A lifetime of Paris

by Charles Harris

Between the Gate du Nord and the Canal St Martin the unsurprised traveller comes across yet another female statue, an impres- sive monument even by Paris standards. With demure hair and tight bodice she bears a striking resemblance to the young Queen Victoria. In fact she represents, in insensitive English terms, the Queen of Tarts. The monument is dedicated to La Grisette Parisienne.

Only the French . . . While the frivolous English were putting up statues of free trade politicians in top hats the French were celebrating the Spirit of Paris in the 1830s: the sparrow of the garrets, the filk du peuple with a caged canary at the window and a poet in the fold-upted. Song and literature have hymned Mimi and her frail sisters; even Thackeray, Albert Smith and Du Maurier, in a humbugging English way; above all, Murger. Murger's Scenes de la vie de boh?me .makes funnier reading than Puccini makes listening but has all the lyricism, tenderness and gratitude expressed at length on the plinth of this silly, profoundly civilised monument. Murger, it's nice to know, made a pot of money from his book, and enjoyed a few years of bourgeois comfort. He died young, noseless and syphilitic. One purses English lips. How different, indeed, both life and art in our own dear Queen's realm. Nancy being bashed to death by dehumanised Sikes— there's surely something healthily releasing here, something satisfyingly purging in the thought of blow after crunching blow beat- ing upon the sacrificial Lost Woman. It gets rid of something, doesn't it? It's our bluff English way. One muses on the Victorian flesh-market of Panton Street and the Hay- market. Certainly, poetry is missing. Monu- ments are not called for.

The French are, still, a lot different from us. The inbred romantics of Europe. they. hate to give up; in the age of hypermarchgs, the Concorde and the force de frappe they

are reluctant to let myths die. There exists a dusty music hall lay-figure called an English- man, a sexual innocent still guaranteed to evoke gales of friendly laughter. Scotland remains the pibroch-haunted Lost Horizon

of Europe, while Wapping, our Wapping of the council flats, is an abode of scarred Chinese and battered flues, a scene Thomas Burke would have thought a bit overdone fifty years ago. Songs on smoky riverside dives still roll huskily out of sub-Piaf throats, and Brigitte Bardot made a terrible film in Scotland dedicated equally to crumbling castles and sex in the surf.

We pay them back in their own coin, or we did in the jolly old days.. A permissive youth and a national mood of middle-aged malice, expressed in its purity until recently in Telegraph leaders and giving a sour green smell to left wing and liberal thinking, have put paid to rosier day dreams. It's a year or two since a comic film was m4de about the English male virgin in Paris. There may well be front parlours in Coronation Street where Paree is a nudge in the ribs; it's hard to imagine it.

What happened to our more sophisticated myths? A serious case of French flu hasn't been registered for ages. Cyril Connolly has taken to Bermuda, country house gardens and Conservation, he who wrote the definitive version of the gospels, whose The Unquiet Grave was the brandy bottle of the exile, the Gideon bible of the demob camp. In 1946 we murmured passages aloud and wept in our chalk-stripe suits. England was Eng- land still, alas. Strobe's Little Man still walked the suburban platforms. We recited all those evocative lists of place names; and fled to the lover's arms.

The light of day is cold and very sober. You boast of an affaire, keep mum about a marriage; when the marriage is on-off-on and the in-laws are being nasty about your prospects you avoid a lot of embarrassing chat. The Dordogne for the honeymoon,

Levi-Strauss or dear old Raymond for best man, a long and brilliant guest list: Sartre, de Beaumont. Leduc . . . it only wants a marriage; and the old fervour somehow seems gone. Not a lot was said and that, by inference, disparaging, when Mauriac, the greatest of them all, died the other day. A bit French, and all that dark, festering Catholic conscience ... no; dated, irrelevant.

