Ready to catch us should we fall: a memoir of Paris

A paper on the theme of exile, submitted to the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature (IASIL) conference in Tokyo 1994, and subsequently published in The Journal of Irish Studies

In 1979 I received a small bursary of £1000 from the Irish Arts Council to finish a novel. I had just returned from a year in Algeria and was living in Paris, in a large, run-down apartment in Boulogne-Billancourt, a working-class district to the southwest of the city. The apartment’s big, French windows faced a reception hostel for African immigrants and students. It was down the street from the Renault car factory, and a pervasive smell of metal and vulcanisation hung in the air.

To distinguish my experience from that of my North African neighbours, and to garnish the artistic persona, I liked to think that this was exile. As Swift said: ‘There is an economic and there is a spiritual exile.’ When discussing Russians abroad after the 1918 Revolution, one speaks of émigrés, using the French term. Irish literati, despite an equal (though less class-sanctioned) connection with France, stick with exile: it has a Biblical ring. Now, more often than not, the term emigrant is used - the age of economics rather than spirit, perhaps. To say one is an exile has a pretentious, literary cast for most Irish people. These declensions in terminology give a clue to the reasons for expatriation: expulsion, revolution, dissatisfaction, and money. Of course, the longer one is away from the ‘home country’ the more one elaborates and ennobles this original motive. There may not have been a motive in the first place: exile may have been a dalliance, which became a way of life. The artist makes a myth of exile out of a battered suitcase and a one-way ticket. This is all the more true of an artist such as James Joyce, whose road to the real was always via myth.

To return, then, to my apartment - I would have said ‘flat’ then; apartment is a continental word. It belonged to the parents of the Jewish boy whose family had moved out to the suburbs some 13 or 14 years before. His grandmother had spent a number of years in Auschwitz and had lost family and friends in Hitler’s Final Solution. She would phone to invite François for Sunday dinner, and I sometimes answered her small, broken voice at the other end. François told me she had not laughed since the war. It was the time of the bombing outside the rue Copernic synagogue in the sixteenth arrondissement, and bomb scares at the kosher student canteen on the rue Medicis, where François, in his more orthodox moments, ate at weekends. Already, the wider culture impinges: apartment, Jewish, history, dinner in the evening, orthodox. The first fact of exile, determined by one’s own culture, skin colour, education and class, is the manner in which one embraces or rejects the host culture – which, often enough, turns out to be someone else’s exile. The expatriate keeps bumping against himself in a hall of mirrors.

Early in my six-year stay in Paris, I was introduced to Maria Jolas, a long-term and permanent exile. Madame Jolas had been a good friend of the Joyce family in the Twenties and Thirties. Her late husband, Eugene Jolas, was the founder of transition, the between the wars avant-garde magazine in which Finnegans Wake was first serialised. In 1979, well into her eighties, but still active, Madame Jolas lived alone in a sixth floor apartment on the rue de Rennes. She didn’t go out often and welcomed visitors, especially Irish ones. I went there quite frequently, for tea and stimulating literary conversation, which inevitable came back to Joyce. Not having read Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, it was only later I realised many of Jolas’s anecdotes surfaced in that book: how Joyce never drank before 6 p.m.; how broken and tired he was at St. Gerand-le-Puy, fleeing from his second world war and the German occupation of Paris. Jolas’s memory tended to run on well-worn tracks, and as Edmund White remarks in his recent biography of Jean Genet, ‘memory is repetition’. Myth relies on repetition as well, often sacrificing accuracy for a generalising truth.

