Algren at Sea Page 9

  When the clocks of St. Denis cried each to each—

  tique-tonne!

  tique-tonne!

  A light rain (she told me)

  Brings men to a room

  A hard one keeps them home.

  She did not say each drop of rain

  Is a drop of regret on the Rue Tiquetonne.

  For, buyer of peaches or buyer of flesh

  You pay up your money and spit out the pit.

  Peaches and girls both grow a light down

  You don’t touch either one without money down

  What you don’t have in money you save in regret—

  Maybe peaches are better. You can spit out the stone.

  Seller of peaches or seller of flesh

  Wish each other in Hell, then cheat on the weight.

  The stair smells of soap and wine and old leather

  That men climb to feel their deaths with pleasure—

  Death costing little in such weather.

  These are small sad thoughts of a Paris street

  Where coiffures are costly though death comes cheap.

  Yet above a bed on the Rue Tiquetonne

  Two lamps keep burning each to each.

  Trapped in a network of night-leaves, a moon of the night-trees kept trying to rise. Between the bridges of Paris, both banks of the river, amber lamps were tethered deep in the waters.

  Through green-gray glimpses of the moon, couples strolled below the lamps. Till an evening cruiser white with light moved noiselessly downriver. The people aboard it looked out, through glass walls, at the lovers strolling. Some waved.

  Their white boat severed the tethers of light but the green moon of the night-trees could not get free. The lovers didn’t wave back.

  But all the lamps of Paris began of a sudden to burn too bright. As if with desires too strong for themselves; desires that could not last the night.

  Leaving the waters darker and deeper than before.

  I first saw the city of Paris from the top floor of a five-story tenement overlooking a street called the Rue Bûcherie. Notre-Dame’s heights were just out of reach. Behind its gray spires the white light of Paris fell.

  All day long.

  One morning rain kept making ready yet did not fall. The traffic that war had halted was picking up below. Cheap music came up from a jukebox café where Algerians met. Postmen and housewives and shopgirls and children, old men and old women and drunks moved along as though each felt his own life to be just beginning.

  It was a time of beginnings.

  All of my friends in that city were making beginnings.

  My friends were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Cau, Boris and Michele Vian, Juliette Greco, Mouloudji, and Olga and Jacques Bost.

  Of these the most memorable face is that of Greco. She was then under twenty and had come to the cafés of Saint-Germain-de-Près from imprisonment.

  Hers was a face as old as time and as young as herself. She had come to the cafés wearing her hair as black as a shroud to her shoulders. A face of great strength and no pretense, in a girl whose manner was made of grief.

  Yet the small songs she sang in a voice none too good, when the lights began to come on in the night cafés, were often lighthearted. In her voice, also, there was no pretense. Greco was then a woman who had been made by times in which there had been no hours to spare to pretension. So she sang gravely, without change of expression till a song was done. Then she smiled.

  She smiled. And the lights in the room came up a little.

  That was Greco in 1949.

  Mouloudji. Who was he? Like Greco, he emerged from the kind of winter that war makes upon children, one when the only heat in Paris was that of the café. Sartre, sitting with others, saw the Arab face looking in. It was plain enough, in that long face, that the boy did not have the money to come inside. Sartre invited him in. Mouloudji began to sit among Existentialists as a kind of mascot; whose payment was a cup of coffee and a croissant.

  He was the son of a French mother who had lost her mind, and an Arabian father who peddled on the streets. He could barely read and write. So he listened, instead, to the makers of books around him. In the spring that followed that winter he said suddenly, “I too will write a story.”

  “About what, Mouloudji?” someone asked.

  “The Mexican disease.”

  “What is the Mexican disease, Mouloudji?”

  “Death.”

  “But death is not a disease. And is common to all. Why Mexican?”

  Mouloudji had a logic all his own. The book The Mexican Disease proved a sound artistic success. He followed this with Death in Barbary, a novel of equal originality. Then he lost interest in writing and began to paint.

  His painting, like his writing, was primitive but striking. Mouloudji had some direct source to the wellsprings of man’s being; which ignored problems of technique. Sartre’s group realized he was a painter of talent. Yet, when he had painted well, he put that aside also.

  Mouloudji began to sing in the cafés, and as in writing and painting, immediately drew a small public to himself. He sang his own tales of the streets of Paris.

  The versatility of Boris Vian was not the spontaneous reaction of Mouloudji, but an advised act. Vian was an intellectual, bright but shallow, who conducted a band devoted to American jazz; and who also wrote thrillers, after James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane, under an American name. He had great success with I’ll Spit on Your Grave, and then turned out a small biographical novel of his own childhood. This book had purity and simplicity, and no success at all. With its publication Vian learned that in France, as here, the fast applause goes to the writer who performs publicly rather than to the one who merely stays home and writes.

  While Vian’s interest in American jazz appeared to derive from its facility, the interest of Michele Vian derived from the emotion behind the music. She was “The Golden Zazu” of whom Mme. de Beauvoir once commented simply, “The Zazu cares for people.”

