Chapter 7

‘Don’t be dumb,’ Bob said when we told him we were going to get identity cards. ‘Your passports will show you’ve been here two months. That means they’ll either fine you a couple of thousand francs or deport you: perhaps both. I know those bastards. There’s only one way of fixing this. You’ve got to leave France for a week or so, get your passports stamped again when you come back, and then get your cards.’

‘Why not? Why don’t you go to Belgium or Luxembourg? They’re only a few hours away.’

‘Rats. We’ll all go to Luxembourg. I’ll pay the fares. I need to get away from here for a while anyway. I’ve got to revise a book. You could work on that book of yours too; it may not be so lousy as it sounds.’

We took the afternoon train to Luxembourg, each of us with a single bag. The spring landscape passed by, with the fields already green and the woods a pale olive. At Longwy it started to rain; but it was a relief to see our passports being stamped at the border by the Luxembourg customs officer, a grumpy old woman in a blue-skirted uniform and chauffeur’s hat. Bob asked for a receipt for his typewriter.

‘How do I know it’s yours?’ said the old woman. ‘How do I know you haven’t stolen it? Show me the sales receipt.’

‘Listen, madam,’ said Bob, suddenly becoming very dignified, ‘I am a distinguished American man of letters, and if you make any more remarks of that kind I’ll report you to my friend Monsieur Pincengrain in the Customs Department, who will fix your clock. Just make out a receipt so I won’t have to pay duty on this machine when I come back, and no more crap about it.’

‘What a nuisance you Americans are,’ she grumbled. ‘Why don’t all you foreigners stay at home? You would be much happier, believe me.’

We reached Luxembourg late at night. The city looked unutterably desolate, with its wide straight dark empty streets and enormous buildings without a light showing from top to bottom.

‘We’re going to the lower town,’ said Bob. ‘It’s supposed to be better than this. If it’s not, we go right back to Paris.’

The taxi took us across the great stone bridge and things began to look brighter. We arrived in a small central square, one whole side of which was nothing but brilliantly lit cafés. The taxi-fare came to fifteen cents, and the driver bowed to the ground when Bob tipped him five cents more.

There were small string orchestras playing softly everywhere. Gorgeously uniformed officers were sitting before coloured ices. Solid men in black, with great beards or moustaches, were drinking swollen mugs of brown beer. Around the square little flocks of pretty girls were walking hand in hand, swishing their long home-made skirts and talking to each other with self-conscious animation, while in the opposite direction marched young men in black velveteen trousers cut very wide at the cuff, large floppy black hats, and short jackets covered with silver chains, pins, and emblems.

It was like being transported into an eighteenth-century Europe, a country out of time and space, something to which I related my impression of Sterne and Casanova—those marvellous travellers who give one the feeling of having discovered a new life in every city they reached, who refreshed themselves in the fountains of romance and desire at every stopping-place, and for whom entering a strange town was like putting on a new skin in which to enjoy the divine restlessness of youth.

We sat down on the terrasse of the biggest café and ordered brown beer, which was served with a plate of sugared buns as a bonus.

‘This isn’t a bad place,’ said Bob, looking around. ‘Of course it’s damned bourgeois.’

Around us the conversation was going on either in the softest German or in a dialect that we found out later was the Luxembourger platt, a language that sounded like the passage of water over stones.

When we asked the grey-haired waiter to recommend a hotel he told us we had better take rooms over a good restaurant, and then, turning to a benevolent-looking man with a neat white beard sitting at the next table, he introduced him as Monsieur Beffort, a merchant and one of the city aldermen. After some polite conversation Monsieur Beffort decided the right place for us was Chez Nicolas, just around the corner in the Liebfraustrasse. ‘Moreover,’ he added, ‘Monsieur Nicolas is my first wife’s second cousin, and he not only makes his own sausages but also gets his wine from his own little vineyard, and both are delicious. Please present this card.’

Thanking him, we went around to Chez Nicolas. On the way we discovered from his card that Monsieur Beffort’s business was in ladies’ underwear and stockings, and he was the country’s largest importer of ostrich-feathers and an accredited Fournisseur de la Cour.

Chez Nicolas was a small, handsome eighteenth-century house, one of whose ground-floor rooms had been turned into a small restaurant. Nicolas himself was a stout man with his hair cut en brosse, wearing a frock-coat and a pair of wicker cuffs.

The two first-floor rooms for rent were large and alarmingly sumptuous, with great bow-windows heavily curtained in velours and big four-poster canopied beds so high they had little sets of steps to climb into them by; all the other furniture—tables, washstands, desks, and chests-of-drawers—were of mahogany, highly waxed and topped with streaky white marble. The only drawback to these magnificent rooms seemed to be the location of the single bathroom, which was at the very back of the house and on the ground floor. Monsieur Nicolas, however, pointed out a little curtained alcove in each room, which held a massive mahogany chaise percée with a porcelain bucket.

Sleeping that night was a curious experience, as both mattresses and bedcovers were made of feathers, so that one sank a foot deep into the one and was nearly suffocated by the other.

