Orphic Paris Read online

  Orphic Paris

  HENRI COLE

  New York Review Books, New York

  This is a New York Review Book

  published by The New York Review of Books

  435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Henri Cole

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Henri Fantin-Latour, Drawing Lesson in the Workshop, 1879 (detail); Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; photograph by Susan Unterberg

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Cole, Henri, author.

  Title: Orphic Paris / Henri Cole.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017050815 (print) | LCCN 2017057895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372198 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372181 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cole, Henri. | Poets, American—21st century—Biography. | Paris (France)—Description and travel. | Paris (France)—Social life and customs. | Paris (France)—Anecdotes.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.O4725 (ebook) | LCC PS3553.O4725 Z46 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.54 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050815

  ISBN 978-1-68137-219-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Part VI

  Part VII

  Part VIII

  Part IX

  Part X

  Part XI

  Part XII

  Part XIII

  Part XIV

  Part XV

  Part XVI

  Part XVII

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  À ma mère

  “A man alone is in bad company.”

  —PAUL VALÉRY

  Part I

  MY SMALL APARTMENT in the Latin Quarter is on the Street of the Iron Pot (rue du Pot-de-Fer), which I’ve renamed Street of the Iron Poet. The neighborhood on Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, a hill on the Left Bank of the Seine in the fifth arrondissement, is full of students, bookshops, bars, and cinemas, and has the feel of a village. Geneviève is the patron saint of Paris. In AD 451 she led a prayer marathon that is said to have saved Paris by diverting Attila’s Huns away from the city. And in 1129, when the city was suffering from ergot poisoning (a sickness caused by a fungus in rye and other cereals), which affects the nervous system and causes a delirious and psychotic state in which spasms, diarrhea, itching, headaches, nausea, and vomiting lead ultimately to death, the epidemic was stayed after Geneviève’s remains were carried in a public procession through the city.

  YESTERDAY I RECEIVED a flu shot, though it will not protect me against the bird flu that is reported daily by the television news, with dramatic videos of birds flying toward France. I bought the vaccine at a local pharmacy for only fifteen dollars and made an appointment with a neighborhood nurse (chosen at random from the phone book) to give me the injection, keeping the vaccine refrigerated in the interim. The injection cost only $4.50, and the nurse wore no gloves and spoke no English, but I liked her and will return to her if I become ill during the months ahead. The expensive medication Tamiflu is not yet available, except to those already afflicted with the deadly virus.

  SIX OF MY POEMS were recently translated into Catalan, a language that half a century of Fascism couldn’t stamp out. I wonder if American poetry is as durable? When I am in a foreign country, I am most at home near the shelf of books in English. It is the language where I am a citizen, though Mother was a first-generation Frenchwoman and spoke French and Armenian as a girl. Her parents emigrated to Marseille from Asia Minor after the Armenian genocide of 1915, and as a young woman she worked at the military base exchange, where she met Father, an American soldier. Mother had a beautiful accent, but she was embarrassed by it and by her grammatical errors. My four siblings and I were brought up as first-generation American children, so French is not my mother tongue, though it is my mother’s tongue.

  CONTINUING TO WRITE means I have learned to not quit.

  Uncertainty is a virtue, and the tolerance of uncertainty.

  THIS AFTERNOON I WALKED across Paris, along the rue de Grenelle, to the Eiffel Tower, the symbol of the city, dominating the elegant bridges that span the Seine, a unifying element (both masculine and feminine) that is accessible to all. It took an hour and a half to traverse the city on foot, and when I arrived there were no tourists, so I immediately climbed to the second platform, where only a small group awaited the elevators to carry them up. I bought a ticket and before long was soaring up up up, like a pigeon or a rocket. At the top it was windy and sunny. It felt good to make this journey, which I’d pondered making all my adult life, since first seeing the Super 8 movies of my childhood, in which I am a little boy holding the hands of my young parents visiting from the South of France.

  TODAY I VISITED the cenotaph to Baudelaire—in the shade of maples, ash, laurels, and conifers—at the Montparnasse Cemetery in the center of Paris. I think I would like to be more Baudelairean, or unafraid of the grim, in my poems. Also, less melodic. In a letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop speaks of how a single word can have enormous power in a line of poetry, using the example of Baudelaire’s “The Balcony”: Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon (“Evenings lit up by burning coals”). It is the coals that surprises the reader and illuminates the poem’s meaning. Poetry is language that doesn’t shut us out; it should give the opposite experience.

