A Paler Shade of Red Page 5

  “The totality of all action culminates in knowledge…”

  -- The Bhagavad-Gita

  Surrealism, still in vogue in post-war Paris, played a pivotal role in this frenetic self-scrutiny. The eccentric cultural movement of the 1920s might have eluded me altogether had I not heard it panned as “intellectual snobbery” and “spiritual degeneracy,” or dismissed as “a hoax perpetrated by petty artists bent on scandalizing the purist mainstream.” Condemnation of an idea, much more than praise, tended to arouse my curiosity and, in some cases, earn my support.

  Fierce criticism strengthens a cause more than high praise.

  To have talent, imagination, or technique is not enough to be Arp, Dali, Duchamps, Ernst, Klee, Magritte, Miró, Picabia, Picasso or Tanguy. One must also have a grain of madness, daring and irreverence.

  One embraces a cause to challenge the status quo; one discards it to challenges oneself.

  Distracting society from its utilitarian yoke and reconciling irrationality with the rigors of conscious thought, a fundamental aim of Surrealism, found immediate favor with the wayward, nonconformist-in-training that I was becoming. The works I read, the avant-garde paintings, sculptures and musical compositions I discovered along the way, produced an immediate and lasting euphoria, and I eagerly surrendered to their spell. They still enchant me to this day.

  It was Baudelaire, my mother’s favorite poet -- and one of France’s most revered literary icons -- who initiated me to Surrealism. Aroused, I would acquire an enduring appreciation for the genre. The formidable bard lavished not only the perfect harmony of his verse on a young, hungry mind; read with quasi-liturgical fervor, Les Fleurs du Mal also seemed to legitimize and vindicate my most visceral inclinations. Trusting neither man nor God, Baudelaire takes refuge in primordial chaos, in the flesh, in orgiastic sin. His verses crawl with monsters and freaks and pitiable bas-monde creatures all too reminiscent of ourselves. To set us at ease, to ensnare and disarm us perhaps, he strips himself to the bone in a poignant display of self-deprecation. Like Saint Sebastian, he flaunts the crimson gashes that score his naked breast, to arouse not pity but indignation. He then agitates our own demons, the ghouls that doze or stir within us, those we can never disavow. Shunned and lonely, the poet finds redemption in the anonymity of crowds, among beggars, cripples, harlots, drunkards. In sad or worn faces, he discovers traces of fathomless drama, in ephemeral smiles a twinkling of hope deferred. His is the voice of all who love unrequitedly, suffer inconsolably, savor rare joys with moving intensity and endure the sorrows, the longings and broken dreams that clutter the deepest regions of our being. Unloved, perhaps unlovable, he craves tenderness and quietude, longing for a faceless maiden to shine upon his winter years the golden warmth of an early autumn sky. He drowns his wrath and his agony in alcohol and hashish, and he dies, still waiting for that which he knows never comes.

  If Rimbaud and Poe -- Baudelaire’s contemporaries and partners-in-rhyme -- gave madness a lyrical hue, it was Cocteau, France’s alchemical man, who urged me up the winding stairway of Surrealism, who shepherded me across its portals, and eased me into its strange and wondrous inner sanctum. Cocteau’s fairy tales, opium-induced phantasms and hallucinatory incantations imparted unique life to ambiguity, purpose to paradox.

  “I am a lie doomed to always tell the truth.”

  I gamboled and drowsed with Cocteau in fragrant fields of poppy only to awaken, sprinting in place in a relay race with myself. Forever seeking to jolt men out of their torpor as he himself prowls at the edges of delirium and paranoia, Cocteau’s trails are strewn with mockery toward the zealot, scorn for the hypocrite and disdain for the uninspired, pity -- dark, raging, agonizing pity. I often set sail on the wings of his allegories, just to keep in shape. Every time I alit from these fantastic voyages I was reminded that rationality is no match for intuitiveness, that the imponderable can only be hinted at by appealing to the imagination, not common sense. No, Surrealists do not live in ivory towers, as their critics suggest. They take careful aim instead and, with mordant wit and disarming irreverence, topple them and scatter their sordid debris for all to see. With the dismal fragments of their own intolerance now strewn at their feet, victims of reality no longer recoil from it but acknowledge its ineffable absurdity. Once fathomed, Surrealism encourages its disciples to seek within themselves new dimensions, hidden planes of awareness. Surrealism is the language of free spirits, the idiom of free thought.