For breakfast next morning we had fried eggs, small sausages, new bread, jam tarts, and coffee in oversized cups, all in profusion. Bob went back to bed.

Graeme and I walked around the city, which was charming. It is said to resemble Jerusalem, and used to be considered the most impregnable fortress in Europe after Gibraltar. But we were mainly struck by the fact that no one seemed to do any work: the cafés were already again full of the same portly men drinking beer and reading newspapers, and as we passed they all looked up, bowed and said good morning, except a beautifully tailored officer with an elaborate white moustache and a great deal of gold braid, who drew himself up and gave a distinguished half-salute.

After admiring the fortifications, which in places are over 200 feet high, the stone bridge, which is the longest single-span structure of its kind in Europe, the view of Les Trois Glans, three mountain-tops so called from their resemblance to the shape of the human penis—which is indeed remarkable—we found ourselves down by the River Else in a semi-rural region of winding roads and small stone cottages. The sun was now quite hot and we sat down on a jetty, took off our shoes, and dabbled our feet in the water; there was a row of big old willows along the bank, the birds were singing, and we watched a kingfisher for a while.

‘If we lived here,’ said Graeme thoughtfully, ‘we could forget all about money for a while. Do you know what American cigarettes cost here? Fifteen cents a package. There doesn’t seem to be any duty on anything. I wonder what they run the country on.’

‘It must be self-supporting. You notice there are almost no luxuries like radios or automobiles. Still, how can there be so much money when nobody seems to do any work?’

An elderly priest in a cassock and shovel hat came along the road, and seeing us he stopped and greeted us in German.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ I said, ‘we only speak French, but won’t you sit down and help us with a problem about your country?’

He then explained the internal economy of the country, saying it depended mainly on the rich iron mines in the east but that there were also distilleries, breweries and tanneries.

‘Oh, quite simple, sir. We import very little, our good Grand Duchess Charlotte is wealthy in her own right and doesn’t cost us anything, there are no large landowners or concentrations of capital, and almost no external debt. But most important of all, we have no army.’

He smiled. ‘The gentlemen you noticed have military costumes and titles, to be sure, but they are either court chamberlains or members of the Grand Ducal Band. By the way, the band plays every Wednesday and Saturday in the square, and the dress-uniforms are magnificent. You must be sure not to miss them. To return to the reasons for our prosperity, I may remind you that we were not involved in the late dreadful war, but on the contrary were able to sell a good deal of iron and steel to both sides. But I must be getting along. Good day, gentlemen.’

We got back to Chez Nicolas in time for lunch but found Bob was still sleeping. We had soup, trout, veal cutlets, fried potatoes, creamed cauliflower, pancakes, and a large pitcher of dry white wine. I thought of how Daphne and Angela would have enjoyed it.

Life seemed very pleasant to me and I began to feel that if I could only get rid of my itch for writing I might be quite happy. What, after all, was the use of tormenting oneself by putting words on paper, endlessly arranging and rearranging them, and then, having at last accepted their inherent failure to say more than one-quarter of what they were meant to, of typing out fair copies and hawking the work around to one editor after another until they were printed and perhaps read, if at all, by a few dozen people all busy doing the same thing? One might end up like Bob McAlmon, screaming with frustration in a nightclub.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Monsieur Beffort, suddenly appearing beside us. ‘I trust you are comfortable with my relative Monsieur Nicolas and he is giving you enough to eat? Well now, having discovered that you are all three men of letters, I have taken the liberty, as one of the committee charged with arranging the festivities in honour of our national poet Lenz, of inviting you to the banquet celebrating the centenary of his birth, which is tomorrow. You will find the cards of invitation at your residence. Perhaps you have not heard of our great poet. Because he wrote all his poems in Letzeburgesch, our own Luxembourger platt, he is not widely read outside our own country. Some of the speeches will be, perforce, in our official language, which is French, but the piéce de résistance will be the recitation of fifty cantos of Lenz’s epic poem, in the original platt of course, by his own granddaughter, Madame Lenz-Bessermann, who is not only a platt poetess in her own right but an accomplished elocutionist. I may add that a five-course meal will be served, accompanied by all the suitable wines of our country.’

Surprised and touched, we thanked Monsieur Beffort and accepted his invitation on the spot.

‘Your acceptance makes me very happy,’ he said. ‘The banquet will be held in the open air before the statue of Lenz, in the Lenzplatz.’

When we told Bob the news he professed to be unimpressed but was clearly as pleased as we were.

‘Rats,’ he said. ‘This is just one of those civic shindies. Who in hell is Lenz anyway?’

‘I gave our professions when I signed the register for us all here. I wonder if there’s a barber anywhere. We all need a haircut, you especially.’

‘Not me. I’ve seen the haircuts they give here. Anyway I’m a man of letters now, I don’t need one.’

‘That reminds me, let me see this autobiography you’re writing. At any rate it can’t be as bad as those surrealist poems.’

