Coda
Absent father anticipates an apologia pro vita sua for infant sons...
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FRANCOPHILE
Europas
Are your faces like your mother’s, my dear boys? Jacob and Gabriel, you live products of creativity… When I saw you last, your inquisitive eyes stared up into mine as blue as skies shot through with the setting sun. Then I was off: back to a counter-life half a world away – an ocean too, though Childe Harold nowadays doesn’t stand on deck like seaborn sons of heretics in blind odyssey towards where your lashes are falling now. Only in mind did I chase our farewell by leaning over a gunwale gazing down. Cloud and ice intersected by wing were foam in the wake of my Holland bark hurtling on.
How many partings did it recall? to summer camps, boarding-school, colleges; then by larger leaps, via sea, via air… I came, and I went. Europa beckoned, materfamilias. The young American – ‘heir to the ages’, as seemed – set off on a grand tour, or hippy trail until – like the Romantic I paraphrase here – his pilgrimage grew into a simulacrum of life separating me from you two.
Fate is mixed. Time sweeps on behind us like the moon you now glimpse beyond translucent lids. Silver wanes, and in a passing of months a world may be altered completely. We alter too. The cocky buck I was once is near burn-out, ageing fast, if less so in memory. What I was then I am again in mind, at least in part, or on a page: the seeker heading off to realize what he has been, or questing for, even as I declines and the ego’s interest in self abates.
For you, sons, I wonder, though partly in doubt, whether, when my transit’s done, you’ll want to know its whys and wherefores. They’re inexact, though clear enough to me. My way was a black sheep’s, I was often told, but others’ norms are not to go by, risking as they do self-estrangement. Conventional ‘good sense’ may mean comfort with curse. To be other, behind a mask or counter-self, leads into realms unbound by rote expectation.
I was a bohemian, I imagined. To be exact, I hoped I was at an age when it could not have been so. Normal clung to me like a suit my mother bought second-hand to send her little soldier of WASP manners off to dancing-class. ‘I am me!’ my soul cried, as yet inaudibly. What that meant then is anyone’s guess. What it should have meant, to me, to you or generally as I’ve lived on into the inevitability of what I’ve become may not be much more apparent.
This trope bohemian, this counter-life... at times it appeared what I set out searching for, in time and in space, the first being a scholar’s dimension, the second a sensual young man’s. I would hear it claimed in the vast city I came to inhabit that no motive for research or ‘work’ could exist except financial. But money was only a mechanism for me, not an end of art or of heartfelt quest. The aim was to approach some elusive explanation, some inarticulate truth – initiation.
A Czech ambassador came to my flat and, seeing on a shelf a slim volume entitled A Journeyman in Bohemia, wondered why I’d called it that. Professional duty being what it is, he was compelled to ask what I knew of his country – had I visited there? had I sketched scenes of it? The answer being no to both, I turned tables on him and asked what he knew of bohemia as a landscape of mind. I’d used the term to paint a progress through unconventional (yet quite conventional) artistic milieux, I said, mentioning the Left Bank of Paris and a Zeitgeist in the San Francisco Bay Area that had formed me. He smiled in indulgence, a touch patronizingly, this echt Bohemian with trimmed beard and glasses recalling Moravian-born Dr. Freud; and I had to admit I knew little of why the word had detached itself from his homeland to preside over an elsewhere akin to Shakespeare’s ‘fond Italy of the imagination’.
After he left, I pondered. Was it possible that he’d been offended? Had he heard the word as one once heard ‘gypsy’ or ‘Jew’? Did it seem pejorative? Of course ‘bohemian’ is a misnomer, its implications depending on how and by whom it is voiced. Did it connote ‘wastrel’ to him? rebel without cause? a man of parts or pisseur? Troubling over it, I wrote him a letter, which grew into an essay, hard-researched yet never sent, its contents being more personal than a patina of scholarship pretended. It sits still in a file, rationale for my preoccupation in life, or a main one, between the ages of, say, twenty-five and fifty: pursuit of knowledge of a particular kind, shot through with aesthetics and emotion; not just the materialism of academic fact but forays into a spiritual counter-existence (that trope again) or primary, thus self-defining mask.
