I was glad I had come to Paris. I wondered about it at first, but after three days I was certain. There was no other place in the world that would have done for me just at this time. It was impossible to be really lonely in Paris. That was the importance of it - that was the whole thing - not to be lonely. There was no conceivable comparison between Paris and London. I leant over a bridge looking down upon the Seine, and I thought of that other time back in London on that other bridge. It could not happen here. There was something in the warm, dusty air that was against it. It was easy to forget myself because of a little tattered book in a collection of books on the side of the quay, because of an ancient man with a long white beard and a wide-brimmed black hat, because of Notre-Dame soft and grey above a network of bridges, with one white cloud in a pink sky; and then gathering these things to me and walking away from the quays in any direction, up the hill again to Montparnasse, rubbing shoulders with people who smiled, coming to a café where the sun-blinds stretched to the pavement, and there would not be an inch of room; somebody waving L’Intransigeant in my face, a smell of burnt bread and Camel cigarettes, and the sombre eyes of a bearded man and the red lips of a girl in a yellow scarf.
It seemed to me that there was no finality to these pictures; they were little flashes of life that broke in upon a line of vision and were gone because another came and then another. I went on sitting at my rounded table blocked by a hum of voices and a hundred eager waving hands, and I said to myself that if I was old I would consider these people as an explosion of gas, a waste of air, and energy to no purpose, coming to a crisis over nothing, but being young I wanted to be as passionate as they, and as warm. I wanted to share their enthusiasms and lose myself, too, in some belief, no matter what it should be, only for the zest and fire of the believing. It was not the faith itself that mattered, but the possessing of it. To be stimulated in any way; the rest was a side issue. I wanted to go deeply into things, not ever to stand apart with a half interest. Thus after these three days in Paris I pretended to be blindly interested in the glimpses of life that came my way, in the pictures that people gave of themselves, mirrored in my mind. The old things did not matter to me. I did not stand transfigured before the windows in the Sainte-Chapelle; I did not watch the shadowed arches in Notre-Dame, nor did I lose myself in narrow streets and in dim churches; I was aware only of the life that went on around me, the strange intimacy of a café, the familiarity of faces I did not know, and wondering how they lived - that man and that woman.
This, then, was the Paris of my first few days, an impressionistic study, patches of colour and flashes of gloom, a suggestion of fullness throughout, so that in some strange way I was dragged into the picture, caught up in it and carried along, and there was no time for reflexion, no time for being entirely alone in a room and thinking.
And this was good, for I did not want to be alone in a room and thinking. The sound of Paris took me away from the silence of the Baie des Trépassés, the laughter and clatter of the cafés covered the hollow whisper of the spent tide retreating from the hold of the Romanie. There was the fellowship of people who were strangers to me, becoming infinitely precious and dear, the broad back of a man with a straw hat on his knees, the flushed warm face of a woman tired with many parcels dragging at the hand of a child, and I clung to them and the supreme power they possessed of rousing a story in my imagination of what he was thinking, of where she was going, so that this might continue in a chain of stories, and never for one moment would I hesitate, and pause, and turn unconsciously to him who had gone from me and then be shaken in a wave of remembrance, and so be lost once more and alone.
I knew now that this sound and this movement of a breathing, living city were necessary to me, and the contact of people, never to be away from people. In some way I must mingle in their lives, be bound up with them, be recognized as one of them. Not be myself, solitary and absurd, creeping to a quiet corner. I had got to go on living, therefore I must live well, and quickly if possible, seeing much, drinking it all in, making some sort of a business of living, placing a value on everything I did, saying to myself: ‘This is a good moment . . . and this . . . and this. . . .’ Definitely I would stop in Paris, I would not go away from Paris. I was not quite sure how I was going to live. It gave me a thrill of excitement, this, the uncertainty of it - never being sure from day to day. And while I was sitting here in Montparnasse, on the terrace of the Dôme, lounging back with empty pockets, smoking American cigarettes, more than a little drunk, there would come to me the image of my father in England, the long windows opened on to the shadowed lawn, and he sitting there, assured, famous, the memory of me, his son, coming not to trouble the smooth continuity of his life that mattered so much. I could write to him for money, of course. It amused me to play with the thought. The inevitable eight-page letter, whining for assistance, admitting failure - the beaten puppy with his tail between his legs. Or sending a wire, a plain statement of facts, carrying it off with a high hand.
