Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 17

JOURNALIST OR GRAVEDIGGER?

It was a winter dawn heavy with clouds the color of pewter. Frost had formed overnight and patches of rime speckled the railing where I stood, an unknown emptiness now claiming a share of my jumbled emotions.

I’d awakened early and gone up on deck to see the Statue of Liberty, ready to weep with ritual if unfelt reverence, eager to surrender like a pilgrim at a holy shrine to its symbolism and physicality. But the androgynous, vacant-eyed stone-faced monolith had loomed across the bow; it had risen against the drab grayness of New York’s concrete piers, fuming smokestacks and decaying wooden hangars, then receded on the port side.

To my dismay, the titan elicited none of the prescribed passions or susceptibilities. I found it stiff, almost intimidating: it lacked the stirring vigor or mythic grace I had envisioned. I’d often glimpsed its diminutive twins, one under the chestnut trees in the Jardin du Luxembourg where I played as a child, the other perched on a battlement overlooking the Seine. Both, I thought -- my sense of observation now in doubt -- exuded more charm, if not splendor, than the square-jawed icon with the sphinxlike gaze towering above New York Harbor.

“America! America!” cried out a man as he surveyed the unfolding scene. He was at my elbow by the railing. I’d not seen him draw near. His hands were clasped against his chest the way people hail a miracle or flinch before a great calamity, and he was shaking his head from side to side as if his eyes and his soul were not yet in sync. Gaunt, weather-beaten, a week-old ashen stubble adding age to his years, he seemed to be inhaling the colossal spectacle, the unimaginable enormity that is New York. Every pore, every crevice on his brow spoke of life endured, hopes deflected, fears surmounted and, now, it seemed, dreams fulfilled.

I would have given anything to know his exhilaration, to share in his feelings of redemption, to consecrate with tears of gratitude my own ascension to the Promised Land.

“Yes. America,” I echoed without joy, startled and dismayed to find myself at its gates. Idealized and reinvented, perhaps as a hedge against its unfathomable essence, half lusted, half feared like a forbidden fruit, America had been but one of a thousand islands in a huge archipelago of youthful fantasies. Yesterday, in the unbroken vastness of the steel-blue sea, America had been the future. Yesterday, there was a tomorrow to anticipate, a reality as yet unconsummated among a stockpile of nebulous expectations. It was an indwelling, irreducible now that I faced as the colossus dissolved into a nether realm of vapor and shadows and ghostlike vessels heaving in the channel’s inky waters.

The man grabbed my wrist and repeated, “America. Can it be? I’ve waited so long.”

“Now look, sir,” I wanted to tell the man, “it’s adventure I seek, not sanctuary. Yes, I’m nomad, restless vagrant, drifter, a wandering Jew beguiled by locomotion, a gypsy craving new horizons, a vagabond enlivened not by landings but by ceaseless migrations, a wayfarer steering not toward the nearest port of call but chasing after the open sea on a journey without end. I’m all that, I grant you. Like my father before me, I roam, seeking both uniformity and self-regeneration through change, finding constancy and coherence in mutability, endlessly coveting a foretaste of the things only anticipation hint at. But I am no refugee, I tell you, no battered remnant of war, and I resent that I might be mistaken for one. Unhand me, please.”

But I said nothing. I didn’t have the heart. A youthful insolence still percolating in my veins, traumatized by the inexplicable reality in which I’d suddenly been drawn, I wanted to distance myself from this tempest-tossed wretched refuse who like millions, had reached the golden door of America’s promise. I ambled instead to the starboard side, the overcoat my parents had purchased a fortnight earlier no match against the arctic chill. Manhattan’s skyline rose before me, a monochrome carcass, unreal, like a theater backdrop, grotesque in its breadth and bulk, and rendered all the more forbidding as memories of Paris, my beloved Paris, submerged my mind’s eye with tears. I blamed the wind. I didn’t want the man to think that they were tears of relief or elation.