I noted how ‘bohemian’ had indeed emerged as the French word for ‘gypsy’ – a French word, I corrected, as there were also gitane and others common to numerous European traditions. For me it was significant that the provenance was French and, in American guise – because of the Bohemian Club? – San Franciscan. But why, you may ask, if my affinities were with Paris, and with the ‘little Paris’ of the West, did I linger so long in London and, in a Californian context, the south?
I’ve tried in these fragments to show how those places made for defining moments too. And one day you, my boys, may find how your pathways evolve via contrarities. Hemingway wondered why, when living in Paris, he could not create Paris as when in Key West or Ketchum, Idaho – ‘Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan... That is how it worked out eventually.’ You may see from what I’ve sketched how the City by the Bay could morph out of a Xanadu precious in post-Beat picture-dreaming into a dead-end of malaise for non-natives who trekked there in hope of finding a ne plus ultra in ‘countercultural’ revelation. The transcendent is ever unreal or ailleurs. In brilliant cities lies a Baudelairean canker. Fourmilliante dreamscapes are for dreaming, la vraie vie elsewhere. And even if ‘reality’ is overrated, it remains necessary.
I liked a drug or two when young. Most of them I tried, few more than once. I saw les paradis artificiels and longed to linger. But I needed my brains, I believed, so closed the ‘doors of perception’ until some future age – say, three-score-and-ten – when on a rare sunlit Sunday afternoon I might enjoy a ‘sacrament’ administered lovingly à la Huxley. For the productive phase of existence I would need not only brains but also sufficient strength to carry on in what Gérard du Nerval called ‘the visible world that exists’. I would need, being no linguist of reach, to be anchored in a locale where folks spoke my language. Nor could it be just anywhere, if I meant to be a ‘writer’; not just some gorgeous backwater where to compose ‘that novel you’ll never finish’, as a lady from New York at a party in L.A. once caricatured San Francisco. Her quip may have struck me as glib at the time, but it presaged a trajectory. London would be my tough school, my anti-Paris if you will – anti-‘fond Paris of the imagination’ at least – though it may have grown less so in decades since I first came there, fresh from the Bay Area.
I was of course too poetic to begin with. Many young people are, not least Americans of my era. We were idealists, cynicism being deprecated, even ‘civilization’ as given. So the English I came to admire were a heterodox lot: Shelley, Byron, D. H. Lawrence, Shakespeare in some moods – say, of a midsummer night’s dream or the forest of Arden. I never warmed to a patrician mode of the 17/18th centuries; as close as I came to it was via some ‘decadents’ – Symons, Wilde, Yeats, even Maugham. They were heretics too from a then-dominant Augustan point of view, some Celtic strain or sexual bent relieving them of the mindset to be more notionally ‘French’. You might call them precisely, in an aesthetic sense, Anglo-Europeans.
Thus the Englishness I was attracted to. And it’s a crux. England as part of Europe was what an American of my kind came looking for. Britannia still lustily ruling the waves may have appealed in song, but in presence it conjured an arrogance that our revolution had fought free of. Nor was Britain as refuge for émigrés from the French sequel to that ‘shot heard round the world’ a concept I could wholly embrace. A near-Norman England of the Angevin Empire maybe, a Britannia of écossais ‘auld alliance’, a United Kingdom ruled by the Irish as Wilde wittily joked, but not the fox-hunting country of Stubbs paintings or my WASP kind’s over-admired ‘Pinkie’ and ‘Blue Boy’.
