23 JULY 1983, Page 19

Books

Reassuring sordidity

Richard Cobb

The Secret Paris of the 30's Brassai (Thames & Hudson £7.95) rassai, the Hibou Nocturne of the

velvet blue-black and brilliant, liquid white of the Paris nights of the Thirties, was entirely fortunate in his period. It enabled him to command a wider, more varied spec- trum than that offered by the much darker 18th-century night of Restif, the original Night Owl. The Hungarian photographer was working at a time — 1931-2, and so a Paris still recognisable in that of three years later, when 1 first went to the city — when the electric night had long replaced the softer gas night of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, He is as skilled in look- ing out onto the street below, onto the bright lights of the fairground as seen from an upper window, as looking in, penetrating the much-used intimacy of a brothel bedroom on the fourth floor, or the still dangerous sociability of a ground-floor bal musette in the rue de Lappe, some of which were still the rendez-vous of the real- ly bad boys in the flat, long-peaked caps and the long points of their shirt collars, cols Danton. He is at his best as a miniaturist, with a wonderful eye for significant detail — detail that, at times, Places his visual chronicle firmly in the early Thirties, and that, at others, illustrates the remarkable continuity from the Thirties to the late Fifties, eliminating the Occupation Years altogether, as if they had brought no significant changes at least in the outer aspect of things. The lurid pattern of a wall- Paper, the texture of a bed-cover (which will not be removed), the simple, summary architecture of a bidet, the regulation fring- ed towel, handed over at the moment of Payment for the room in the brothel or 1161e1 de passe, hanging on the edge of the washbasin, having served its purpose to clean up the man, following his brief mo- ment of pleasure: the continuity of a reassuring sordidity.

The lack of continuity is more striking. Here are girls with carefully curled fringes of their very dark hair, four or five adjoin- ing curls, like a row of cedillas facing the wrong way, the now lost, distant race of Working class and lower middle class Paris- lennes of the 1930s, their eyes bright with excitement, drink and invitingness. The brilliantined and well-brushed hair of the men, the neat parting to the side, the men apparently as dark as the girls, like the characters in a Rene Clair film, speak as eloquently of the Thirties as the curled fringes of the girls. Both seem somehow more French than the chlorophylic in- habitants of the Hexagone of the 1980s, as though, at that time, no blonde French had existed. It may of course all be the effect of the night lights. The bad boys, too, look very bad indeed, as though they meant business with their eustaches — their knives — ready to hand, famished and rat-faced, as they stand, feet insolently splayed out, caps to one side, with their hands in their pockets. Equally menacing is the waiting group of la bande du Grand Albert, silhouetted against a brightly-lit long peel- ing wall somewhere near the porte d'ltalie. All — fringed girls and stony-eyed men have limp gauloises hanging provocatively from their lower lips, as if further to em- phasise their Frenchness. Here are the broad lapels of the jacket, in loud check, the made-up bow-tie over a pullover that comes up to the collar of the shirt, the bow- tie like a toy stuck on, a burly man, pleased with himself as he stands squarely at the counter of a cafe, bal musette, in the rue de Lappe. It was as if Brassai's characters, caught wide-eyed by his flash-bulbs, were consciously acting being French. Were the French more French then? They were cer- tainly more joyful, more uninhibited, more eccentric, less conformist.

The choice is as varied as was the inten- sive night life of a still living, socially varied Paris. I particularly like the sailor and the petty-officer, with the fringed girl between them, and in front of them a rising pile of saucers. The girl is paying more attention to the sailor, turning towards him; the petty- officer is too far gone, he will never make it. Then there is an amazing lateral shot, through a glass panel, of a bal musette, an elderly man in a hat, such a one as could have been described in the happy Thirties as a noceur, his mouth wide open, in laughter or in song, supporting himself on two girls, rather like the elderly gentleman described by Guilloux in his Carnets, who, when it was proposed that they make an outing to a brothel, says: 'Wait while I put on my Legion d'honneur.' Among the strange creatures of the night collected by Brassai the strangest is /a mome Bijou, rippling with cheap jewelry, rings and bangles, hat- ted, gloved, wearing a moulting fur, many scarves and floating draperies, a sort of dot- ty elegance gone to seed, her eyes bright and slightly mad, as she stares at the camera, holding a glass. She is said by some to have been the model for la Folle de Chaillot.

A police cycle patrol — les hirondelles, some of the police with 1914-style moustaches, accompanied by two burly in- spectors, heavily muffled, their breath visi-

ble — are waiting expectantly at a brightly lit corner, staring into the night. On the fac- ing page are five men of la bande du Grand Albert looking in the direction of the patrol.

Before and after: a couple, reflected in the long horizontal mirror beside the bed, the man still in tie and waistcoat, his hair unruffled, his jacket thrown carelessly over the chair, the woman partly beside him, both lying on a bed-cover decorated in a flower pattern, the clothing soon to be removed but not the bed-cover. Then the woman sitting on the bidet, her broad and sagging bottom protruding over the rim, as she washes herself in front, her feet in flowered high-heeled shoes, the man balanced on one leg while putting on his trousers. Stage three: the woman, still nak- ed save for the shoes, her broad back mark- ed by the red line left by her brassiere, reflected in the mirror, the man, now in his shirt, adjusting his tie and brushing his hair in the mirror of the heavy wardrobe that, for some reason — for this was a place for unclothing, not for keeping clothes — so often cluttered the bedrooms of brothels and hotels de passe.

There is a bizarre picture of three short girls tying on a couch, like dolls, their faces heavily made up, against a huge flowered wall-paper, two little dogs lying at their feet and looking like toys. The outside girl is wearing net stockings and black buckle shoes that accentuate her doll-like respect- ability. A well-dressed lady in a saucepan black straw hat is showing her hand to a voluminous cartornancienne, the tarot cards spread out lanwise on a table covered with a heavy cloth, against a corner background of wallpaper samurai. The grotesque gorilla-man, in a heavy plaid dressing-gown bends over the little naked blonde boy, Peterchen, in a Montmartre hotel bedroom that houses gymnasts and circus people. Or the benevolent, child-like face of the old tramp beneath his shapeless beret, heavily bearded, sitting holding his little black cat, his overcoat tattered at the cuffs and held together by a large safety- pin, on a winter night on the quays beneath the Pont-Neuf, his female companion lurk- ing in the offing, having refused to be photographed. Brassai is as compassionate as he is observant; and he warms to the in- dependent and rather well-spoken clochard, the denizen of a lost age, when the quays were still free of traffic and the home of tramps and lovers. But he can also be mer- ciless, as when he portrays, twice, the triple- chinned tauliere, queening it, in black dress and heavy necklace, over her own establish- ment: once, when she is seated playing cards with two of her girls, one looking very bored, and a customer, his hair brushed back; then when she is standing command- ingly in front of a heavy mirror, her three chins sagging beneath her blotched face.

Brassai's album is a nostalgic one. It depicts a Paris still vibrant with life, throughout the night hours, and when it was still possible, at the café au carrefour de Buci, to meet le pere la Tulipe, a misnomer,

for, top-hatted, he sold violets, bought at the Halles, standing at the counter, from four every morning, for a round, or several rounds, of canons, most of which he was offered by customers grateful for his familiar presence.

As Louis Chevalier has written, and as Brassai might have said, something of the wonder and variety of the Paris of Balzac and Eugene Sue had survived into the Thir- ties, and, indeed, beyond, into the early Sixties, before the Ville-Lumiere began on its stow death, early to bed, burglar-alarms set, all doors bolted and barred.