*

Montmartre. Frame by frame, I relive the moment: A cobbled courtyard. Madame Muche, the concierge, is there, ruddy-cheeked, feinting peevishness but susceptible to gallantry. A blue denim apron girds her opulent rotundity. She is mopping the portico’s weather-worn stoop. A vague odor of fried onion wafts from her unshaven armpits.

“Bonjour, Madame Muche.”

“Bonjour, jeune homme. Alors, l’école, ça va?”

“Tout va très bien, merci. And how are things with you?”

“Bof, as you see, a million chores, little time, only ten fingers.” Josephine Muche props the broom handle against a broad, sallow cleavage and shows me the palms of her hands. “Just look at them. Have you ever seen anything so pathetic?”

I mumble words of commiseration and offer her some chocolate. She blushes like a schoolgirl then scolds me softly.

“You shouldn’t. I’m on a diet. My liver, you know.” But she takes the offering and devours it all the same and the sugar triggers another burst of irascibility, this time aimed at her husband, Maurice, a burly, warmhearted Paris gendarme, who is pumping air in their six-year-old son Lucien’s bicycle.

“Some people have it easy,” Josephine demurs, raising her eyebrows. “He’s off today. You’d think he’d use his big muscles, the lunkhead, and help a little.

“Pay her no heed, mon petit,” rejoins Maurice, grinning. “It’s pure theater. She should have been on stage, the woman. She’s got enough talent for two, n’est-ce-pas?” Maurice spreads his arms, draws two semi-circles in the air and cups his enormous hairy hands on the downward curve as if to enfold an imaginary pair of buttocks. Mortified, Madame Muche bites her lower lip, peers over her glasses and shakes an outraged finger at her husband. But outrage gives way to amusement and she surrenders a good-natured smile.

“Ah, les hommes! Men. They’re all the same.”

Emboldened, Maurice aims the bicycle pump at his wife’s behind.

“We can’t let the air out of such talent, can we?”

Little Lucien squeals with delight.

“Do it, papa, do it.”

His mother parries, raises the broom and threatens to hit her husband over the head.

“Now, now, mon amour.” Maurice cowers with feigned terror. “Who loves his little Fifine? Her little Momo, non?” Madame Muche melts. They lay down their weapons and embrace. Monsieur Muche grabs Madame’s generous posterior and declares with Gallic showmanship, “if that’s not talent, I don’t know what is....”

“Run for your life,” Madame Muche exhorts. “This man is incorrigible. I’m liable to.... Oh, la la!”

I retreat, laughing, and scale four flights up a steep, creaking wooden stairway sagging from a century or more of clambering feet. Each narrow landing gives onto two small apartments with tiny rooms and eccentric plumbing. I’m embarked on a dizzying voyage up a spiral gullet resonating with discordant sounds and reeking with disparate exhalations, all vying for dominance. The fullness of their vitality haunts me still: I can smell Mademoiselle Vauclair’s Friday fare -- cabbage soup, chicken gizzards and fried leeks. Madame Jabois’ tremulous renditions of Mistinguett’s classic, Mon Homme, later reprised by Fanny Brice in My Man, echo as she sloshes twice weekly in her Empire brass tub. Monsieur Vacheron’s stentorian voice thunders like a summer storm as he barks at his eight-year-old daughter, Monique, over some petty infraction. Next door, Sylvie Lefèvre, unkindly favored by nature, stridently denies her husband's absurd accusations of infidelity with the butcher’s errand-boy. Eugène Lefèvre knows his wife is incapable of disloyalty but morbid suspicion sharpens his libido and they eventually bury their sham conflict in furious and sonorous make-up sex.

Mornings bring the redolence of croissants, evenings the aroma of freshly baked baguettes. Radios hum in cacophonous unison, summarizing soccer scores, blasting the latest popular hits or reporting on some faraway conflict. I can hear the Golaud children repeating their verses in an exhausting drone as the garlic in Madame Morabito’s ailloli and the commingling vapors of hearty wines and pungent beers waft and settle in mid-air.