Maugham lauded the prose of Burke. It’s as near to an Augustan style as I could get. Conservatism as a philosophy was alien, except in a Disraelian internationalist sense. The English as chauvinists may have been no more antipathetic than others, but they were far more congenial when passionate about Tuscany or the Dordogne. Insular tribalism is all that could explain relapses into hating ‘the Hun’ or parlaying ‘English’ and ‘British’ into synonyms for ‘good’. This seemed a symptom of historical decline to me. Bone-headedness such as I thought could only exist in Spiro Agnew’s Amerika seemed, after years of encountering Aussies and other ‘colonials’ in ‘Blighty’, to infect Anglo-Saxony at large, despite how the bien-pensant liked to self-idealize. No culture is free of similar flaws, but it excuses nothing. You grow most exasperated by the shortcomings of those with whom you are closest.
I was told by friends who had gites in France that living there as opposed to travelling in it would be a cure my francophilia, and I was polite enough to credit it as possible. When confronted by French petty bourgeoisness, I sometimes even saw it as probable, though in my heart I didn’t want to. French petty bourgeoisness often struck me as more quaint than problematic; French bohemianism, as ancient in and typical of the culture, was there to counteract it. And if the argument turned to bureaucracy and the French fonctionnaire, I might propose that no nation on earth could be more entitled to preserve its institutions than one in which a universal doctrine of the rights of man had first been promulgated, in preference to God, clergy, aristocracy or kings.
A citizen of our world may not grant this, but then the tag citoyen du monde is first and foremost French. So too is Cosmopolite, a term Byron used to preface his Childe Harold when setting out to declare independence from his anti-Napoleonic tribe. There is of course a streak of teenaged rebellion in all romantics, an antinomian zest for kicking against the eternal Wellingtons and Castlereaghs, and let’s be frank – bloody Bonaparte was no cerebral Jefferson. That said, the contrast between French and American ructions of the end of the 18th century may seem less egregious when you consider how much harder it was for Europeans to throw off the entrenched tyrannies of king and pope stretching as far back as extermination of the Cathars by Simon de Montfort (père of the père of an English parlement) than for Anglo colonials to adopt a novus ordo seclorum in the relatively mild rising led by farmer Washington.
Europe is different. The soil of France has for millennia been fertilised by blood, that of America less so. The War Between the States may have soaked the South east of the Mississippi, but the continent largely stayed dry. In Europe of the west it is France, as in Europe of the east it is Poland, where the earth is enriched by chips of the bones of ardent forbears. Does this matter? Can one feel it? Does a certain type of sensibility draw its potency, or some portion of it, from unappeased phantoms of what’s gone before? OK, you concede; but what does this have to do with England? In specific why did the England of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses appeal to you as a pre-teen? or of Dickens lamenting conditions of the urban poor shortly after? or of Hardy the same in a rural context once you had reached the full throes of puberty?
I mention these by way of further underlining how the England I came for was not the one of devotees of Jane Austen. Mine was an England, or Britain, that a French enragé might have had time for. I should admit too that arriving there at all was more out of accident than affinity. I’d been dreaming of Paris of Hemingway, Stein – I’ve noted the template – and it was only by chance, or some obscure god’s election, that Britain had the sole opening in Stanford’s Overseas Program in the late spring of ‘69 when I went to inquire – a day after I’d been at that protest in Berkeley where Governor Reagan’s National Guard shot rubber bullets into the crowd and killed a student my age.
That summer England was dappled in splendor. Travelling from Heathrow into the vast azalea and rhododendron gardens of Cliveden House, locus of Stanford’s campus abroad, I could perhaps have been forgiven for believing that I had indeed entered a New Age. But summer wanes, and that gaudy August would prove a last bloom of the efflorescence known as the ‘Swinging ‘60s’, with its Beatles and Rolling Stones and Kings’ Road social revolutionaries. By winter the world was turning gritty and grey. Thus England appeared to me… and would mostly remain.
Shot through with color for a season, it lay more typically under skies of depression, and perhaps always has. The famous English melancholy is not just a literary trope, the half-in-love-with-easeful-death of John Keats or Virginia Woolf. The drowning Ophelias of pre-Raphaelite imagery were ubiquitous in my hot youth, and not to be dragged down in their eglantine became almost a profession. For my attractiveness to them, I should always be grateful: the robust ‘gals’ of my own land could never have erected this frail ego so high. But la belle dame sans merci ever lurked in the shadows; and English ‘gels’ finally, perhaps out of some congenital bruise to the ego, would have rather seen a foreign lover brought low than to pass via intimate knowledge of them on to a ‘higher consciousness’, let alone more promising relations, beyond.
