I WAS BORN during a historical interlude that has yet to be properly charted by the historians, in no small part due to its utter insignificance. What has been portrayed as novel and revolutionary from the 1910s onwards was born of warweariness and a self-willed amnesia. Euphoria, ekstasis, the wind of inspiration, the fire of idealism, all of it had perished on the plains of Champagne, on the Somme, in Flanders Fields. Those who charted the paths of surrealism, cubism and all the artistic -isms that followed in the wake of the murderous political -isms and schisms, were the confections of sons of academics who knew nothing of battles, military or even professional life, and those who had tasted the bitter fruits of the assembly-line were few and far between.
Heroism was no longer tendance. Sacrifice was a con game, for suckers, and returning veterans from each of the great conflicts were honoured in their invisibility. Apollinaire and Cendrars were the last of the sucker soldiers. Even in the waning days of the Great War, when Apollinaire died, Cendrars, Raymone and Fernand Léger joined up to mourn the soldier poet. They stopped for a few glasses of rum on a grey and grisly Paris day at a small café on Boulevard St. Germain, prior to ascending to Montmartre for the funeral. Cendrars recounts the shameful episode of how his funeral began so dignified, and ended in ignominy:
Let me tell you about the funeral. The priest had just given absolution. Just by the St. Thomas Aquinas portico, the coffin of Apollinaire emerged, draped with the French flag. We pushed the coffin inside the hearse. Guillaume’s lieutenant képi was placed on the tricoloured flag, clearly displayed among the crowns and the flowers. The guard of honour — a demisquadron of poilus regulars, weapons held under the arm — lined up, and the convoy rumbled along slowly, the family moving slowly on foot behind the vehicle. His mother, his wife were wearing mourning veils. Poor Jacqueline had barely escaped the Spanish flu epidemic herself that had taken away Guillaume ... But then, as the cortège turned onto boulevard Saint Germain, it was assaulted by booing and jeers coming from an out-of-control crowd cut loose of the most recent mob of protesters celebrating the Armistice, men and women arm-in-arm, singing, dancing, embracing each other and howling in delirium the famous refrain of the end of the war:
‘... Nay, ya shouldn’a done it, you shouldn’a done it, Guillaume, Nay, you shouldn’a gone, you shouldn’a gone to war.’1
I was never attracted to any art scene, and certainly not the Paris art scene. My experience of Paris was immediate, direct and carnal, and occasionally, when I got into serious trouble, it brought me to the ground, and to the knowledge that Paris didn’t take prisoners. If you bought into its myth, you were likely to finish badly but fatally, still clinging to the conviction that you’d made the right decision. To stay there was like embracing a cloud of mist and in the long term would erode you into an insufferable bore with dental issues.
It still took me a year to get there. In ‘74, I played rugby for two Belgian sides. Avia-Kituro, named after an east African volcano discovered by the club’s founder, was located on a Belgian air force field in Schaerbeek. Our team had travelled to Paris. I had nothing against buses, and liked my teammates, but I was like a helium balloon. If I wasn’t fastened down with rope and lead weights, I’d be as likely to fly off into the cosmos first chance I got.
I managed to give the team the slip upon arrival, jumping on a metro and going into the Latin Quarter, where I knew my pal Kate had found digs on Rue Séguier just off St. André des Arts. It was a couple of floors up, accessible by a stairwell called “Escalier G.” Her sister’s name was Suzanne. She looked like Kirstin Scott Thomas. As I entered, a small cassette player was playing “Riders on the Storm,” and on a small coffee table there were two hypodermic needles, cotton balls, a soup spoon, a shoelace and a cheap BIC lighter. Suzanne was unconscious but seemed to be smiling blissfully, her head propped up against the head of a bearded man in a similarly catatonic state. Kate was drinking a glass of Côtes du Rhône, smoking. She was the spitting image of June Miller but had nothing of the weird neurasthenic behaviour of Henry Miller’s muse.
“Well, look what the damn cat brought in.”
She reached for a scarf and her pea jacket, and we were out the door, and on our way to rue de Seine. We took up quarters in La Palette, in the rear room, and began a chinwag in the best of all possible neighbourhood bars, carelessly tossing back demi-pressions of Méteor, a local Parisian brew. Like being at home, except home was Paris.
“Give me a smoke.”
“What about the rugby game?”
“Still another fifteen hours to go.”
By 3 am, we were six sheets to the wind and rolling like tumbleweed down the rue St. André des Arts. The next morning, I had time for an espresso and a cigarette, then left to catch a bus for a rugby field somewhere to the north of the city, stinking of plonk. Upon arrival, the coach booted my ass all the way to the locker room. Then, oddly, I played the best game of my life, picking fights, making tackles, compensating for my bad showing.
I was for the moment redeemed, but the following week, I would be punished severely for challenging the gods. The team we played in Brussels was SHAPE, the British Army side, and the scurvy grunt opposite me at the number-two position in the line-out was a Sergeant Fury lookalike with a drooping red Fu Manchu moustache, about six feet seven with arms that hung to his ankles. It was to be his last game of rugby, as he was returning to the old country.
During the first half I found myself at the bottom of a ruck, and for a split second, I caught a glimpse of a set of steel studs, just as they smashed into my nose, breaking it in two spots and ruining my breathing for life. All because I found myself accidentally on the wrong side of the gain line. After the game, I was dumped off at Bruxelles Midi train station, and that was that. I returned to Leuven for another week of inhuman studies under the patriarchs of the history faculty, and life in a fourth-floor single chambre de bonne, with a single small sink, and only cold running water.
So, my introduction to Europe had nothing to do with the avant-garde. I had been parachuted right into life as a petit Belge, and in my miniscule apartment and anonymous place in old Leuven, I had never been happier, now having sighted for the first time Paris, the city of my dreams.