In this olfactory and sonic Babel also lived Wanda, her presence foretold by the heavy perfume she wore -- Mitsouko by Guerlain -- and the lugubrious wails she emitted at odd hours of the day and night, compliments of a mercifully discreet assortment of suitors. She had an unpronounceable Polish name so everyone called her “La Vanda” or “l’anglaise,” even though she hailed from Steubenville, Ohio, via Tangiers and other Byronic locales, all tested and abandoned in favor of Paris. Wanda was a tall, cadaverous middle-aged expatriate, the living caricature of many a castaway I would chance upon in Hamburg and Tegucigalpa, Marseilles and Port-of-Spain. Bedaubed with funereal make-up, she had an incurable American twang and a weakness for gin. I’d vainly tried to sharpen my English and often engaged her in conversation about Chicago and gangsters and cowboys and Indians and Hollywood and skyscrapers and the mighty Mississippi -- pretty much all I knew about America. But “l’anglaise” was either too drunk to contribute useful intelligence or she’d invariably insist on trading sex for the education I yearned. I never took her up on it. I’d often wandered what it might be like to fuck an American but a mixture of pity and revulsion made such commerce unlikely.

There are women one hungers for even after; others from whom one is sated well before.

Only the Bredoux brothers -- Bernard and Bertrand -- veterans of La Grande Guerre, never married and subsisting on their pensions, lived in unsettling silence amid the dissonance and ubiquitous effluvia. They were kind-hearted souls with gentle smiles and simple truths, not given to idle chatter but always ready to comfort or encourage. I could see them now, their tall, lanky frames bent by age, a vague mustiness exuding from their taupe-colored cardigans, as they read the papers by the window -- France Soir and old copies of Le Petit Parisien. They’d been generous with their baskets of green Normandy apples and steaming chestnuts. They’d offered me other gifts along the way -- a small plaster bust of Hector Berlioz, a tortoise shell cigarette case, a gold-tipped fountain-pen, an illustrated first edition of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth.

I’d objected politely but they’d insisted. “It’ll be that much less to dust,” they’d quipped, winking at each other. “You’re doing us a favor, my boy.” It was a hint that held, in its subtlety, the promise of some impending finality I did not have the maturity to decipher. I continued to do errands for them on rainy days or when the pain in their joints flared up. They never spoke about the Great War. I never asked. All wars, I surmised, possess a prosaic commonality, a tragic redundancy that makes explication quite useless. It is the mark of great soldiers never to reminisce. Bernard and Bertrand committed suicide, I later learned, when life, irrelevant and joyless, ceased to be worth living. They were found in bed, their medals and ribbons lying at the bottom of chamber pots in which they had dutifully -- and with studied scorn for the military establishment, La République and posterity -- taken their last shit. It was a scene straight out of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: blasphemy exalted by contempt.

Above the din and the scents, tucked away at the top of a narrow wooden corkscrew staircase, was home at last. It was in the nurturing silence of this sparsely furnished mansard that I withdrew after work and school. Delivered from the world below, I’d hasten to the dormer, part the chintz curtains and gape at my city the way a boy covets a woman. Under me were the streets. I could read in their cadence like from an open diary and I reveled in their pantomimes. In the distance, Paris spread like a tapestry of gilded domes, verdant parks, esplanades, and ancient spires, and I’d marvel at the loveliness, the grace, long after twilight had draped the city in a star-studded mantle of lilac and periwinkle blue.