This I would glean. Bitterly, I would submit. But let’s not speak falsely: the English rose got the best of my loving, and one should ever say je ne regrette rien. No other type could match her – I had as many French girlfriends, but with them it would last three weeks while with the English it would be three years and, in the haunting, more. The formula is inexact – most confessions about love are, though there may be poetic truth to them. In years later I would live with a German by birth, and our relations would be happy; and on reflection I see that my steadiest liaisons were with women of mixed heritage – Celto-Germanic, Celto-Jewish, Germano-Slav. But the Anglo rose in WASP form had been an ideal from boyhood: first a blonde, high born and glamorous; then a shadow of her dusted in grey, yet more lasting... It was a pattern. It is broken now.
The English and England were finally not quite about living for me. My career with them was indeed a counter-life – a mask to define what I felt or presumed to be my ‘real’ self. England is where books overtook me: the British Library, literature, history. I buried myself in them and, cut off from the radiance of the south, made suns of my own, tinted in shades of departure, frustration and longing. Writing, the arts, are often compensation – re-creation of what you no longer have. In my soul shone the azure and terra cotta of the Alpes-Maritimes, the green and crenellation of a gorge of the Dordogne. I heard the cicadas on a cliff above Cap Camarat, an owl in the woods by Bouzic. There were the chartreuse and golds, the heat of lost summers, a rising of blood in the veins. Then too, off in France, was a chance to linger in an alternative language that I could almost, if not fully, comprehend.
My first fictions soi-disant were written there. I wrote this in Cannes at a point in my career when creativity lay dormant otherwise. But why France? How is one country likely to bring out more creativity than another? May it be in part what is not present? – i.e., without the tones of English in the ear, one tended to invoke them (think Joyce)? In truth I suspect it is more: some affect of French words on the psyche, a tap tap at the brain, a self-conscious forming-up on the lips. In any case, perhaps especially for a writer, it is a holiday to be out of one’s mother tongue.
In Poland where I never knew enough grammar to speak, I felt cosseted like a babe: smiling, pointing, requiring aid. In Germany where I knew some story-book phrases from Grimm and so on, it was more like being age three or four. In France, however, I was, and continued to be, somewhere between the ages of six and ten: ages at which perception is coalescing into words. So it may be out of some predictable alchemy of mind that I should have felt most verbally productive in France.
Justly, you may say, this is hokum: whatever you pretend, your productivity came in England. Yes, but consider: my first novella, about an Englishwoman, was conceived and set in France; England (London) was only a convenient retreat in which to revise. So much was this so that I could posit that, as with my California work later on, I kept myself in England precisely to crystallise on colors and a milieu I was pining for. As to further novellas with English settings: the most extensive of these was about another Englishwoman, doubtless linked to the first, whose husband’s taste was shot through with Gallic tradition, unlike that of his life model.
Overall it may be not only as author of scholarly studies (except the California one) that I drew inspiration from and paid homage to things French, but also as writer of the explorations that made up my ‘necklace of novellas’, as a lady poet once dubbed it. Yet as I write this, I’m aware that to claim as much in a work of this title may seem in part an attempt to shed the syndrome: half-consciously to free oneself of it. If so, so be it. I have no brief to cling to a status of francophile as idée fixe. No minister of culture in Paris is going to underwrite these reflections, nor am I bucking to join an élite of foreign chevaliers de Légion d’Honneur. Things Italian, German, Polish and other have inspired me too. Still, the French impulse has been most consistent, and France as a standard has lasted the longest.
In sum it is probably all mixed up with the challenge that confronted Californians of my generation: who are you? Many sought gurus or shrinks for an answer this ‘eternal question’, as it seemed to us entitled ‘children of the sun’. So for you, my sons… Who are you, or will you become? It may be addressed by a process of self-realization. And self-realization may be pursued by a régime of self-knowledge. And self-knowledge may be achieved via trial and testing – initiation, as an older school called it. Which brings us to a nexus of experience.