  Disquieting as my enthusiasm for Surrealism might have seemed (I would exploit this perceived eccentricity to discomfit those who were vexed by it), and in spite of a growing interest in the abstruse, I was still very much a boy and, like all French boys, I read Alexandre Dumas. In the flip of a page I became D’Artagnan and Edmond Dantès and Cagliostro. I wooed fair maidens with chivalry and selfless devotion. I rode noble steeds in pursuit of miscreants. I fought desperate duels on the side of the just, against despots, scheming aristocrats, and perfidious clergy. I escaped from dungeons, eluded the gallows, exposed dastardly cabals, and restored the good and the worthy to their rightful stations.

  Mark Twain's landscapes and perspectives evoked settings and locales of an America now long gone, of mores and prejudices that are not. Wanderlust and a craving for the hinterlands of exoticism would be further whetted by Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Pierre Loti, Herman Melville, James Michener, Marco Polo, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne, among others.

  Often, perhaps too often (some deemed such predisposition a “malignancy”) I’d turn to Kafka, the conjurer, Kafka, “the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament,” for booster shots of spleen and cynicism, the serum that inures dreamers against groundless hope, idealists against pointless fancies. I meandered casually and without haste in his miasmic labyrinths, ready to lose my way, to become ensnared in his inscrutable plots, to merge into them. Kafka would bequeath a lifelong reflex and a healthy lack of forbearance for the meanness, the absurdity, the despotism of officialdom, the odious banality of bureaucracy, the effrontery and intolerance of the ignorant, the shallow intellect and miserly preoccupations of the petty bourgeois, the boorishness and vulgarity of the rabble, the sham majesty of the privileged.

  Hardened by experience and an ebbing regard for all authority, this amalgam of aversions would be reinforced by Nietzsche’s warnings against mindless dictates. What I chose to distill from his florid orations is that I was now obligated to dismember the tentacles of stupidity, dogma and prejudice (Maimonides called them “degenerate practices and senseless beliefs”). Oh, how I struggled with Nietzsche. But I read on and reread Ecce Homo and Twilight of the Gods and I dissected and agonized over every word, every twist of phrase, every last convoluted paragraph until his awesome genius erupted and lit up some heretofore dormant synapse inside my brain.

  From Spinoza, my father’s favorite philosopher (Henri Bergson came in a close second) I learned to reject doctrines that don’t make room for speculation or doubt, to call a lie any truth that owes its sole existence to blind faith. Shackled to unbending creeds, afflicted with intellectual villainy, his contemporaries shunned and rebuked him. Excommunicated by Jews, vilified by Christians, he was a heretic and a rebel. His was an enviable malediction, I mused, and I remember vowing to emulate him in some way. It would take a more mature perusal of his work to recognize that I lacked both his formidable intellect and his couth. I would have to settle for a Spinozan willingness to invite hostility.

  Men struggle and fight. They’re so busy fooling themselves so they might endure what is unbearable that they’d rather live with lies than truth. In attempting to rationalize mirages, they dupe others along the way.

  Voltaire, the freethinker whose moral code hinged on tolerance and generosity was also required reading at school. Hostile to all metaphysics, Voltaire warns against the perils of immoderation and groundless idealism with sardonic ferocity. A believer in natural religion, he condemns the social effects of “revealed
” doctrine, calling it “pernicious,” thus earning him the unwavering hostility of the Church. There can be no higher endorsement of one’s relevance in a world of staggering hypocrisy, I thought, than to attract such antipathy. Convinced that it is more useful to be hated than ignored, I fantasized that my writings would one day be listed, along those of other irreligious libertines, in some Index of prohibited reading. Reserved for higher intellects than mine, such distinction would elude me. I would take comfort in the knowledge that a tight-lipped but all-knowing Big Brother was keeping me in its sights.

