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On a Flying Fish Paris was gray as most people who've spent any time there remember it. It was always a thrill nonetheless to return to the magic of its details. Paris was an aphrodisiac as was its absence, and now I longed for the poetic loneliness I knew here. Each time I glided in - I wanted to say rumbled but those new fast trains didn't really do that - I've re-experienced the excitement of that first arrival at Gare du Nord. Trains, pure and simple, excite the soul. They escort you into the heart of town, dump you at the curb of local dailiness, and magically transform you, the traveler, in seconds into an anonymous pedestrian, a credible and unquestionable part of the cityscape. Materializing, you appear like you'd never been away, like you've been living there for your whole life. The girl and I headed across Boulevard Diderot instinctually aiming for a couple of warm pains au chocolat in a boulangerie we knew, as if we'd planned it from the start. She brushed the flakes of pate feuilletée off my chin and we walked on, arm-in-arm. Whereas Frankfurt had no tolerance for, and New York was perfectly indifferent to, Paris seemed to thrive on public affection. A city of caresses. You could get scolded for almost anything else in Paris, like walking on the grass or not keeping to the right, but embracing another human in the public domain was sacrosanct. Being in love is the most efficient way of negotiating the French capital. And all Parisian attitudes begin with the lips. Not that the RER line toward the Val de Chevreuse where the girl's family resided inspired any romance, but, still, the smells and the bits of re-visited trim on the buildings charmed us the way it had three years earlier, and we translated this delight into our own private love affair. We walked along in a happy drunken way. Paris did that to you. The red tile letters of the mid-town stop almost connected with the name of the capital in his manuscript. It wasn't quite the same but I made the connection. We sat there holding hands in that commuter-line funk, the smell of grinding gears and stale water, not the same quaint stench of urine as in the Metro stations above,, and I suddenly wanted to get out by myself into the streets. I wanted to get back my legs and lungs and feel the city around me and play Sartre or Miller. The repressed artist was waking. The dreaming lit major turned editor. Anaîs Nin’s journal came to mind and Eugene Jolas’ good magazine. "Hon, please, I'll meet you later. I'll be back by dinner. Please. I'm sorry. I know it's not ... I know, but..." "Oh not now," she pleaded. She knew these egotistical bolts. I was sorry I said again as I rose and backed away up the stained steps, dying to sit alone, jumping over a patch of vomit. Tormented, she dragged our valise onto the rubber-wheeled train and sped off. Almost running up the steps, I surfaced near the Tour Saint Jacques and crossed the Seine. At mid point on the Petit Pont I stopped to watch two peniches thread under the bridges in opposite directions, and it felt like I was orchestrating the world. Notre Dame was unchanged except for the scaffolding. A loud procession of gray, CRS police buses with grilled windows and water canons sped along the quai heading toward a manif. Paris. Let them strike. At the end of the bridge I hesitated. Shakespeare & Company was just to my left on the rue de la Bûcherie. I hadn't been there in years and although I'd been told that the forces that made pages yellow and bindings crack and was frequented now by all sorts of non-literary grubs, I still romanticized about that first winter a dozen years earlier when I first set foot in both the shop and Paris. I had walked in the door under a sign that read: "The Bookstore Henry Miller calls a Wonderland of Books." White-bearded George Whitman was wearing a worn-thin crushed velvet suit, and was eating from a burnt casserole chunks of a Welsh rarebit he had prepared on a hotplate above the store. He was sputtering with cheesy breath a story about Durrell and Korfu. Invited up the back stairs, I had wandered into his vermilion den, which was lined from ceiling to floor on all sides with good books. My eye jumped from binding to binding, an early edition of Ulysses, Eliot's Four Quartet... George, carrying the Welsh rarebit, was now flanked by two young girls, poets they said, who proceeded to tidy his wild beard, removing the bits of cheese, and placed his plastic tumbler of Grand Marnier in his bony hand. The three of them sat on his crumpled bed, which was supported in the corners with equal heights of lesser works and damaged editions. The image of George sucking thick slices of Danish butter off a dull knife has never faded, a culinary habit that some say spoke for his libidinous fortitude. Late in life he bore an heir. A week later I gave a reading of my own poems, which suffered from the juvenile confessions that characteriwed the period. Spill it and you were a poet. That was back when I was writing for myself, when I still worried about having something to say. I remember vividly coming back that next Monday and reading my name on the door. Embarassed by that icon of letters which George had written in magic marker, I struggled with it for several minutes and felt like vomiting or disappearing into an alley in the Latin Quarter. How could those stick figures up there on the door mean me? Why was I there, and why would anyone show up. Finally, I took my place in front of a woolly group of faces, crouched on a rug that bred acarions, cleared my throat, and became a poet. At least for the night. I decided to walk past but not enter; there was someplace else, more urgent, that I wanted to visit and I only had a few hours. As I approached the rue de la Bücherie it became evident that something had changed. The facade was scorched. There had been a fire, someone outside said, and the black smoke stains on the wall beneath the gutted first floor window confirmed it. Arson, they said, most certainly, a neurotic Brit who wrote sestinas and hated his father. Others said it was a street performer, a fire eater, who had blown up a gas bottle. Five thousand rare volumes and signed first editions went up in flames. The burning of books, it had an evil ring to it. Bad