She liked to speak of Joyce as a young man, despite having known him only in his middle age. She talked about the political affiliations of his youth and thought that he had been much more socialist in his ideas then than he has been given credit for by critics and commentators. He had got politics out of his system early. His socialism lasted into the first few years of his exile in Pola and Trieste, only to be dissipated by his own maturity and underlying bourgeois nature. In his fictional work these socialist leanings all but disappear. Bloom’s philistine vision of a vague socialist regime of universal brotherhood is one residue. This brings home to me how much, in the act of selection for fictional purposes, Joyce created another self, not just a mirror image. His creation of the figure of the exiled artist belongs as much in fiction as in biography, and has as such joined the canon of national myths, the stock-in-trade of Irish literary culture. In this other self, Joyce downplayed the enthusiasms of his early manhood, or at least elevated the artist in him at the expense of the political man. As Harry Levin puts it: ‘he revised his own account of his early attitudes towards life and art.’ Between the callow Parisian dandy, Stephen, with the jejune paradoxes and misquotes of a twenty-two year-old, and the urbane, thirty-eight year-old pater familias Jew who is Bloom, there is a lost self – that of Joyce’s twenty-something exile. If we line up Joyce’s personas, the way the seven ages of man are represented in a medical textbook, we can see that Joyce in his late twenties gets the thinnest part. He is there in Exiles, not too successfully. He is there also in the figure of Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead”. Gabriel represents that alter ego behind the exile - the man who never went away. Just as the exile haunts the consciousness of the stay-at-home, the man with roots haunts the eternal wanderer. Myths again: prodigal sons and brother’s keepers. Gabriel is ill at ease in Ireland but tied to it, settling into the conformities demanded of him, making the small, cumulative compromises of middle age. But the opposing and merging figures of Stephen and Bloom become iconic in the canon, one on the brink of exile, the other at its tail end, in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘an inner exile’.

In 1982, Deirdre Bair’s biography of Samuel Beckett appeared, carrying the then much-reported dictum of Beckett himself, that he would ‘neither help nor hinder’ Bair in her researches. Maria Jolas disliked the biography, not least because she felt that in it she herself was maligned. She had not consented to be interviewed by Bair and, consequently, felt that references to her singing duets with Joyce were a settling of scores. Bair reports, though not very believably, that Beckett described the Joyce-Jolas evening duets – Joyce on piano, Jolas singing – as ‘caterwauling’. During the last year of his life, at Jolas’s bilingual school at St. Gerand-le-Puy, Joyce would sit at the grand piano and accompany Jolas who, like Joyce, was an accomplished and prizewinning singer. Forty years later she could still be persuaded to sing a few bars of an Irish air, expressing disappointment that the same musical culture – repertoire concert-hall stuff – had not survived the generations. As a result of Bair’s slight on Jolas’s singing, it was advisable not to mention Bair or her Beckett biography within Jolas’s hearing.

One time Jolas told me a wonderful anecdote about Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was expected at one of her parties in the early Thirties, when he was the new young man about town. He was late, and people were wondering where he was. Then, coming from the kitchen, they heard a loud knocking. At the other side of the service door someone was frantically trying to get it. It was Hemingway, in the blue overalls then fashionable among a certain type of intellectual who wanted to show empathy with the workers, a neat example of the exile getting the host culture wrong. The concièrge, thinking Hemingway was a tradesman, had shown him to the escalier de service, the back staircase without a lift. He had been lighting matches all the way up, peering at the chalked numbers on the kitchen doors. It was through the servants’ door that Mr Hemingway, all in blue worsted, made his entrance to the party.

I happened to mention to Jolas my admiration for Mary McCarthy’s late novel, Birds of America. It deals with a young American finding his feet and wings in Paris. Jolas told me the author now lived in Paris and kindly contacted her. McCarthy then invited me for tea and to bring along some of my short stories.

Mary McCarthy’s apartment was further up towards the Gare de Montparnasse, and an altogether grander affair than Jolas’s. It was a wet, cold evening and a black and white uniformed maid received me. Then my hostess led me into an elegant sitting room with Picasso lithographs, among other signs of wealth, on the wall. I was struck by her handsome, strong-boned Irish face, her hair sternly pulled back from a high, square forehead, and that famous lively intelligence playing all over it. It was Halloween and she was in the middle of sculpting a pumpkin for a lantern. She would use the pulp for soup, she made a point of saying. The table in the dining room was set for an elaborate dinner. She asked if we had lanterns at Halloween in Ireland and laughed when I told her that once we had used turnips instead of the unavailable pumpkin. I must have appeared dumbstruck, but I was charmed, and she offered me a large whiskey to follow my tea, since it was, as she said, the aperitif hour. I don’t remember much else about our conversation. She talked about the Irish short story writers she had known and admired, O’Faolain and O’Connor in particular. Her fourth husband, James West, returned from his office, came in and said hello. I went back down into the November air of the rue de Rennes from that warm, festive apartment, feeling elated, singing a little.

