The clerks say nothing, I pick up the suitcase and the chain falls off. Naval cadets in there buying tickets stare as I lift the suitcase. I show them my name written in orange paint on a black tape strip near the keyhole. My name. I walk out, with it.
I lug the suitcase into Fournier’s bar and stash it in the corner and sit at the bar, feeling my railroad ticket, and have two hours to drink and wait.
The name of the place is Le Cigare.
Fournier the owner comes in, only 35, and right away gets on the phone going like this: “Allo, oui, cinque, yeh, quatre, yeh, deux, bon,” bang the phone hook. I realize it’s a bookie joint.
O then I tell them joyously “And who do you think is the best jockey today in America? Hah?”
As if they cared.
“Turcotte!” I yell triumphantly. “A Frenchman ! Dint you see him win that Preakness?”
Preakness, Shmeakness, they never even heard of it, they’ve got the Grand Prix de Paris to worry about not to mention the Prix du Conseil Municipal and the Prix Gladiateur and the St. Cloud and Maisons Lafitte and Auteuil tracks, and Vincennes too, I gape to think what a big world this is that international horseplayers let alone pool players cant even get together.
But Fournier’s real nice to me and says “We had a couple French Canadians in here last week, you shoulda been here, they left their cravats on the wall: see em? They had a guitar and sang turlutus and had a big time.”
“Remember their names?”
“Nap—But you, American passport, Lebris de Kerouac you say, and came here to find news of your family, why you leaving Brest in a few hours?”
“Well,—now you tell me.”
“Seems to me” (“me semble”) “if you made that much of an effort to come all the way out here, and all the trouble getting here, thru Paris and the libraries you say, now that you’re here, it would be a shame if you didnt at least call up and go see one of the Lebris in this phone book—Look, there’s dozens of em here. Lebris the pharmacist, Lebris the lawyer, Lebris the judge, Lebris the wholesaler, Lebris the restaurateur, Lebris the book dealer, Lebris the sea captain, Lebris the pediatrician—”
“Is there a Lebris who’s a gynecologist who loves women’s thighs” (Ya tu un Lebris qu’est un gynecologiste qui aime les cuisses des femmes?) yell I, and everybody in the bar, including Fournier’s barmaid, and the old guy on the stool beside me, naturally, laugh.
“—Lebris—hey, no jokes—Lebris the banker, Lebris of the Tribunal, Lebris the mortician, Lebris the importer—”
“Call up Lebris the restaurateur and I’ll give my cravat.” And I take my blue knit rayon necktie off and hand it to him and open my collar like I’m at home. “I cant understand these French telephones,” I add, and add to myself: (“But O you sure do” because I’m reminded of my great buddy in America who sits on the edge of his bed from first race to ninth race, butt in mouth, but not a big romantic smoking Humphrey Bogart butt, it’s just an old Marlboro tip, brown and burnt-out from yesterday, and he’s so fast on the phone he might bite flies if they dont get outa the way, as soon’s he picks up the phone it’s not even rung yet but somebody’s talking to him: “Allo Tony? That’ll be four, six, three, for a fin.”)
Who ever thought that in my quest for ancestors I’d end up in a bookie joint in Brest, O Tony? brother of my friend?
Anyway Fournier does get on the phone, gets Lebris the restaurateur, has me use my most elegant French getting meself invited, hangs up, holds up his hands, and says: “There, go see this Lebris.”
“Where are the ancient Kerouacs?”
“Probably in Cornouialles country at Quimper, somewhere in Finistère south of here, he’ll tell you. My name is Breton also, why get excited?”
“It’s not every day.”
“So nu?” (more or less). “Excuse me” and the phone rings. “And take back your necktie, it’s a nice tie.”
“Is Fournier a Breton name?”
“Why shore.”
“What the hell,” I yelled, “everybody’s suddenly a Breton! Havet — LeMaire — Gibon — Fournier — Didier — Goulet — L’Évêsque — Nob-let — Where’s old Halmalo, and the old Marquis de Lantenac, and the little Prince of Kérouac, Çiboire, j’pas capable trouvez ca—” (Çiborium, I cant find that).
“Just like the horses?” says Fournier. “No! The lawyers in the little blue berets have changed all that. Go see Monsieur Lebris. And dont forget, if you come back to Brittany and Brest, come on over here with your friends, or your mother—or your cousins—But now the telephone is ringing, excuse me, Monsieur.”