  Cau was a student who had come to Sartre without being sent for. He ran Sartre’s errands, de Beauvoir’s errands, my errands, The Zazu’s errands and Boris Vian’s errands. I don’t know who ran Bost’s errands.

  Cau liked running errands. If nobody had one to send him on, someone would think one up and tell him to take his time coming back.

  The manner of Cau at this time was precisely as though he were rehearsing for a part in Dickens. I never saw him without hearing someone say, “Oh, I am ‘umble, Master Copperfield. “

  Sartre’s surest friend was Jacques Laurent Bost. Bost had been wounded in the defeat of France and had written Le Dernier de métiers, a foot-soldier’s story of France’s defeat that remains one of the most genuine literary works to come out of World War II.

  Had I passed Sartre on the street as a stranger, I would have taken him for a cheerful tradesman, cheerfully failing in the trade in men’s pants. Unprepossessing in both appearance and dress, he was ugly as well. One eye out of focus and with a dryly amused air, he appeared to be more a waiter not above snatching of another waiter’s tip than France’s most dangerous thinker.

  Most dangerous because of his total commitment to the nature of man and his opposition to formal assaults, from left or right, upon the nature of man.

  This could, of course, be said with equal truth of Camus. But Camus never became a danger to the state, as he never implemented his conscience in action. When decisive action was needed, Camus remained the intellectual at the point that Sartre exposed himself to charges of treason to the state.

  Although his public answer to all uses of oppression was always an unfaltering NO, his personal answer to any small scheme upon his works, his time, or his pocketbook was always an unfaltering YES. As he was the public man who never said Yes, he was the private man who agreed to anything, as the quickest way of disposing of the matter.

  While walking down a Paris street with him shortly after he had returned from Haiti in 1949, he made a sudden U-tu
rn and fled into a café. What had come over him was the sight of a girl who had asked him to bring her a toy electric train from whatever country he was going to, and he had promised it simply to rid himself of her. This was not a girl toward whom Sartre had any obligation, but only a café idiot who liked toy trains. Now Sartre had to avoid her until he could buy such a train in Paris to make his promise good!

  He was at this time being sued by two parties for the same dramatic rights to the same play, having signed contracts with both parties the same day. A French court later resolved the dilemma by nullifying both contracts and then appointing a member of the court to referee Sartre’s financial life. When the appointee later made off with most of the money, Sartre merely shrugged; as though he had assumed there could have been no other result.

  His emotional life was, apparently, conducted upon the cheerful premise that it is better to say yes to a woman than to disturb her by saying no; with the result that his work was much infringed upon by women’s demands.

  And since these demands were made upon him at the same time that he exposed himself to arrest by encouraging French youth to refuse to bear arms in Algeria, he discovered, as he always discovered, that both matters would be happily solved for everybody if the De Gaulle government would imprison him. Then he would be able to have the peace essential to completing an anthropological essay; and, at the same time that it would keep the demands of women away, he would be serving a political purpose to the best interest of his country.

  Simone de Beauvoir’s eyes were lit by a light-blue intelligence: she was possessed by something like total apprehension. Her judgments seemed a fraction sooner than immediate and her decisiveness shook the arrondissement.

  “Now, tell me about Existentialism,” a male interviewer once settled himself down to amuse himself, and get a story too, at a café table where she sat; with pencil and notebook ready and self-contentment coming out of his ears.

  “You do not care about Existentialism, you do not care about anything”—and, taking her own notebook and pencil from her handbag, she bent to her own work. The interview was over.

  She did not even bother to glance up when he left.

  Yet to the fool trying not to be a fool, to the perplexed or the half-maddened, to the man or woman in trouble, to all those making an effort to understand themselves, she put down her own work with the same immediacy and struggled with others’ problems as though they were her own.

  Friends sometimes had to remind her that it might be just as well to hang up last winter’s dress, midsummer having come to France. Most Parisian of Parisians, she was least the Parisienne. As a court had to prevent Sartre from blocking the French economy, Castor’s friends provided her with needle and thread and buttons. Nothing more was then needed except a volunteer to sew them on.

  “If one gives time to trivial things, the important matters will never be settled,” she disposed of all sewing of buttons, all washing of dishes, all sweeping of all floors, all shopping, all cooking, all childbearing—she not only did not know one end of a broom from the other, but was actively opposed to other women differentiating between either end. It was understandable that she should resent husbands honoring themselves with the freedom to drink and chase the girls while wives lived between bed and stove. But I worried a bit about how the human race was going to perpetuate itself once Castor took over. She struck me as a bit preposterous.

  And, indeed, in 1949 her one-woman opposition to the single standard was preposterous. It was preposterized in every newspaper and magazine edited by the French bourgeoisie. She was cartooned, ridiculed, sometimes made gentle fun of and, at other times, reviled with no restraint.