I would not do either of these things, not I. I would not be humble and accept his kindness - gratitude and the rest of it. I did not want those sorts of sensations in my life. I could hear the voices of his friends: ‘He was so good to him, you know, so good to him.’ Because he would send me the money if I asked for it. I knew that all right. He would send it willingly, without any reproaches, having expected such a summons for a long while. He would not even take it seriously; he would open the letter at breakfast with a little smile and a shrug of his shoulders, looking across at my mother. ‘Something from Richard at last. In trouble, of course. We had better send him a cheque, and his fare home. Will you see to it, my dear? You had better read his letter.’
And then he would open The Times, folding it carefully, turning to the centre page, while my mother rather anxious and flushed fingered my close-written screed, worried that his breakfast might have been spoilt by my interruption, and ashamed that she had had a hand in the making of me, his son, who should have turned out so differently, who had been such a quiet little boy - no trouble - and now all this suddenly, all this. Such a worry, such a breaking up of the placidity of things. My father wandering off to the library, his indifference to me sincere, not even a cover of pretence, and then looking out of the window absently, his eyes fixed, an old man with no understanding, and back to his desk, giving the lie to this, steadying his pen with steady fingers, calmly, clearly, writing his way into the pages of immortality. . . .
No, I would not whine to him. I could stand by myself. I would not trade on his name or his relationship. It gave me a keen satisfaction, this feeling of intense individualism.The famous father, the outcast son. Being free of him, being a rebel, smashing at authority. I would show them all what I was made of - one day. Here was I, just nobody, drunk in a café, but I was more alive than he. Drinking took away my inferiority. I painted a picture of myself to myself, rather a devil, getting what he could out of life and not caring, then startling the world with some magnificent gesture. Living intensely, supremely. . . . Oh! yes, that was me all right. If I had been sober I should only have been a boy sitting at a little table on a pavement outside a restaurant, going back later to a solitary room, with no occupation, slightly foolish, very inexperienced and lonely - admittedly lonely, but I was drunk and full of deep-worn theories, and this was Paris, and I was a grand fellow. I called stoutly about me, I cursed a waiter for the slow service, I bought a French paper which I did not read, I gazed slowly and critically at the legs of a passing girl.
Why should anyone doubt me? - I knew about these things.
There was a party at the next table. There was a man with a beard and full, protruding eyes, he kept smashing his fist on his knee and talking all the time. He wore a purple shirt, open at the neck. By his side sat another man, small and putty-faced, who hung upon his words, and there was a tall fair boy bending over their table now, a portfolio of drawings under his arm which I felt he would never sell nor have the courage to show, and t
here were two girls without hats, bad figures and good hair. They tried to look Hungarian, but were English all the time, and this did not matter to me, being drunk, they were not ridiculous at all. I was certain that they painted brilliantly and wrote brilliantly, but nobody understood them, and they were in advance of their age - one day they would be understood - but in the meantime they would work furiously, and burn with ideas, and be miserable for no reason, and talk too much, and all sleep with each other on different nights.
‘I’m not drunk,’ I said to myself, ‘I’m not drunk at all.’
I listened to them gravely, catching snatches of their conversation, and every word they spoke seemed to me to be sincere and true. There was not an atom of absurdity in the man with the long brown beard. He was the apostle of a new faith. ‘In art,’ he said, ‘sex is everything. You can’t get away from it.’
I nodded my head as though I were sitting at his table, and I wondered if this was a very new idea or if perhaps I had heard it somewhere before.