  Orwell's view of freedom -- “the right to tell people what they don't want to know” appealed to me intuitively. But it was the stirring humanism of Hugo and Zola, their attention to the unlearned lessons of history, that steeled my resolve to “tell people,” to startle the smug and the compliant, to challenge the established order, to prophesy chaos and decay as a hedge against their inevitability. Hugo and Zola, more than any others I knew, celebrated the enormous power of passionate, hard-hitting reporting, the poetry of polemic, the elegance of words honed to sing and sting and move men to great deeds, and occasionally drive them to infamy, shame and remorse. He whose only loyalty is to the truth, I would eventually learn, has very few friends. I would long revel in the vainglorious illusion that being friendless is a small price to pay for defending the truth -- smaller yet for exposing it. Alienation, jobs lost or denied, opportunities forfeited and, later, threats from some very irate readers, did little to tame the inner rage.

  These hindrances only taught me to modulate the rhetoric, not to suppress it. As for “truth,” I would quickly learn that it is the strongest and most persuasive of two conflicting doctrines, and that the urge by some to exhume it is habitually frustrated by the reflex of others to keep it entombed.

  *

  All my mentors were there at my beck and call, lovingly shelved in alphabetical order, ready to impart fresh insights, to titillate, amuse and exhort, astound and stir at every turn of the page. They kept me company when homework was done or postponed, or as I waited for the girls to climb to my old drafty garret. It was in the sagacity of books, in their wit and nonconformity that I trusted most. And it was in their company that I withdrew long after the girls had gone home and lust, for now appeased, yielded to more cerebral cravings and to the greater dividends of sleep, alone at last, in my very narrow bed.

  *

  I’d rearranged the room, pushing the bed against the skylight so I could look at my beautiful Paris, like from an aerie, while I made love to maidens with violet-scented lips, sprigs of muguet -- lily of the valley -- adorning their tangled tresses, as antimony clouds sailed across lavender skies.

  Freckle-faced and deliciously depraved, sixteen-year-old Ginette, the concierge's daughter, had taught me things only a freshly deflowered nymphet will dare. Free of shame or pretense, spurred by precocious carnality, she’d granted me every vice, indulged every caprice. We’d performed elaborate acrobatics to the accompaniment of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, contriving to climax simultaneously as the Bacchanale’s joyous tumult rose to a rapturous crescendo. Blissfully exhausted, we’d then settle back against a large down pillow and read from Apollinaire’s erotic novellas, The Adventures of a Young Rakehell and The Debauched Hospodar, parodies of the sizzling French novels circulated in secret in Victorian England. I’d borrowed the books from my godfather, Ernö, a distinguished anesthesiologist who routinely entertained fellow surgeons with his readings of kinky sex during major surgery. Ginette was particularly fond of the well-endowed Romanian nobleman, Prince Mony Vibescu, whose insatiable urges had taken him from the Paris bordellos to the bath-houses of the Orient in a never-ending quest for the supreme orgasm. Aroused, we would start all over again.

  Once a month or so, with Ginette gone for weekend visits to her mémée in Auvergne, it was a fellow student, Isabelle -- “la belle” -- blue-blooded and demure, the niece of a high-ranking member of the Chambre des Députés, who looked in on me. Refined, exuding a breeding found only in old money tirelessly replenished, Isabelle had deemed Ravel’s ballet too long and so we’d settled for Debussy’s ten-minute transcendental Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. Ten minutes was all Isabelle could grant me anyway. My recitations of the most grotesque passages of De Sade’s Justine and Juliette, followed by the gyrations and undulations I exacted as she rode astride me at the edge of the bed, often made her nauseous. She once vomited all over me. I never quite felt the same about her patrician little derrière after that. I continued to see her now and then because she came all the way from courtly Le Vésinet to the plebeian escarpments of Montmartre just to get laid, and such servility in a highborn, I felt, could only be rewarded with vile, crude fornication. Years later, driven by a similar incentive -- the promise (or the illusion) of great sex -- I found myself crossing the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the breadth of the United States. It was then that I remembered Isabelle and that I mentally sought atonement for my cruelty. Inevitably, I also understood that the cost of such expeditions far, far exceeds the returns.

  Sex gives us angel wings. Then it dumps us back to earth where, thank heaven, we can take a shower.

  I eventually lost both Ginette and Isabelle, the result of an indiscretion with a third p'tite amie, Elyse, whom I’d picked up at a kiosk on Place Blanche as I rummaged for my favorite old comics, Les Pieds Nickelés and Bibi Fricotin.

  Love creates and destroys liaisons by vocation and breaks hearts by whimsy.