I gave him the first two chapters of this book, inwardly resolving to pay no attention to his opinion of them. Then Graeme and I went out to look for the statue of Lenz.

It was in a little tree-bordered square at the end of the lower town. The poet was represented at full length in a frockcoat, a Byronic collar, and beautifully tapered trousers breaking over his boots; he was holding a flowing scroll in his left hand, his gaze was fixed on the sky, his lips were parted, and with the fingers of his right hand he seemed to be plucking something out of the air over his head. There were already a number of scrubbed tables set out in the square.

Bob came up while we were looking at the statue. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Is this the guy? We all need a drink badly.’

We went back to the Grosplatz, where the heavy men had now switched from beer and buns to aperitifs and anchovies. Many of them were sitting in front of elaborate ice-filled glass tanks with little spigots extending over their glasses. When I learned these were filters for absinthe I at once ordered one and was served an aperitif glass a quarter full of pale green liquid over which was fitted a flanged and perforated spoon holding a large domino of sugar. A tank of ice was then brought and the glass placed under one of the spigots. I had now only to turn a little tap to let the iced water drip slowly over the sugar until the glass was full.

The clean sharp taste was so far superior to the sickly liquorice flavour of legal French Pernod that I understood the still-rankling fury of the French at having that miserable drink substituted for the real thing in the interest of public morality. The effect also was as gentle and insidious as a drug: in five minutes the world was bathed in a fine emotional haze unlike anything resulting from other forms of alcohol. La sorciére glauque, I thought, savouring the ninetyish phrase with real understanding for the first time.

For dinner at Nicolas’s there was soup, smelts, roast pork, browned potatoes, fresh cabbage, dishes of sour cream, a large cheese, and a pitcher of rosé.

Next morning I heard the clatter of Bob’s typewriter and envied the almost uninterrupted sound of the keys. It must be a wonderful thing, I thought, to be able to write so fast. I remembered he had mentioned having already written nine books, with three more in preparation; and then, moved by the spirit of emulation and thinking also of the honours soon to be heaped on the shade of Lenz, I started writing the third chapter of this book. But after about two hundred words I wondered if I was not too close to the events I was relating. Telling myself I had better wait a month and let them settle into a proper perspective, I closed my scribbler with a sense of relief and went for a walk. As usual, I thought, there was plenty of time.

Halfway across the great stone bridge I was so struck by the beauty of the view that I sat down on the low wall and gave myself up to contemplation. A similarly extensive view of life was what I still lacked. I was still distracted and engrossed by detail, I could see every hair and pimple on a human face, without seeing the face itself. I had, moreover, no experience of anything but ecstasy. I had never known despair or anguish, which I looked on as literary expressions. I had not endured hunger, frustration, illness, or chastity; these were the afflictions of others. I had nothing on my conscience and had never wept except from loneliness, fright, or boredom. How then was I qualified to write? Could I go on treating life as an amusing spectacle, a kind of joke? The only serious emotions I had were connected with my sense of the hideously fleeting passage of my own happiness, of the mortal beauty of everything I saw, of the inexorable progression of my own body to decay and death; but the conclusions to be drawn from these seemed neither original nor profound. I was at last faced with the fact that the only thing bothering me was not having enough money and that all I desired in the literary way was not to be a bore.

This was the time, I believe, when grace should have descended on me, penetrating me with the spirit of some kind of universal love, some nobility of purpose, some feeling for my fellow man, or at least bringing me its characteristic message of hope. But I was not, to use the theological word, receptive. The great obstacle to the influx of grace was my own perfect happiness, and it is well known that God takes no thought for the happy, any more than He does for birds or puppies, perhaps realizing they have no need of Him and mercifully letting them alone. I also thank Him for the same infinite mercy, now when I am making these observations in a hospital; for I have not yet been taught anything but the pointlessness of suffering and feel no deepening of my spiritual apprehensions. All I can do is record the thoughts of a young man as he sat on the bridge of Luxembourg on a warm summer day.

I got up and walked across the bridge into the new town, which had all the usual pretentious buildings—the offices of the steel cartel, the workers’ unions, and other depressing embodiments of group effort. I turned around and went back.

Returning to the lower town I thought about my favourite English poet Wordsworth, the greatest purveyor of neat emotion in the language. It was difficult to enter the consciousness of this cold, reserved man who so mysteriously combined the poet and the prig; but what troubled me now was the recollection that he had stopped writing good poetry after 1798, when he was still under thirty. At that rate, I thought, I had little more than ten years of creativity left and I had barely started. This reflection put me in a sombre frame of mind for the rest of the day and I was only rescued from utter despondency around evening by the sight of a hairy basset-dog harnessed to a small cart full of milk-cans waiting outside a shop. This dog, looking at everything and ceaselessly wagging his tail, deliriously happy in the sphere to which Providence had obviously called him, delighted me. ‘Just to be happy,’ he seemed to say, ‘is enough for me. I don’t know or care what I am doing, I only draw my cart because it belongs to my master who is God, and the pleasure of serving him fills me with such a quality of social joy that I simply keep wagging my tail.’