‘Every curve in drawing,’ he continued, ‘expresses a sex-urge. Unconsciously, of course, to people who deliberately blind themselves to their own impulses, but to us - to us who know, it is the very essence of creation. When I fling a straight line on to a stretch of canvas, I always remind myself that it isn’t a line - it’s a symbol, a sex-symbol. If I wasn’t aware of this I shouldn’t be able to draw at all.’
He paused, and we all stared at him in admiration.
‘We’ve got to cultivate it,’ he said: ‘we’ve got to break away from this state of appalling passivity. We must acknowledge sex on canvas, but not as a product of civilization - it must come from within ourselves as a last definite protest. . . .’
I was lost in wonder at his flow of words. Then one of the girls spoke. ‘Kroenstein says that there is no such thing as sex,’ she announced; ‘he says that it only exists in our imagination.’
Ha! Here was a poser.This would not be so easy for the fellow in the beard. If Kroenstein said a thing like that . . . I had never heard of him, it was true, but anyone with the name of Kroenstein surely. . . . Was I very drunk? My bearded man would not give way, though; he was determined to carry off the situation. He laughed, and leant back in his chair with a shrug of his shoulders.
‘You’re a little behind the times, aren’t you?’ he said; ‘nobody has believed in Kroenstein for at least three months. He’s gone right out.’
That of course was another matter. I felt sorry for the girl. Still, it was her own fault for trying to brag about her knowledge of Kroenstein. I smiled stupidly to myself and nodded my head. I watched the same figures pass up and down the pavement in front of the Dôme, stroll down as far as the Coupole, and then return again, crossing over the street to the Rotonde. The same figures, over and over again.
This was great, this brilliance, this noise, this clatter of traffic, and my head swimming and my eyes staring. I wasn’t lonely - not I. . . .
I could hear the fellow in the beard holding the conversation again.
‘You, Josef, paint in terms of rhythm,’ he was saying; ‘I can tell by your work that you’re striving for some inner purity that you haven’t yet learnt to control. You’re sex-conscious, too, but it doesn’t break the harmony.’ The fair boy leant forward eagerly.
‘You say it,’ he exclaimed, ‘you say it very truly. Rhythm has more importance to me than the sex.’
But here the putty-faced man shook his head, he laid his hand on the shoulder of the fair boy.
‘Rhythm,’ he said, ‘will lead you so far - and then, pouf!’ (he snapped his fingers). ‘You come against a blank wall. Symmetry of design is the great thing to achieve, but you’ll have to surrender to sex before you purify yourself. You’ll have to surrender.’
The fair boy looked about him a little helplessly. I wondered if he would surrender to sex immediately or if he would wait until he got home. Then the other girl spoke, the fattest and plainest of the two. She wore horn-rimmed spectacles and she was spotty under the skin.
‘If only,’ she said, ‘if only we really knew just what it was that our bodies wanted.’
They looked at her with respect; they were silent, they admitted that she had thrown across to them a thought of very deep intensity. I began to imagine a little conversation between the girl and myself.
‘When I look at you,’ I was saying, ‘I know perfectly well what my body doesn’t want.’ And then she would crumple up like a child from a convent, and burst into tears. ‘It can’t be much fun for a girl,’ I thought, ‘unless she is pretty.’
I sat very still and watched the flickering lights of the Rotonde, while their voices went on and on, droning in my ear, and I was very far away, really. . . .’
After a while I shook myself out of a dream, and I looked at them, and I saw there was another man sitting at their table, and he was thin and very round-shouldered, and his face was olive green. He was the only one of them who wore a hat, one of those wide black ones that suggest no sense of humour - or possibly too much. He called for another round of drinks. He fluttered notes in his hands, hundred-franc notes.
‘I wish,’ thought I, ‘that all that belonged to me,’ and I fumbled in my pocket and drew forth a crumpled five-franc note. And this was all that remained, and I was drunk and I did not care. I looked across at them all sitting at the next table. The olive-green man was important; even beard and putty-face sat back and let him do all the talking.