When I initially came to Paris I had taken a room for a couple of months at the Irish College, an old building round a pretty courtyard in the rue des Irlandais, behind the Pantheon. It is now the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris but in the 1970s and 1980s it was rented out by the Irish hierarchy to a Polish boarding school, with some rooms reserved for visiting Irish clerics. I came fresh from the Algerian desert, impersonating a young cleric on a year’s sabbatical from Maynooth. Unable to keep up this ruse for long, and confessing my lack of a vocation, I was politely requested to leave. Later, in 1981, the poet Paul Durcan had a room there on the third floor. Though not a bona fide cleric either, he too had a bursary from the Irish Arts Council and was working on poems which would eventually form the collection Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela (1983). In A Snail in my Prime, New and Selected Poems (1993), Durcan adverts to that time in Paris, when he was away from his wife and sending home articles weekly to The Cork Examiner. In a new poem “The Only Man Never to Meet Samuel Beckett”, he describes his circumstances:

1981 – the year I spent working in the Collège des Irlandais

5 rue des Irlandais

Paris 5

Persons were always plotting

For me to meet Samuel Beckett.

 

In my cell on the third floor

I used to wake up in sweats

With Samuel Beckett at my bedside

Peering at me.

I’d plead with him to soak my facecloth

(there was a tiny wash-handbasin in the corner of my cell)

And I’d poultice my visage with it

Whispering to him: Go away.

But he’d whisper back:

‘Won’t go away.’

Despite our bursaries, we were both poor, and when we met to eat in the Latin Quarter, it was at one or the other of the student canteens, Mabillon or Censier. Sometimes, always carefully vetting the café, we had coffee round the back of the Odéon theatre. Durcan was a sympathetic street observer, with an eye for the oppressed. He was, at that time, preoccupied by the fate of the tramps who slept on the metal grids over the hot air vents of the metro. There were several of these down and outs sleeping rough round the corner from the Collège des Irlandais, on the rue de l’Estrapade, and he brought them food occasionally. As his poem about Beckett suggests, Durcan had little time for the literary politicking which would go on in some cliques in Paris. He had a retiring nature, priestly even, and the Irish College might have suited him more than he cared to admit.

But Beckett, indeed, would not go away. We rarely saw him in the flesh. A friend, who worked near Beckett’s apartment, carried an old copy of Waiting for Godot in her handbag for years, until one day her path crossed with Beckett’s in the Luxembourg Gardens and he duly signed it. Beckett lived on the rue St. Jacques, between a Seventh Day Adventist prayer hall and a garage, not far from the Irish College. I walked up and down that street several times, hoping for a glimpse. Unlike Durcan, I would be only too glad to meet the master. If I was going through St. Jacques on the metro I always scoured both platforms. I stopped and stared at the one word BECKETT on his letterbox, and when a novel of mine was published, lacking the courage to contact him face to face, I slipped it into a brown envelope and dropped it into his letterbox.

Richard Kearney, now Professor of Philosophy at UCD, Ann Bernard, his wife, and, later, one of the first winners of the European Translation Prize, were at that time a focal point in our dissolute lives. Richard contributed to many influential reviews, Esprit among them, and seemed to me to have a wide personal acquaintance with Parisian intellectuals and writers. He always seemed to be busy with typing or proofs. Both he and Ann managed to be hospitable with their tiny two-room apartment, strategically located behind St. Germain. If the last metro had gone, his floor space was always welcome, provided one didn’t mind being woken by typewriter keys.