  When I came again to Paris, in 1960, there was no more laughter: she was feared. She had broken through the defenses of the bourgeoisie, of the church, the businessmen, the right-wing defenders of Napoleonic glory, and the hired press. She was, at once, the most hated and the most loved woman in France. It had become plain: she meant it.

  “The difference between a desert and a paradise is not as great as generally assumed,” she wrote upon returning from her first visit to the States; “in the gardens of Fra Angelica or the Sahara there is nothing for men to do. . . . The young American is in a world that others have created for him, a completed world. I do not say there is nothing for him to do, far from that: America is not a paradise, it is a living part of the earth of men. But to discover what is to be done, a human interrogation has to put the world to question. They feel the abstract-ness of a contentless freedom: it makes them giddy; they look for a way out. The American is afraid of that dereliction into which man falls when he has to split off from what is given. The individual has to assume the task of being what he is in the jeopardy and glory of his lonely freedom; only then can the world in which he thrusts himself have a human character and value.”

  She had been awed at the possibilities she perceived here; and dismayed at the uses to which these possibilities were reduced. The American conviction that happiness consisted of a house, a faithful mate, no passions and no cares left her cold. The common possession of an automobile looked to her as though it brought only a chance to a great many more people to drive at greater speeds to nowhere.

  She had then perceived the necessity of giving content to our civilization, lest its technical triumphs come to no more than a race between drivers who did not know they were dead.

  She herself was not waiting for death. To have a house, a faithful mate, no passions and no cares; to take no risks and never to play the fool was not the way Castor ran her life. Existentialism, to her, was not a philosophical complex of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Kant, but a means of living in the world with freedom and joy.

  “A man tied to a fertile soil which he obediently cultivates,” she wrote, “is not free. Nor is the man abandoned in a desert and told to go where he likes.”

  She had seen the particular abandonment Americans endure; of how common it is to become an expatriate without leaving town. She had seen those Americans’ faces that seem to lack responsibility even to themselves. They had looked to her like the faces of occupying troops, capable of cruelties they would not risk at home.

  They had no home on the streets where they were born. Their lack of connection with the world of men had left them unconnected to themselves. Since they did not know the name of their world, they did not know their own names. How could they know who they were when they did not know to whom they belonged?

  This was the beginning of that strange change of Americans from first person to third: instead of seeking to impose his will on the world, he contrived to defend himself from it in an emotional isolationism.

  “The American fears that dereliction into which man falls when he splits off from what is given,” Mme. de Beauvoir had observed. Her observation has since been confirmed by the man paying fifty dollars for a tin key with a bunny on it, upon an assumption that he is purchasing a unique personality. (That twenty thousand keys may be sold the same month to men suffering the same sense of inadequacy doesn’t, apparently, modify this assumption.)

  Stripped of philosophy, the question asked a decade ago by Existentialism was, simply, “Why not?” Meaning that, to multitudes who despair at risks involved in living, it offers the answer that not to try is to die. It answers that there is no alternative but to assume the responsibility of giving oneself: That the only way to be alive was to belong to the world of men.

  A decade later it appeared that the American key-holder had decided death preferable to risk.

  “The only spot on Achilles’ body which was vulnerable was where his mother had held him,” another French scold2 writes. And it began to appear that the American’s mother had literally encompassed him until he was old enough to own his own key. He was then set free and immediately ran away from home by buying himself into the sanctuary of a key club where he could look at nude women without getting involved with them. For the understanding within the club, however tacit, was, �
�If you’ll let me stay a little boy I’ll let you stay a little girl.”

  And was not this pervasion of the emotional life of Americans by the values that had once only been employed in business—never sell till the price is right and then try to get a piece of the commodity back along with the profit—precisely the result of what the French philosopher had observed in saying, “The cult of money which one encounters here expresses the fact that the individual is unable to commit his freedom in any concrete realm”?

  The shift in emotional values from first person to third appeared to have followed a similar shift in the philosophy of business: the investor no longer put his life savings into an enterprise and went for wealth or went for broke: now he invested the money of others. And so, in love, he invested only the emotions of the other party, and contained his own.

  Thus the anonymous nude performed for him the thrill without the risk. And, as nothing is happening in the private life of the third-person man, he feels an increased appetite for the private life of others. Which the omnipresent camera now supplies us through Life and Look and dozens of other mindless rags.

  What the key-holder—and multitudes who cannot afford fifty dollars for a key but remain key-thinkers all the same—has settled for is to remain uncommitted, by taking no risk of exposing oneself to another. It means never being for another. In short, a flat refusal to be fully human. His answer to the question “Why not?” is “No. Never.”

  Existentialism directly opposed this view by going to its source, to the ancient biblical warning that to gain the world is to lose oneself, and to give oneself to the world is to gain one’s self.

  This was the beginning my French friends were making in 1949.

  The people partying through the rooms were Americans who wished to be helpful but didn’t know how. This was the spring of 1960: They were the first wave of a summer inundation that had broken early in April on Saint-Germain-de-Près.