‘I want you to do the cover this month, Carlo,’ he was saying, ‘and I want you for once to give your mind entirely to me, not to let yourself be swayed by an impulse coming from your own indifference. I want you to express my thought in curves, and I suggest that the thought be called “Flight” - you can, of course, lend it something of your own treatment.’
‘By “flight”,’ said Carlo with the beard, ‘you mean to convey one distinct impression of the slipping away of the mind after the consummation of the body?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Then there must be no striving after tone effect?’
‘None.’
Carlo seemed disappointed. I thought it was a damned shame he shouldn’t have his tone effect - a damned shame.
‘Of course,’ said olive green, ‘it must be formless, utterly formless. You can’t connect any purity of line with impotence. Your curve must suggest relaxation - a negation of sex after the act.’
‘Yes - yes - I understand.’
It was more than I did. I did not understand one bloody word of what they were saying. I had half a mind to tell them so, too. It would serve them right. None of this was real, anyway, so what the hell did it matter what I said to them? I got up from my table and dragged my chair after me. I pushed against one of the girls, and sat down, and struck my fist on the table.
‘Nonsense,’ I said loudly, and that was all. They gazed at me in astonishment. I could see the blank surprise in their faces. The fat girl was the first to recover herself.
‘You get out of here,’ she said.
I smiled at her politely, and then I remembered, and I shook my finger at her in reproach.
‘You,’ I said, ‘are the girl who wants to know what to do with her body. That’s right, isn’t it?’ She flushed under her skin and looked away from me in disgust.
‘He’s drunk,’ she said.
I stood up again, and bowed to them very gravely.
‘I think you are all so charming,’ I said, ‘so very charming.’
‘Who are you?’ asked Carlo.
‘I’m a poet,’ I said.
Olive green raised his eyebrows. ‘We are not interested in you,’ he said.
I looked at him a little sadly. ‘That’s where you make such a big mistake,’ I told him; ‘you ought to be interested. You need a wider, broader vision than the science of curves can ever give you. I don’t believe in curves - I never did.’
‘Are you a sodomite?’ asked the other girl.
I considered this thoughtfully
for a few moments.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t sufficient rhythm.’
‘Supposing you go back to your table and leave us in peace?’ suggested olive green.
‘I would rather recite one of my poems to you,’ I said.
This was very amusing. I was enjoying myself. Or wasn’t I? I sat down at their table once more. ‘My poem is a study in repression,’ I said; ‘I wrote it some time back, but I don’t think it is really dated. In fact, between you and me, I think it’s pretty good.’
I began to say the lines of the poem that once, long, long ago, I had laid on the desk in the library before my father, and he had taken the paper in his hands, and then let it flutter softly on to the floor.
And a boy had run away down the chestnut drive, flying from the shadows that pursued him. But I was not that boy any more, I was somebody else, escaping down another drive, escaping from another shadow.
‘Perhaps you would like to hear some more,’ I said when I had finished; ‘if I can remember rightly there is one poem that deals with a different sort of sensation entirely.’
They looked at me stupidly, and their faces were flat, like ghosts, without any expression.
‘Well?’ I said later, ‘and if the first was too thin for you, what do you think of that one?’ I leant back, my hands on my knees, unconscious of ridicule, proud of my little triumph.
‘Do you want another?’ I said.
And when I had come to the end of my little repertoire I saw that they were smiling at me, and the olive-green man was rubbing his hands together, and the ugly girl’s eyes were large behind her glasses. She breathed heavily, she leant against me, excited.
‘It’s marvellous,’ she said, ‘marvellous.’ And the bearded man looked at me and laughed, and suddenly they were all aware of each other, as though this was the first time they were together. I hated them then, I hated them. It was all right before when I could fool them with their curves, and their rhythm, and their symmetry of design. Not now, though. They were different. It was not a game to any of us any longer. They were men and women with narrow, horrible minds, running round and round the same subject like moles in a trap, little moles, fusty and evil-smelling. And I was not so drunk as I thought I was.