So I cut outa there carrying that suitcase down the Rue de Siam in broad daylight and it weighs a ton.
30.
NOW STARTS ANOTHER ADVENTURE. IT’S A MARVELous restaurant just like Johnny Nicholson’s in New York City, all marble-topped tables and mahogany and statuary, but very small, and here, instead of guys like Al and others rushing around in tight pants serving table, are girls. But they are the daughters and friends of the owner, Lebris. I come in and say where’s Mr. Lebris, I been invited. They say wait here and they go off and check, upstairs. Finally it’s okay and I carry my suitcase up (feeling they didnt even believe me in the first place, those gals) and I’m shown a bedroom where lies a sharpnosed aristocrat in bed in mid day with a huge bottle of cognac at his side, plus I guess cigarettes, a comforter as big as Queen Victoria on top of his blankets (a comforter, that is, I mean a six-by-six pillow), and his blond doctor at the foot of the bed advising him how to rest—“Sit down here” but even as that’s happening a romancier de police walks in, that is, a writer of detective novels, wearing neat steel-rimmed spectacles and himself as clean as the pin o Heaven, with his charming wife—But then in walks in poor Lebris’ wife, a superb brunette (mentioned to me by Fournier) and three ravissantes (ravishing) girls who turn out to be one wed and two unwed daughters—And there I am being handed a cognac by Monsieur Lebris as he painstakingly raises himself from his heap of delicious pillows (O Proust!) and says to me liltingly:
“You are Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, you said and they said on the phone?”
“Sans doute, Monsieur.” I show him my passport which says: “John Louis Kerouac” because you cant go around America and join the Merchant Marine and be called “Jean.” But Jean is the man’s name for John, Jeanne is the woman’s name, but you cant tell that to your Bosun on the S. S. Robert Treat Paine when the harbor pilot calls on you to man the wheel through the mine nets and says at your side “Two fifty one steady as you go.”
“Yes sir, two fifty one steady as I go.”
“Two fifty, steady as you go.”
“Two fifty, steady as I go.”
“Two forty nine, steady, stead-y-y as you go” and we go glidin right amongst them mine nets, and into haven. (Norfolk 1944, after which I jumped ship.) Why did the pilot pick old Keroach? (Keroac’h, early spelling hassle among my uncles). Because Keroach has a steady hand you buncha rats who cant write let alone read books—
So my name on the passport is “John,” and was once Shaun when O’Shea and I done Ryan in and Murphy laughed and all we done Ryan in, was a pub.
“And your name?” I ask.
“Ulysse Lebris.”
Over the pillow comforter was the genealogical chart of his family, part of which is called Lebris de Loudéac, which he’d apparently called for preparatorily for my arrival. But he’s just had a hernia operation, that’s why he’s in bed, and his doctor is concerned and telling him to do what should be done, and then leaves.
At first I wonder “Is he Jewish? pretending to be a French aristocrat?” because something about him looks Jewish at first, I mean the particular racial type you sometimes see, pure skinny Semitic, the serpentine forehead, or shall we say, aquiline, and that long nose, and funny hidden Devil’s Horns where his baldness starts at the sides, and surely under that blanket he must have long thin feet (unlike my thick short fat peasant’s feet) that he must waddle aside to as
ide gazotsky style, i.e., stuck out and walking on heels instead of front soles—And his foppish delightful airs, his Watteau fragrance, his Spinoza eye, his Seymour Glass (or Seymour Wyse) elegance tho I then realize I’ve never seen anybody who looked like that except at the end of a lance in another lifetime, a regular blade who took long coach trips from Brittany to Paris maybe with Abelard to just watch bustles bounce under chandeliers, had affairs in rare cemeteries, grew sick of the city and returned to his evenly distributed trees thru which at least his mount knew how to canter, trot, gallop or take off—A coupla stone walls between Combourg and Champsecret, what matters it? A real elegant—
Which I told him right off, still studying his face to see if he was Jewish, but no, his nose was as gleeful as a razor, his blue eyes languid, his Devil’s Horns out-and-out, his feet out of sight, his French diction perfectly clear to anybody even old Carl Adkins of West Virginia if he’d been there, every word meant to be understood, Ah me, to meet an old noble Breton, like tell that old Gabriel de Montgomeri the joke is over—For a man like this armies would form.
It’s that old magic of the Breton noble and of the Breton genius, of which Master Matthew Arnold said: “A note of Celtic extraction, which reveals some occult quality in a familiar object, or tinges it, one knows not how, with ‘the light that never was on sea or land.’”