It was different in our time. I don't know how others caught the disease—Clive Bell's Civilisation, Matthew Arnold, Strachey, possibly, or the undergraduate freedom of Paris. I was a broody twelve or thirteen and my father sent me on the day-trip to Calais from Margate. In the vivid mainland light— why had no one told me of the transfiguring light?—there was this pack of barefoot French urchins chanting abuse at me, the most musical, merry, sophisticated, witty and incomprehensible sound I'd ever heard. I was entranced, a passionate francophile on the spot, for life, even before I came across the nourrices in the Town Hall Square, my first astounded sight of the naked female breast. (Breasts. They made a noble com- pany.) As for the Town Hall, a more rhetorical St Pancras Station, it was my instant definitive conception of Architecture. Cornielle, Villandry, Tino Rossi, Du elite de chez Swann, Cogito ergo sum, the rational and guilt-absolving pissoir—I was condi- tioned to accept the corpus of French civil- isation. I returned to dozing Margate in a delirium. Life had possibilities.

I had to learn French. Fervour suffered a set-back. As a language French is as notori- ously unwelcoming as a concierge of the old school. Glimpsed through the barbed gram- mar was the sensuous promise of the French vowel. Crimson was a serviceable English

word, cramoisie glowed and crumbled with jewel-like fires. Racine, all wonderful vowels.

was as easy to swallow as an oyster, long before one could make an intelligible book- ing of a single room from the fifteenth of next month. One climbed the rock-face with bleeding finger-tips.

And wasn't England, then, a jolly place for a boy before the war? And weren't there lots of nice English books for him to read. and miles of whalebacked downland, and Cotswold churches? Why this pubescent whoring after strange gods?

England in the 'thirties was a horrid place to live in. The men of Jarrow had their answer, and the Welsh miners singing in the West End gutters. You couldn't breathe, there was no air. Keep the Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier precisely des- cribe that world of cloth caps and hollow cheeks, of middle-aged men in bowler hats clinging to pension rights. There was a smell of decay, triviality, malice and no hope. Philistinismwas absolute, government des- perate. Good conceptions, the Becontrees and Withenshaws, were executed with hide- ous and puritan meanness. Buy British. exhorted the bus posters, as feeble a flexing of slack muscles as the chicken-throated Chamberlain's antics. When the war came- Onvell's vision of throbbing bombers come true—the pink young servicemen sang 1914 songs. You never heard anything more pathetic than their young voices piping 'Tipperary.' Something was going on. yes, and there was much fine, impassioned writing. But yoil had to be marxist or nothing, and that simple-minded daydream seemed as unreal and contrived as We'll Hang Out the Wash- ing on the Siegfried Line.' Spanish Civil War romanticism was ultimately escapist, and Orwell, as usual, had the last word when he placed a neat, annihilating bomb under the gullibility of the left. I didn't know everything, I was only too aware I knew nothing. I took my Spanish War news from the Corriere della Sera and, disbelieving, my German news from the in- credible Beobachter. I didn't really dis- approve of the Abyssinian War; the strident hypocrisy of the left and right drove one into strange positions. There was no air to breathe. The quality of life left a grime on the fingers. Reith's Finc gave you a sound Scottish education all the week but the Calvinistic Sunday was barely less horrible than the London Sunday of Little Dorrit. Impossible to convey the feeling of release offered by Picture Post and Lilliput, brilliant products of a refugee. Fine colour reproduc- tions of French and English paintings; biting photographs of the slums; and nudes. Im- possible to convey the release—or the back- lash of hatred.

In this frightened world of Dawson's Times and filmy-looking world statesmen- furtive-eyed smoothies, all—it was a tempta- tion to turn on old friends. You fell in love with David Copperfield at eight, and at eighteen cursed Dickens for misleading you. People weren't jolly, and tears solved nothing. People were like people in Madame Bovary, and there wasn't a tear in a line. English literature was a summer dream, drowsy with the sound of hissing trees. Oh God, for the scorching lightning flash of a Candide!

