Outwardly, Wilfrid was satisfied. ‘These assemblies are like authors, who so seldom know the effect they have, profound or negligible. Listening, not least to myself, I remembered an epigram ascribed, with whatever likelihood, to the unfortunate Pétain, that a certain individual knew everything, but that was all he did know. I would not entrust my fortunes to Herr Flake if we were stranded on the Great Barrier Reef.’
Disturbed, I thought again of England, an obstinate energy that had sailed cockleshell ships down wind to the edge of the world, scattered banks and language like acorns, hauled cathedrals into the sky. Hegel, so deplored by Father, had condemned the English as unattracted to abstract principles. High praise.
No Inner Emigration for me, no Heimat. Yet I could not forget an incident at the Conference. Wilfrid had, with his habitual solemnity, introduced me as his ‘learned confederate’, to a Herr Felder, very flabby, very dull. I was reserved, probably curt, in haste to escape. Next day, in Le Figaro’s Conference leader, I was infuriated to read that Josef Felder had recklessly defied the Stuttgart SS and, in the Reichstag, denounced the 1933 Enabling Bill, which established the dictatorship.
Wilfrid’s solicitude, I thought, must now be disguising some impatience, and he could have felt that, in rejecting Felder, I had missed an opportunity most essential to my development. He himself, in the busy Conference aftermath, was often too fatigued to do more than listen to music, and, with him, I believed that he shared Father’s taste not only for achievement but for failure. Uncertain of my future, my position, I overdid efforts to amuse him with stories and gossip and must have irritated him, though he only showed reticent gratitude for permission to hear my exceptional reminiscences. Nevertheless, what had for so long seemed affectionate irony, now, I feared, was faintly hostile sarcasm. We had fewer walks, Marc-Henri, too obviously Lisette’s favourite, may have noted my unease. ‘I am a person.’ He spoke as if reminding me of the universe.
One morning, I was talking to Wilfrid. Gently disengaging, he left the room to find a book and did not return for three weeks, taking Marc-Henri with him. I had apprehension of an emptied stage, unseen hands preparing a new set, actors rebuilding their personalities, rehearsing another cryptic vaudeville.
Alone in the apartment, I was, with disquiet, more aware of its symmetry: books, paintings, flowers arranged in perfect lines, absolute balance, as if in an ideal empyreum in which I could only disappoint.
Simultaneously, life was raging: upheavals with Suzie, embryo poem with Falls and Ascents. Desiring ultimate simplicities, I was stranded in her half-surrenders, sudden retreats, occasional anger, the behaviour, I judged, to be expected from the young and powerful. It was the impact of what Jünger called being drunk without wine and, besotted, I was as uncertain as I had been in childhood, wondering which was more real, my Turret world, or that of adults, with its puzzles and initiations.
We continued our morning strolls, afternoon cafés, less often by night. Any move, however slight, was a move towards victory or defeat. Outside a small bistro, she grabbed my hand and put it to her cheek, a landmark in a week of stratagems and non-sequiturs. ‘Young Berserker!’ She almost sang it, grimacing, head tilted back: small peaked cap, dark glasses, her knowledge of the North still rudimentary: elks, Northern Lights, Lapland forests, all clustered in a single movie-shot. She called me Viking Lars, as if I had been hacked from an iceberg, from a country swarming with beasts elsewhere extinct, where lust-ridden heiresses swung themselves over torrid grooms and pastors galloped into hell. A North unnecessary as St Helena, fugitives like myself strong but pitiable mastiffs roaming Paris, the world’s centre.
Yet we were in an urgent, throbbing, moment, a perpetual ‘Is’. I attempted to entertain her with Forest Uncle, Margarita-Who-Grieves, huge winter suns over the Sound, bows cutting water as summer folk sailed to ‘Ogygia’. I boasted of Count Pahlen, enthused more energetically about Gulf Wind with its scraps of salt, pine, sand, and attempted to excite her by descriptions of wild geese soaring for the moon, the Lake sprinkled with fancy, the girl running, but, in stagy patience, she was silent. Yet, never breathless for adventure, she saw other things and shrank from them behind her mimes, spurts of ribaldry, her dances. War and Occupation remained unmentionable. She wished to forget.
I had my own preoccupations – commissars’ eyes like straps, like hooks, Meinnenberg, scrap-heap disregarded by history but surfacing in dreams. That I could have led partisans, sabotaged a train, was as unlikely as Wilfrid stoning a cat, Trilling betraying friends to McCarthy or Primo Levi choosing to forget, but Let’s cancelled misgivings, regrets, indecisions, and concern with the illusion of self, the non-existence of evil. With her, clichés were original, action not despicable but trite. Not violence, not news, not slogans, but windows, lamps, advertisements gleamed with possibility, like souls. Air sparkled, parks glittered, walls had spirit, the dyed hair was thrillingly appropriate. When our hands met, they dispersed all else. Only the nebulous was solid. Images flashed hysterically, the dull tree actually ashine with Iduna’s apples as if freshly risen from the Underworld: a cracked mirror was a vista into myth, a fountain was the exuberant surge of existence, thoughts worthy of Frodi the Unthinking and which, if spoken, would have provoked her mockery, make her the elder, more determined, always in command.
Freed from Conference jargon, words hitherto colourless – table, jug, tile – were repolished. Light noosed the Dôme, silver rippled the Seine, woods were Corots, all goading me towards less talk, more writing, but yet again, when pen touched paper, fragmentary vision collapsed.
However, in side streets, recesses, buses, Suzie was irresistible, caustic, joking, scowling at passers-by, pulling me into a shop, never buying. Sometimes she sent a postcard, often with an obscene picture, Lisette disapproving, though usually only to apologize for failing a date – ‘studio business’ – or cancelling another with less explanation. In brisk switches of mood, we were, and were not, like the gods. Whether or not she used drugs I never cared to ask. Wary of Lisette, she never rang.
Autumn was near, the year sagging, streaking trees with gold, emptying the parks of afternoon children. The news was stiff with portents, as though the Conference had never been. Words had fallen like snowflakes and, like snowflakes, died. An exiled Lithuanian poet, Conference delegate, was found hanged in the Bois; Americans, often black, complained of being trailed by the CIA; we read of a father kept locked in a garden cage.
As if affected by lower skies, capricious suns, Suzie became less animated. ‘I’m a drying pond, Lars. Eggshell in a flood.’ Sexual politics were corrupting the studios, vilifying or obstructing talent. A last-minute story change had wrecked a promise, Gabin had reneged, a modelling contract had been returned, unsigned.
One evening she abruptly decided we should ‘go club’ in a drab Left Bank subterranean hideaway. We arrived during in an Italian movie, a jumble of discordant sequences without clear narrative. A child was disembowelled by hooded women, live goldfish gnawed by naked revellers, gorillas sparred in boxing gloves, a swastika slowly straightened into the Cross of Lorraine, a dance was staged like flamingo mating-habits, echo of a Rathaus ball, the Duce’s bald head peeled to a skull, perhaps fulfilling the programme’s promise to illustrate the Metaphysical Absurd, the Intricacies of Nothing, the Folly of Purpose. Soughs of rapture shook an audience in which the fashionable, the workaday and pin-table loungers awash with plonk sat in unsteady mass. Once a voice breathed ‘Now’, primed for the ghoulish as a knife hovered before a flower transforming to a delicate, adolescent throat. Another conference, also dedicated, but to what?