  Elyse liked the accordion. I did too, but over fish and chips and cold fermented cider in a cozy bistro at dusk on the banks of the Marne, not as an attendant to fucking. So we had each other in silence, lulled by the gentle rains and the cooing doves perched atop the gargoyles. Of humble birth, uninhibited like Ginette, Elyse gave her all, anytime, anywhere without the slightest affectation. She giggled a lot. I’d read Rimbaud and Verlaine, and she’d nestle her head on my shoulder like a kitten and she’d stray, her eyes fixed upon my moving lips, a moistened finger buried between her thighs, her thoughts drifting on the wings of the poets’ magic incantations.

  Elle jouait avec sa chatte

  Et c’était merveille de voir

  La main blanche et la blanche patte

  S’ébattre dans l’ombre du soir....

  She played with her cat [pussy]

  And it was marvelous to see

  A white hand and a paw of white

  Frolic in twilight’s shadows….

  There’d been others. Nothing was left of them now but the dim memory of their existence and, coalescing with New York harbor’s fetid emanations, a paramnesiac whiff of muguet up my nose.

  *

  The ship came to rest in its Hudson River slip. I heard metal groaning against the pilings as the vessel tightened its moorings. In its emerging actuality, New York towered overhead, the vague manifestation of childish musings, baseless fantasies, two-dimensional Hollywood renderings of America and, from hereon in, the junction of a lifelong exile in a realm as strange and ill-fitting as an oversized garment into which I sensed I could never fully grow.

  A flight of hungry gulls, their air-worthiness challenged by invisible gusts, swooped across the stern and disappeared. I looked at the behemoth metropolis spread out before me and I asked myself what in hell was I doing here. My first impulse was to remain on board, to run down to the lowest deck, to hide in the bilges if need be, and sail back across the Atlantic straight into my parents’ arms. I was cold and confused. I remember shivering long and hard as if seized by high fever. For the first time, I thought of suicide. I was eighteen.

  *

  Two years earlier. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the chancellor of the Paris School of Journalism had intoned with studied self-importance. “We’re here to teach you many things. Journalism isn't one of them. Instead....”

  I remember staring absent-mindedly at the vaulted ceiling imagining smiling bare-buttocked cherubs hovering over an outdoor feast attended by corpulent dry
ads as virile centaurs, cupidity burning in their eyes, hid behind the thicket. I’d felt the first stirrings of an erection but the solemnity of the occasion and tight-fitting pants had quickly humbled my ardor.

  Across the street, in the golden luster of early fall, marked by time and history, the 11th century Eglise Saint-Germain-des-Prés stood proud in its austere architectural simplicity. On the sidewalk, jugglers, balladeers and poets, quick-sketch artists and musicians, sought in the goodwill of passersby a chance for recognition, perhaps fame. Around the corner, patrons at Les Deux Magots sipped hot fragrant espressos in thimble-sized cups and cool pale white wines in fluted glasses. In their chairs had once sat Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, Samuel Becket and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley and James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few. Paris had beckoned, seduced them all.

  The chancellor's booming voice put an end to my reverie.

  “... Instead, you’ll dissect history, chew on political science, ruminate on sociology, and choke on economics. You’ll learn how to conduct interviews, wrest information from recalcitrant witnesses, resist subjectivity, suppress personal biases and dominate sentences by luxuriating in as few words as possible. We'll send you on assignments -- the Grands Boulevards, the narrow alleys, museums and theaters, marketplaces, railway terminals, brothels, jails and morgues. If you lack basic writing skills, you're in the wrong building. Nor can we stoke let alone ignite that sacred pyre that must consume you from within. Make no mistake: journalism is no less a calling than soldiering, doctoring or the priesthood. If the Muses beckon, we can help you seduce them. We can't sell you inspiration, at any price. Nor can we instill the greatest of all virtues -- an unyielding respect for truth and the dogged determination to unearth it wherever it may hide. The truth is a loathsome and elusive beast. Like a scorpion, it burrows and flattens itself under a rock. Your job will be to lift that rock and expose the hideous creature. Speaking of which, the Bursar’s office is on your left at the end of the hall. Look for Proudhon’s bust. For those of you who never heard of Proudhon, he was one of the principal socialist theoreticians of the nineteenth century. It is he who declared, ‘ownership is theft.’ Good luck and good day.”