Well, there were French films, the long series of sombre masterpieces from Zero de conduite to Le Jour se leve. They felt like reality. There was the great Impressionist exhibition at Burlington House. The Tate was still cluttered with Luke Fildes and that ilk, the English cinema meant George Formby and Our Gracie (how the press turned and rent her when she followed her Italian husband to America, as it rent P. G. Wodehouse, and Auden, and all the 'scuttlers), with mobs of jolly millworkers in caps and chokers. Valery seemed a purer, profounder poet than chatty Yeats, Graham Greene the single, slighter competitor to Mauriac and Malraux, and Proust loomed enormous. America had nothing • much to offer. Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald? Oh, sound second-leaguers, surely.

And it came, the war, like a storm after stifling heat, terrifying and welcome. And after the violins of Palm Court Orchestra, and the Nine o'Clock News Priestley- made his sensational (mildly radical) broadcast about a Better Postwar Britain and sent the middle classes mad. (My hosts that night went about striking furniture,) Paris fell and the aged French announcer, Legion of Honour ribbon in his lapel, made his last sobbing announcement before the rapid, tinny recording of the Marseillaise. A great despair took hold of us. - The bombs fell. I went East, with The 1-ight of Asia, Leopardi and The Sweet Cheat Gone; and came back to 'Don't Fence Me In'. Olivier and Richardson at /he New heatre; and the Unquiet Grave. I wept at the miraculous Falstaff, Justice Shallow and stuttering, knee-hammering Hotspur, this unfair reminder of an English that didn't exist; and went to Paris.

And Paris as always, and unfairly, won. l.ondon was an unshaven, filthy, exhausted near-corpse in a bleak dawn. Her beauty un- impaired, Paris seemed even to have cap- tured the drama of the war with her little monuments to the fallen of the resistance; placards outside the Opera accused the high- placed whores who had slept with the masters. Claude Dauphin was playing in a savage anti-collaborationist satire. But, besides, there was Les Parents Terribles, Jouvet and the great Marguerite Moreno in La Folle de Chaillot, there was La Grande Illusion, and Tartu fie, Plautus and Strind- berg.

songs, sang, very drunkenly 'God Save the King' myself, got involved in the indescrib- able sexual jealousies of our elders, the res- taurant owners, had a 4 am fight in a raging dance hall; and was gravely presented with a souvenir chestnut from La Grande Avenue, a delicate, a French touch. I had a bad hangover.

A bad, long hangover. Twenty years after, France Dimanche, which serialised Prix Goncourt novels, has sold out to the con- cierges, and its brilliant team has dispersed; Francoise Giroud is queen of the bleak, neat columns of L'Express. It's a different world. The arteries harden and one reads Cowper and Parson Woodforde and Crabbe. If a packet of money turned up it would be a toss-up between a mas in Provence and a cot- tage near the Windrush. I know the new Godard is exciting, perhaps silly, but I won't, probably, see it. I don't want to get excited. All those books, films, records that changed my life; but didn't. Autumn's coming on and there's really no reason why I shouldn't take a few days off in Paris, except that it would break my heart again, and the almost savage vitality of the city would over-flood me with adrenalin I wouldn't know what to do with.

I know it's all going on over there as I sit here trying to be English. England dozes on as ever, and all its vitality is destructive. Another motorway planned with brutal regard for the worst of all possible worlds, another Georgian square savaged, another redundant church or harmless Jacobean relic —I don't read _on, I'm a coward. The new philistinism, the new illiteracy, is worse than the old. Be English? Isn't it too late by a life- time? Did it ever exist, England? One reads again Dickens, the myth-maker, and sees And such food and such wine. And in closed restaurant, laughter with two Minus with hard experience of five armies. The Germans, I learned, were korrect, the Russians barbares, the Americans—Ameri- can and the British, predictably, rigolo. I rowed the laughing, unwashed girls on the Versailles canal, shared a superb lobster while an ex-pow waiter (the younger Mimi's cur- rent lover), sang innumerable French folk why he grew sombre. Pickwick's England, like the England of Dad's Army, like Jane Austen's England, are myths of genius, the gentle dreams of civilised men. The real action has always been outside, and it greases its body with animal fat, and finally destroys all. We are the last generation to read real books and speak un-American English. I don't know who else may survive—France just might—I don't think it will be England,