31.
KUDOS EVER, BUT OVER, WE BEGIN A LICK OF CONversation—(Again, dear Americans of the land of my birth, in ratty French comparable in context to the English they speak in Essex) :– Me :– “Ah sieur, shite, one more cognac.”
“’Ere you are, mighty.” (A pun on “matey” there and let me ask you but one more question, reader:” Where else but in a book can you go back and catch what you missed, and not only that but savor it and keep it up and shove it? D’any Aussie ever tell you that?)
I say: “But my, you are an elegant character, hey what?”
No answer, just a bright glance.
I feel like a clod has to esplain himself. I gaze on him. His head is turned parrotwise at the novelist and the ladies. I notice a glint of interest in the novelist’s eyes. Maybe he’s a cop since he writes police novels. I ask him across the pillows if he knows Simenon? And has he read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, not to mention B. Traven?
I could better go into long serious controversies with M. Ulysse Lebris did he read Nicholas Breton of England, John Skelton of Cambridge, or the ever-grand Henry Vaughan not to mention George Herbert—and you could add, or John Taylor the Water-Poet of the Thames?
Me and Ulysse cant even get a word in edgewise thru our own thoughts.
32.
BUT I’M HOME, THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT, EXCEPT if I were to want a strawberry, or loosen Alice’s shoetongue, old Herrick in his grave and Ulysse Lebris would both yell at me to leave things alone, and that’s when I raw my wide pony and roll.
Well, Ulysse then turns to me bashfully and just looks into my eyes briefly, and then away, because he knows no conversation is possible when every Lord and his blessed cat has an opinion on everything.
But he looks and says “Come over and see my genealogy” which I do, dutifully, I mean, I cant see any more anyhow, but with my finger I trace a hundred old names indeed branching out in every direction, all Finistère and also Côtes du Nord and Morbihan names.
Now think for a minute of these three names :–
(1) Behan
(2) Mahan
(3) Morbihan
Han? (for “Mor” only means “Sea” in Breton Celtic.)
I search blindly for that old Breton name Daoulas, of which “Duluoz” was a variation I invented just for fun in my writerly youth (to use as my name in my novels).
“Where is the record of your family?” snaps Ulysse.
“In the Rivistica Heraldica!” I yell, when I shoulda said “Rivista Araldica” which are Italian words meaning: “Heraldic Review.”
He writes it down.
His daughter comes in again and says she’s read some of my books, translated and published in Paris by that publisher who was out for lunch, and Ulysse is surprised. In fact his daughter wants my autograph. In fact I’m very Jerry Lewis himself in Heaven in Brittany in Israel getting high with Malachiah.
33.
ALL JOKING ASIDE, M. LEBRIS WAS, AND IS, YAIR, an ace—I even went so far as to help myself, to myself’s own invitation (but with a polite (?) eh?) to a third cognac, which at the time I thought had mortified the romancier de police but he never even glanced my way as tho he was studying marks of my fingernails on the floor—(or lint) —
The fact of the matter is, (again that cliché, but we need signposts), me and M. Lebris talked a blue streak about Proust, de Montherlant, Chateaubriand, (where I told Lebris he had the same nose), Saskatchewan, Mozart, and then we talked of the futility of Surrealism, the loveliness of loveliness, Mozart’s flute, even Vivaldi’s, by God I even mentioned Sebastian del Piombo and how he was even more languid than Raffaelc, and he countered with the pleasures of a good comforter (at which point I reminded him paranoiacally of the Paraclete), and he went on, expounding ’pon the glories of Armorica (ancient name of Brittany, ar, “on,” mor, “the sea,”) and I then told him with a dash of thought :– or hyphen:– “C’est triste de trouver que vous êtes malade, Monsieur Lebris” (pronounced Lebriss), “It’s sad to find that you’re ill, Monsieur Lebris, but joyous to find that you’re encircled by your lovers, truly, in whose company I should always want to be found.”
This is all in fancy French and he answered “That’s well put, and with eloquence and elegance, in a manner not always understood nowadays” (and here we sorta winked at each other as we realized we were going to start a routine of talking like two overblown mayors or archbishops, just for fun and to test my formal French), “and it doesnt disturb me to say, in front of my family and my friends, that you are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration” (que vous êtes l’égale de l’idole qui vous à donnez votre inspiration), “if that thought is any comfort to you, you who, doubtless, have no need of comfort among those who wait upon you.”