I’d then turn to my books. In their pages, I explored the unrevealed nature of things, unearthing strange and wondrous emotions, toying with enticing abstractions. I wanted to conquer everything that is known and, if possible, to understand all that is unknowable. Such quest, I would discover, was as self-defeating as it was all-consuming. Alluring as they were, the voices behind the words (or was it the echo of my own ruminations?) invariably raised more questions than they answered. Curiosity is a long hallway filled with an infinite number of doors. Most never swing open, even at the loudest rap. I would settle on the notion that to seek knowledge is to know. In prospecting the unknown, I would also later concede, I was not so much interested in acquiring new insights (I was even less impressed with their utility or application) as in how they played on my imagination, how they kindled certain longings. Once digested, essential knowledge and fresh perspectives opened up a world into which I withdrew the better to savor the transcendent realms they evoked. I was intent at all cost, and with each newly apprehended truth, to let my subconscious roam free. Knowledge was in vain unless it had the capacity to stir, touch, shock or stupefy.

“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 dryads 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.”

There was no applause. We all sat motionless, struck by the chancellor's acerbic reception, a vague uneasiness slowly scaling up the collective spine of a dozen bright-eyed adolescents dreaming of clever scoops, scorching exposés and poignant editorials.

*

My father, a physician, had hoped I’d follow in his footsteps but shameful grades in math, physics and chemistry had mercifully and decisively dashed these paternal designs. My maternal uncle, a well-to-do criminal lawyer who defended men he knew deserved to be drawn-and-quartered, had urged me to pursue a legal career. His courtroom theatrics, the flourish of his sleeve work, the ostentation of his blackjack arguments against blameless plaintiffs -- his very assertion that the worst scoundrels are entitled to due process -- had seemed incongruous at the time and given me all the ammunition I needed to reject his counsel -- and profession. Years later he lovingly chided me and claimed that mine was the only “case” he’d ever lost.

“What sort of victory would you have wrested had I ignored my instincts, disobeyed my conscience and yielded to coercion,” I asked. He smiled with avuncular pride and shook his head. “Like I said, you’d have made one helluva lawyer.”

Standing numb and speechless in the atrium of the Paris School of Journalism that balmy September morning, I found myself summoned before a hurriedly convened court of self-inquiry. The evidence was slim, the exhibits trivial. Fiery high school prose had earned me a number of prizes -- a book of poems by Alfred de Vigny; a selection from the Letters of Madame de Sévigné -- and the cautious admiration of my teachers. I’d excelled in literature, history and geography, but I’d flunked everything else. Stirred by charity, the principal had written impassioned letters of recommendation, but the School of Journalism had acted with circumspection and agreed to enroll me provisionally.

I paused for dramatic effect and shrugged my shoulders. “It’s either that or grave digger,” as my uncle had often warned. To my uncle, who had never defended a single honest, hard-working client in his entire career, and who feared death until it claimed him, being a grave digger was a ghoulish and contemptible occupation. Having one in the family would be calamitous. I would later concede that I’d grossly misjudged my uncle’s metaphorical admonitions. Being a brilliant attorney and an intellectual did not prevent him from holding manual labor in the highest regard. But the oft-repeated warning had had the desired effect. I flipped a mental coin in the air. “Heads, journalism; tails….” What an odd piece, I remarked. No tails.

“So journalism it is. It’ll be a living,” I reasoned with greater incertitude than conviction.

A living? Barely. Journeymen reporters earn subsistence wages. They survive on raw energy, frayed nerves, half-digested fare of dubious origin, they spend sleepless nights and torpid days separating rumor from reality, insinuation from fact and they live, as two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Russell Baker once put it,

“...in a world where time is forever running out. On their inner clock it’s always two minutes to midnight and the work is only half done, maybe not even started yet, and they absolutely must have it ready for the printer before the bell tolls, whether they have anything to write or not. It’s not a work that suits everybody. High blood pressure goes with the territory, alcohol is an occupational hazard, and anyone too proud to confess cheerfully to a steady flow of errors and bad judgments will not be happy at it. When you’re playing to a large public and there is no time for second thought you may as well get used to looking foolish. Error and misjudgment are your destiny.”

Baker also shrewdly observed that “reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.”

I was hooked.