  At the end of his life, Baudelaire smoked opium and drank to excess, suffering a stroke followed by paralysis and aphasia. He died with considerable debt, which his mother paid off. In his poems, he explored the changing nature of beauty in industrialized Paris. His Flowers of Evil (1857) is the swan song to romanticism. When it appeared, the government brought action against him as an offender against public morals. In Bishop’s poem “The Bight,” Baudelaire appears in a description of the low tide: “One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire / one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.” She is referring to Baudelaire’s idea relating color to sound. But also, her discovery of something gallant amid the horrifying (the dredge, the boats with gaffs and hooks, the birds like scissors and pickaxes, and so on). This is the Baudelairean touch, the “awful but cheerful,” as Bishop described it.

  The monument presents Baudelaire swathed like a mummy with his head bare, lying on a slab a few inches above the ground. When I visited, the sky was gloomy and a bat flew over my head. I left a small bunch of flowers from a pilgrim. I didn’t hear any marimba music, or even a solemn oboe. Instead, I felt unease and read a poem called “Obsession”: “I see the black, the empty, and the bare!”

  WALKING ACROSS the Île Saint-Louis yesterday, I remembered Bishop’s metaphysical poem “Quai d’Orléans,” which is set on the Seine and is one of many that Bishop wrote about Paris with a sense of intense emotion kept at bay. The opening paints the scene:

  Each barge on the river easily tows

  a mighty wake,

  a giant oak-leaf of gray lights

  on duller gray;

  and behind it real leaves are floating by,

  down to the sea.

  Then the speaker addresses a friend:

  “If what we see could forget us half as easily,”

  I want to tell you,

  “as it does itself—but for life we’ll not be rid

  of the le
aves’ fossils.”

  Behind these lines is a terrible episode, an automobile accident in which Bishop and two friends were forced off the road while driving in Burgundy to look at churches. All three women were thrown from their car as it rolled, and Margaret Miller’s right hand and forearm were missing when it was over. The next months were spent in a Paris apartment on the quai d’Orléans awaiting Miller’s release from the hospital. In her notebook, Bishop soberly contemplates the severed arm:

  The arm lay outstretched in the soft brown grass at the side of road and spoke quietly to itself. At first all it could think of was the possibility of being quickly reunited to its body, without any more time elapsing than was absolutely necessary.

  “Oh, my poor body! Oh my poor body! I cannot bear to give you up. Quick! Quick!”

  In his sympathetic book Becoming a Poet, the critic David Kalstone writes that “Quai d’Orléans” “is colored by all the losses the accident entailed and recalled, though none of them is specifically its subject: her friend’s mutilation; her own childhood losses; the loss of self-control and surge of vulnerability. . . .”

  Bishop dedicated the poem to Miller, who was her classmate at Vassar and had been an aspiring painter. In it, “seeing is inescapably tied to scarring,” Kalstone tells us, so much scarring that Bishop would never again return to Paris.

  Part II

  TODAY I ENCOUNTERED fifteen horses marching down the avenue in the cold, bright sunlight. The horses were many shades of brown, and the riders wore black coats with long gold swords dangling from their waists, which matched their boot spurs and the chin straps on their helmets. I could hear the horses’ hooves striking the pavement long before they were visible, and when they stopped at an intersection, all of us on the sidewalk, in cars, or on motorcycles couldn’t help but pause and admire them, smiling as the wind played with their brushed tails. High up, the handsome riders conversed among themselves, and when the traffic light changed, one rider at the front lifted his arm, and they all crossed the boulevard Saint-Michel toward the Luxembourg Gardens. Later, returning from the post office, I encountered the horses again, and their phalanx seemed to me like a poetry muscle exercising itself to remain strong, the precise movements of each horse and rider like the lines of a poem moving across a blank page, representing the highest degree of control—of selection and omission—as when language is assembled into art.

  LAST NIGHT I ATE DINNER with James Lord, the biographer of Picasso and Giacometti, at a hotel across from James’s building on the rue des Beaux-Arts—formerly the Hôtel d’Alsace, one of a string of cheap hotels where Oscar Wilde spent his last days while suffering from “mussel poisoning,” as he called it, which caused red splotches on his arms, chest, and back, making it difficult for him not to scratch. Because of this itching, the ailment was not thought to have been syphilis, though it was certainly syphilitic in origin.

  His doctors made sixty-eight visits to room 16 during Wilde’s final weeks as the symptoms became graver, making the following report: “There were significant cerebral disturbances stemming from an old suppuration of the right ear. . . . The diagnosis of encephalitic meningitis must be made without doubt.” Wilde died with no family present, and a priest applied sacred oils to his hands and feet, though he wasn’t Catholic. Richard Ellmann’s moving biography records the last moments:

  A loud, strong death rattle began, like the turning of a crank. Foam and blood came from his mouth during the morning, and at ten minutes to two in the afternoon Wilde died. . . . He had scarcely breathed his last breath when the body exploded with fluids from ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices.