Picking up: “But, certes, Monsieur, your words, like the flowered barbs of Henry Fifth of England addressed to the poor little French princess, and right in front of his, Oh me, her chaperone, not as if to cut but as the Greeks say, the sponge of vinegar in the mouth was not a cruelty but (again, as we know on the Mediterranean sea) a shot that kills the thirst.”
“Well of course, expressed that way, I shall have no more words, but, in my feebleness to understand the extent of my vulgarities, but that is to say supported by your faith in my undignified efforts, the dignity of our exchange of words is understood surely by the cherubs, but that’s not enough, dignity is such an exe-crable word, and now, before—but no I havent lost the line of my ideas, Monsieur Kerouac, he, in his excellence, and that excellence which makes me forget all, the family, the house, the establishment, in any case :– a sponge of vinegar kills the thirst?”
“Say the Greeks. And, if I could continue to explain everything that I know, your ears would lose the otiose air they wear now—You have, dont interrupt me, listen—”
“Otiose! A word for the Chief Inspector Char-lot, dear Henri!”
The French detective story writer’s not interested in my otiose, or my odious nuther, but I’m trying to give you a stylish reproduction of how we talked and what was going on.
I sure hated to leave that sweet bedside.
Besides, lots of brandy there, as tho I couldnt go out and buy my own.
When I told him the motto of my ancestral family, “Aimer, Travailler et Souffrir” (Love, Work and Suffer) he said: “I like the Love part, as for Work it gave me hernia, and Suffer you see me now.”
Goodbye, Cousin!
P.S. (And the shield was: “Blue with gold stripes accompanied by three silver nails.”)
In sum: In “Armorial Général de J. B. Riestap, Supplement par V. H. Rolland: LEBRIS
DE KEROACK—Canada, originaire de Bretagne. D’azur au chevron d’or accompagné de 3 clous d’argent. D:– AIMER, TRAVAILLER ET SOUFFRIR. RIVISTA ARALDICA, IV, 240.”
And old Lebris de Loudéac he shall certainly see Lebris de Kéroack again, unless one of us, or both of us, die—Which I remind my readers goes back to: Why change your name unless you’re ashamed of something.
34.
BUT I GOT SO FASCINATED BY OLD DE LOUDÉAC, AND not one taxi outside on Rue de Siam, I had to hurry with that 70 pound suitcase in my paw, switching it from paw to paw, and missed my train to Paris by, count it, three minutes.
And I had to wait eight hours till eleven in the cafes around the station—I told the yard switchmen: “You mean to tell me I missed that Paris train by three minutes? What are you Bretons tryna do, keep me here?” I went over to the deadend blocks and pressed against the oiled cylinder to see if it would give and it did so now at least I could write a letter (that’ll be the day) back to Southern Pacific railroad brakemen now train masters and oldheads that in France they couple different, which I s’pose sounds like a dirty postcard, but it’s true, but dingblast it I’ve lost ten pounds running from Ulysse Lebris’ restaurant to the station (one mile) with that bag, alright, shove it, I’ll store the bag in baggage and drink for eight hours—
But, as I unpin my little McCrory suitcase (Monkey Ward it actually was) key, I realize I’m too drunk and mad to open the lock (I’m looking for my tranquilizers which you must admit I need by now), in the suitcase, the key is pinned as according to my mother’s instructions to my clothes—For a full twenty minutes I kneel there in the baggage station of Brest Brittany trying to make the little key open the snaplock, cheap suitcase anyhow, finally in a Breton rage I yell “O u v r e d o n c m a u d i t !” (OPEN UP DAMN YOU!!) and break the lock—I hear laughter—I hear someone say: “Le roi Kerouac” (the king Kerouac). I’d heard that from the wrong mouths in America. I take off the blue knit rayon necktie and, after taking out a pill or two, and an odd flask of cognac, I press down on the suitcase with the broken lock (one of em broken) and I wrap the necktie around, make one full twist tight, pull tight, and then, grabbing one end of the necktie in my teeth and pulling whilst holding the knot down with middle (or woolie) finger, I endeavor to bring the other end of the necktie around the taut toothpulled end, loop it in, steady as you go, then lower my great grinning teeth to the suitcase of all Brittany, till I’m kissing it, and bang!, mouth pulls one way, hand the other, and that thing is tied tighter than a tied-ass mother’s everloving son, or son of a bitch, one.