I travelled, like many another. I came in mind to be that proverbial questor for a grail: a wanderer through waste lands within, and often without. And what did I find there? What destination seemed most likely to unveil the essence? – You could perhaps glean it via what that grand Romantic self-realizer Goethe labelled ‘elective affinities’. So what were they in my case? Where did the spirit soar most?
In St Sulpice and other cathedrals of Paris. On a sweep of the river above Beynac. Crossing the Golfe, St Raphael to St Trop. In the Var near Fayence and Seillans. In Venice, Siena and Ligurian hills. In the Old Town of Warsaw on a dim winter’s night, or Piotrkówska Street in film noir Łódź. On a stretch of the Thames below Cliveden. In Sausalito gazing back at the City by the Bay. In southern Humboldt County amid first growth redwoods. Riding a bike under Santa Monica palisades. Hiking a ridge-top overlooking L.A.. Dropping down to La Jolla. Certain patches of desert and dune. Some music by Beethoven (Eroica, first movement), Wagner (Wotan in Walküre, finale), Rossini (Stabat Mater, tenor solo), Puccini (bells in Tosca, Act III) and most of Berlioz.
There is more of course. The Grateful Dead provoked many an exalted excursion, as did a Mahler adagio. But let it rest. Somewhere in the époque that produced Symphonie fantastique, Le Rouge et le noir or La Chartreuse de Parme, Dumas’ histoires and la comédie of Balzac, the vaisseau fantôme of Wagner, Nerval, Baudelaire, Delacroix and Géricault, I found myself most at home. It’s not that I was less than a product of my generation or place: as I wrote this, I wore Levi’s, sunglasses, tennis shoes and a t-shirt inscribed ‘Local Hero’ – name of a bookshop in Ojai CA. It’s just that, in reverie, I was buoyed out through time and space; and the warm spots in that oceanic infinitum included a version of what’s embodied in Les enfants du paradis of Michel Carné.
So go to the video shop or equivalent, boys, when I’m pushing up thistles. If you want to imagine the by-ways I took, go to certain performances, events; sit in the gods, then get out on the road. Open the great epics and dream yourselves into marvellous vistas. Because the ‘monuments of unaging intellect’ may contain, along with love of a truly able-to-love woman and bounty of the most blessed hideouts in nature, a trove of the answers your spirits crave. Meanwhile, in a courtyard of the Louvre find the sublime on summer evenings as the lamps flicker on to refract sunset’s gold. And the books in your language to make best companions may be ones that guide you towards kindred gloire – The Razor’s Edge, say, A Moveable Feast, or…
Franc: a few definitions
Franc, franche, a. 1. Free. 2. Frank, open, outspoken.
Franc, franque, Hist. (a) a. Frankish. (b) n. Frank.
Franchir, v. tr. (a) To clear (obstacle); to jump (over) (ditch); to shoot (rapids); to run past (danger-signal); to exceed (limits); to get over (difficulty). (b) To pass through; to cross.
Franchise, n.f. 1. (a) Freedom (of a city). (b) Hist. (i) Right of sanctuary. (ii) Sanctuary, asylum. (iii) (Diplomatic) immunity. 2. Exemption.
Franciser, v. tr. To gallicize.
Franc-maçon, n.m. Freemason.
Frank, n. 1. A member of one of the Germanic tribes settled on the Rhine early in the Christian era. 2. In the Near East, any European. [L. Francus a Frank, a spear (cf. OE franca lance); named from their weapon.
In other words, not being too restrictive, to be a francophile might involve affinity to an individual of European heritage (Frank) dedicated to liberty and clarity (franc) with a quantum of mobility, courage and vigour (franchir) and ability to expect some privilege (franchise) as well as other characteristics (spear-like? Masonic?) comme tu veux.
I'm hoping the next one's about Germany!
It wasn't wasted, friend.