Читать книгу A voyage to Pagany - William Carlos Williams - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Paris! where notable Englishmen come to see their illegitimate daughters.

Paris, a place abandoned and serious. What is its tooted frivolity? The froth of serious waves?—In this way, it being now full evening, Evans had been composing apostrophes to Paris for the last twenty minutes of his ride—Paris! Its frivolity, its frantic milling about for pleasure—that’s America, not France—“Jenseits des Lust-prinzips.” These are the evidences of a seriousness foreign to us; this rock sets us spinning as dry land does feet after a ship. From the small cities of the whole world, frivolous from their bedrooms to the ornate corridors of the minds of their—to every little chamber where men and women hide themselves to do business of whatever sort—and no business without first the gesture of hiding—in Paris it bursts out to become serious—

Paris as a serious city, the beloved of men; Paris that releases what there is in men—the frivolity that means a knife cut through self-deception.

He also thought of Paris as a woman watching for a lover. Paris is a stitched-up woman watching the international array that constantly deploys about the Eiffel tower and goes frantically about its streets in the squealing taxis—hunting a lover.

It must be a lover. He must come of machines, he must break through. Nothing will subdue him.

Yes, that is Paris. Nothing will subdue him. Finally he grows serious, finally clear. It expects lovers out of the hearts of machines. Out of the felted chamber of boredom you must come clean. Somehow you must have saved, must have built up a great seriousness.

Good God, Paris—He remembered how he had hated it; just an opportunity to shed the nerves; the cast-off of international malady, like the crutches at Lourdes.

They were passing through the city now. And Evans began to think of the stern morality of certain legendary great French families, the rigid discipline, the cold aloofness from the loose life of Montmartre, bespeaking a solidity of character which permits liberties no other nature could afford. He remembered his mother’s stories. And her brother’s.

And they are dextrous. To that he added “argus-eyed.”

Paris wipes all frivolity aside and stares in. What are you made of? What are you made of? What are you made of? It coincided with the slowing rhythm of the train. Then try it, try it then, try it then.

This is the secret of Paris—and, that if it be a lover, here is the reward.

Come, you incestuous,

Bald and uxorious.

In the crowd at the Gare St. Lazare the porter was drunk and started to put up a scene. What! only two francs. What! for the boat train!—Evans gave him five and demanded the two in return. The porter gave them back grumbling, and the dilapidated taxi started out madly into the rain in the disordered whirl about the station front. At his time of life Evans was less inclined to stop the parade to think than formerly. He was always straining out of windows. And now for the third time in Paris he stared and stared into the gloom of the rue du Havre in an excited frame of mind. Had it changed?

Had it changed since as a boy Trufley had taken him to the Catacombs and on the great boulevards fed him syrop de Groseille while he himself slowly sipped absinthe and smiled and smiled? Had it changed since that day when, a schoolboy from great America, he had sat playing with others on the third floor of an apartment house on rue la Bruyère, and one of the little devils had tried to push him out of the low French window? Coup de poing americain! He smiled. Had it changed since he had come from Germany reading Heine; from London where he had seen the literary world just before the war?

What would Jack be like now? And he was anxious to meet his sister. No one had come to the station. Well, so much the better. He wondered what luck he would have on this trip. And always he kept saying: Perhaps this is the time. Something may happen and I shall not return.

But what to do? and what to do next?

Bess, his sister, was in Paris ostensibly to sing. She had the available cash of the family that their mother had left them when she died. Evans wanted none of it; he could work. Bess was twelve years her brother’s junior. They had sided together against the old man. Evans was like his mother. “Bess is like the old man—purged,” her brother sometimes said.

Marvelous to be in Paris, the air is different; feel it at once. Even that night he had to go out for a walk—anywhere—to the Boulevards.

You must not be afraid.—But Evans was uncertain—and American—and this and that and careless—and amused and lazy and more than a little critical and no drunkard at any time and—hard to crack, a sparrow in short. He wanted to write—that was all, and not to have written, but to be writing. He got his whisky that way, he got all he ever got from that. To be feeling it in his mind and his fingers as it flowed out. And there in secret he lived.

What a life! But Paris understands that too. It did not seem to Evans that he was afraid; it was that he had to discard so much to get at what he wanted that he never arrived anywhere. The whole world is built to keep it from being said. And so he walked admiring the fabric of it—the hateful fabric.—No, he laughed, not hateful, but in the repulsive phase. Every discovery is only a discovery to hide it deeper.—How shall I talk to Jack for instance, when I see him?