It was through Kearney that I was introduced to the writer Tom McIntyre. Tom, who had already published two books with Faber & Faber, was then working as writer in residence with the Calk Hook Dance Theatre, based in Oberlin College. The company was on a year’s transplant to Paris. He was a striking-looking figure: long, halo-like white hair, a strong, weak-eyed face and stage presence written all over him. I met him several times in the company of his girlfriend, Katherine Holmquist. They were squatting in an apartment on a street behind the Bastille.

They were poor, of course. We were all poor. I introduced him to a scam which might be of some interest to a Japanese audience. The Louis Vuitton shop, selling luxury luggage, was on the Avenue d’Iena, and across the way was a café where Taiwanese and Hong Kong con artists used to meet. Since there was, and is, such a demand for Louis Vuitton bags among the Asian bourgeoisie, there was a need for prototypes of the latest models in order to manufacture fakes in Taiwanese and Hong Kong sweatshops. The Louis Vuitton shop staff was aware of the scam and screened their customers carefully. Of course we didn’t look like money, but were theatrical enough to get away with it. For each bag successfully bought we received 300-400 francs. It was good easy money if you passed muster. Tom and myself had recourse several times to ‘doing a Chinese bag,’ as we called it. Afterwards we usually went to eat.

He was interested then in knocking on its head conventional Irish theatre. Mime, dance, conceptual tableaux and techniques taken from the music hall and the circus were the weapons he was going to employ. At that time, the Calk Hook Dance Theatre was working towards a performance of his play Doobally Black Way, which premiered at a festival of dance and drama in Paris. It was a stunning, memorable performance, and as with many of Ton’s plays, clearly separated the sheep from the goats in the audience. Few of us could put our fingers on what it was about: all admitted it was visually arresting and challenging. Its roots seemed to be in Dada and it drew somewhat from the happenings, which were in vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It looked forward to McIntyre’s dramatisation of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, to which he applied the same dislocating battery of techniques, as though assaulting the parochial with its own surrealism. The Great Hunger dramatisation was one of the major theatre successes of the Eighties, playing in the Abbey Theatre, the Edinburgh Theatre Festival and in the pre-break-up Soviet Union.

We lived in a multi-faceted intellectual climate. Once, spurred on, I think, by Richard Kearney and Joe O’Leary, we went to hear Daniel Berrigan, the radical priest, theologian and draft-card burner, speak in a church under the Gare Montparnasse. Kearney and others organised a colloquy in the Irish College under the title ‘Heidegger and Faith’ and, indeed, Heidegger was our cutting-edge philosopher of that year. If there is such a thing as cultural Zeitgeist, and if it is distinct from fashion, then our clique of exiles was characterised by collapsed Catholicism shored up by Left Bank enthusiasms. It is interesting to look back on this Zeitgeist in the light of the liberal direction which Ireland has taken since. Though there were glimmers of that liberal direction then, it was by no means taken for granted. It is even more interesting to look back to Ireland’s more luminary exiles of the early century and to make a comparison of attitudes to religion. They would have none of it, of course: the closely reasoned discourse had been employed against them all too often before.

The irony of exile is that within a short span of time – 70 years – it is possible to overturn the premises of that exile, to the point where one questions the validity of the term. Perhaps it has a shelf life. Perhaps, like ‘colonial’ and ‘oriental’, it is time to deconstruct it. We had return tickets, or the means to buy them. We spent Christmas with our families and returned in January with Bewley’s tea and a bottle of duty-free whiskey. We were not averse to congregating in the Irish Cultural Centre and colleges, to using embassy and Arts Council funding for our artistic and academic projects, to wearing our air freighted shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day at the embassy off the Avenue Foch. We had no particular argument with the state: it had well educated us for our stay abroad. We recognised that the Church was a declining power in Irish affairs and could be blatted aside like an irritating cobweb. What nets were stopping us? Surely we were funambulists, high wire artists of no great distinction, with the nets under us ready to catch us should we fall.