kitsch. I stuck my head further into the dark of the shop and there was George unchanged, ranting with two tall cans of pesticide and an iced tea in a chipped mug. Even the fire hadn't succeeded in fumigating the crawling population. He looked up and spoke like he recognized me; there was no reason why he should have. "I have a little mission to do. Could you sit here at the desk. The cash box is underneath. I'll be back soon." And he dashed out before I could say a word. Voila, a total stranger, I was sitting at the cockpit of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. A momentary book man. "How much is this," a Greek exchange student asked, showing me a tattered paperback edition of William Styron's Sophie's Choice. I recognized the accent. I laughed. "I haven't got a clue. How about ten francs?" "Do you have Ashbery's Reflections in a Convex Mirror?" "Yeah, at home," I joked. "Couldn't tell you, George just stepped out. Look in poetry." Ten years earlier it had been behind the desk to the left. Now, after the fire, who knew. It felt good to get out of the smell of burnt books and DDT. I turned left on the rue St. Jacques, right at the Sorbonne, crossed Boulevard St. Michel, and continued past the Odeon theater and that little hotel where Beckett’s English publisher stayed, and the back of the Luxembourg Gardens. Then a left and a right and I was on the rue Vavin, a stone's throw from Montparnasse, although I never really knew how far I could throw a stone. I went directly to the cemetery while the light was still strong and the gates were unlocked. I turned left out of habit and almost immediately was approached by a Japanese student with thick glasses. He showed me his student card, Miya Moto, was his name. Philosophy major at Kyoto. "Jo Po Soto," I understood him to say. For several minutes we played imprecise charades. I didn't know of any Japanese celebrities buried in Montparnasse. I wanted to be alone, but he looked so earnest and solitary and I had Beckett on my lind and the idea of sharing such incomprehension with a Japanese stranger in Paris spoke directly to the human condition. So we continued. Together, we asked the guardian for Jo Po So and the squarish man with a dangling Gitane shrugged, lifting the straps of his faded blue work smock. "Peut-être, la bas." He pointed toward the other gate. We walked along chatting in fragments, passing through narrow corridors which were marked with marble blocks and dead flowers, surveyed suspiciously by a macabre pack of iridescent cats. We reached the gate. Nothing. Let’s hang ourselves, I suggested. "Jo Po Soto!" he yelled with intense joy; we had found him. I looked down at the remarkably plain grave and read the name: Jean Paul Sartre. He knelt at the grave and ran his finger into the grooves of the stone inscription. Miya proceeded to snap far too many photos than any reasonable human would have thought necessary. Then, he gestured for me to take one of him flanking the headstone. He lay down, prone, side by side with the great existential thinker. I got them both in the same frame and in the viewfinder was struck by the modesty of the grave. It seemed perfect. Tiny bits of paper, notes from fans and worshippers to their fallen hero were stuck into the cracks of stone like at the Wailing Wall. The few, truly great ones, I thought, didn't need flashy reminders of having existed. Here was Sartre as eloquently dead as he had been alive. "Jo Po Soto," Miya Moto repeated in tenderness, almost purring, as he continued on his tour of dead thinkers. "Ji Mo Son," he wanted now. I wasn't catching on, and he repeated and then added "Da Tors." I shrugged, and it wasn't until long after we had shaken hands and he had walked away, and I had bowed and said sayonara, pleased to use 50% of my Japanese vocabulary in its appropriate linguistic context, that it dawned on me. He wanted Jim Morrison of The Doors. The former rock star and cult figure had died in Paris in '73 failing to obtain the obscurity he sought. Miya was in the wrong cemetery and I hoped he'd find his way across town to Père Lachaise. I walked past the grave of Yves Simon, an insurance man that no one visited except his last remaining sister. Yup, we were in this together. Attracted by the emptiness of an appealing-looking bench, I spotted a plump man in a handsome but crumpled double-breasted suit toting a book bag from City Lights. His white shirt-tail had come untucked and his tie hung askew as he bent over a plain, fresh grave. His suit jacket bulged at the breasts and side pockets and he gave the impression of an over-stuffed doll. I looked away. Vaguely, I remembered sitting in the past on this same stone bench and in a gesture that I knew religiously, I finally withdrew the frayed manuscript from my shoulder bag. This is where I wanted to be. On a bench alone in Montparnasse with these messy pages. The urge like this only came at special moments, in pangs, in the volcanic repetition of a strange sort of instinct, reserved unfortunately for only a certain tribe which you’re never really sure you belong to. To ignore the urge to create, or worse, to watch it fade away into oblivion was as sad as death itself. Creation was never the same twice, and yet something about it was always identical. The stout man in the crumpled suit bent to a crouch and I looked up to watch him do his task dutifully. There was elegance to him although even from that short distance I could see that his thin shoes were cracking and had worn unevenly to the outside from the waddling of his weight and lugging of heavy books. His rather good but out-of-mode English suit suffered from over-stuffed breast pockets and had lost its original form. At once he seemed both harried and in possession of all the world's time. With the conviction of reverence, agnostic if any, he removed one by one the pretty flowers and bunches of fallen petals from the stone bed. He slid away the white blossoms that obscured the dead but not forgotten author's name. It wasn't a prayer; he was just mumbling to a friend. "Sam, you never wanted flowers." I gripped a pencil. The cold of the stone began to creep inside me. ©David Applefield, 2004 Reviews by Marc Heberden, Paul McNally, Jon Frosch & Joanna Hagger, Matt Langione |
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