyday, simply by impersonating Elvis, in some decent sense inhabits Elvis (just as Childe Hassam, impersonating Monet, at some decent level inhabited him too). Every epoch has an art form into which all the energies and faiths and beliefs and creative unselfconsciousness flows. What makes them matter is their ability not to be big but to be small meaningfully, to be little largely, to be grandly, or intensely, diminutive.
The best lesson I have learned from a thing this year, perhaps in all my time in Paris, occurred on another afternoon this spring. I was sitting on the bench under the metal and glass porte-cochere at the playground at the Luxembourg Gardens, watching Luke climb up the sliding board, the “toboggan,” the wrong way—glancing warily over his shoulder for the surveillant to whistle him down—when I looked down at the plastic-cupped café creme that I had bought at the little entrance shed a few moments before. About to unwrap the sugar cube, I saw that the little paper wrapping had a picture of the poet Mallarme on it—an odd, Benday-dot, unintentionally Lichtenstein-like portrait of him—while on the two other faces of the sugar cube there were quotes from his poems (“Et finisse I’echo par les celestes soirs, Extase des regards scintillements des nimbes!”) and a brief, summary life (“LIBERTE SANS MESURE: STEPHANE MALLARME, POETE 1842-1898”). The fourth face just had the name of the sugar company, Begin Say. The sugarcane had not only become a sugar cube, like the one in the Deyrolle poster, but been wrapped in a picture of a poet. I saved it to keep on my desk in my writing room and for once drank my coffee unsweetened. A lesson from a thing, and thrown in for the price of the coffee too.
The Rookie
I don’t really remember how we first thought of the Rookie. I think it may have been right after I saw Luke, who had just turned three, playing with a soccer ball in the Luxembourg Gardens. It wasn’t just the kicking that scared me but a kind of nonchalant bend-of-the-body European thing he did as he rose to meet the ball with his head. Next, he would be wearing those terrible shorts and bouncing the ball from foot to foot, improving his “skills.” He had been born in New York, but he had no memory of it. Paris is the only home he knows. (Or, as he explained to a friend, in the third person he occasionally favors, like Bo Jackson or General de Gaulle, “He was born in New York, but then he moved to Paris and had a happy life.”)