  When I arrived at James’s elevator landing, he gave me the bisous—kisses with our cheeks touching—instead of the usual American handshake, and I presented him with pink lilies, which he promptly put in a silver urn that had belonged to his father. We sat in the living room, where James drank a Diet Coke and I sipped a scotch—he under the large Giacometti portrait, the most commanding artwork in the apartment, which had required eighteen sittings before Giacometti completed it.

  I knew this from reading Plausible Portraits, James’s little book recording his visits to Giacometti’s studio. In it, James writes, “From the beginnings of civilization it has been the human likeness which has most preoccupied man. What we seek and value in a work of art is its relevance to human life, its emotional and intelligible relation to a representational vision of a living being.” I believe the same is true for poetry. I want to write poems that are X-rays of the soul in moments of being and seeing. This includes the ghastly, the insane, and the cruel, but also beauty, Eros, and wonder. In short, a poem is like a portrait. It is an artist’s most profound and expressive response to life.

  At dinner, James wore his tweed jacket with his Légion d’honneur rosette.

  Asking him about Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his formative years as a writer in Paris, A Moveable Feast, I wasn’t surprised to hear James say that it was a despicable book by a fine writer.

  Hemingway thought that Gertrude Stein considered him a “square at sex,” so one day he admitted his prejudices in connection with homosexuality. They were drinking eau-de-vie and suddenly having a dangerous conversation, as Stein asserts: “The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink, take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.” Hemingway responds, quietly, “I see.” But Stein presses on, saying that women are the opposite of men, doing nothing that is disgusting or repulsive, therefore leading happier lives together, unlike homosexual men.

  James insisted that Stein didn’t feel this way, and said he didn’t believe the episode in which Hemingway overhears her quarreling with Alice B. Toklas, who is speaking to Stein as he has never heard one person speak to another—“never, anywhere, ever.” Hemingway describes Stein’s voice pleading and begging, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”

  Could Hemingway have lied about so intimate a scene? Could a lie have truth as its basis? Could it be that such a frank story, even one not based on real facts, has been created for art’s sake? At the back of the restored edition of A Moveable Feast there are transcriptions from Hemingway’s handwritten fragments for the introduction: “This book is fiction.” “This book is all fiction and the fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” “This book is fiction and many things have been changed in fact to try to make it a picture of a true time.”

  Poetry is different from fiction. Poetry is not a lie that tells the truth. A poem must burn with a truth-seeking flame and be a small symphony of language, too. Often my poems contain real events and real details from life, but I don’t want them to be like diary entries. I want to create an imaginative world that seems to be entirely my own, one that is neither confessional nor abstract.

  Walking home alone, I climbed Montagne Sainte-Geneviève under a full moon.

  THIS AFTERNOON was cold and damp, and I met my translator Claire Malroux at La Closerie des Lilas, on the boulevard du Montparnasse, which Hemingway mentions in A Moveable Feast. It is a café that retains its old world atmosphere, with a zinc bar and red leather banquettes. I kept my coat on while waiting for Claire at the entrance and pondered the corpses of lobsters displayed on a platter of ice.

  We ate in the less expensive brasserie, where the waiter said “bingo” each time he served me because it is an English word, and he recognized I wasn’t French. In the next room, an elderly man played a polished black grand piano.

  Claire talked about her work. Unlike many American poets, she has never taught. She spent her early childhood in a small rural village where her parents were elementary-school teachers. Because of her father’s involvement in the French Resistance, he was incarcerated and died in the Nazi concentration cam
p Bergen-Belsen. In her book A Long-Gone Sun, she describes the moment when her young father was taken. The doorbell rings “long and loud” one morning and he goes to answer it. Two policemen wait while he packs his razor and toothbrush, and Claire notices his face reflected in the mirror above the sink. The episode is brief. Her last glimpse of him is as a silhouette in the back of a Citroën.

  I cannot imagine having such a memory to haunt me for my whole life. This, in part, must be why Claire has devoted so many years to translating Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, poets who remind us continually of the evanescence of flesh.

  I AM READING her translation into French of Stevens’s last poems, comprising a volume titled The Rock, which received a full-page review in Le Monde. According to the poetry critic Helen Vendler, in these poems Stevens becomes the “silent rhapsodist” of the earth:

  The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.

  A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

  The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,

  Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot . . .

  (from “An Old Man Asleep”)

  Claire translates the third line of Stevens’s poem as “Le moi et la terre—tes pensées, tes sentiments,” and I’m surprised that moi = self. In French, there exists no separate word to describe the total, essential, or particular being of a person (the individual self ) other than the word for “me,” the objective case of “I.”