The days that followed were a kind of interregnum, a time apart, filled with an unmoored, indigent freedom, and with quiet and room. André served us our meals at the villa, out on the terrace as before, but he lingered to talk. I sat in the kitchen gossiping with Josephine, trying to imagine her own youth, not far from there, and the German occupation, which she remembered vividly. I had a room to try to write in, day after day. An Austrian-born physician, Alan’s doctor in New York, had been invited to spend a few days at the villa. He came with a tall, willowy young English woman, his current girlfriend. They settled in easily, entertained themselves, and were agreeable company. Mrs. McCormick, who was staying nearby, came with Muriel and took us on an excursion to Éze, and to lunch at La Réserve de Beaulieu, and afterward to visit her friend Lord Beaverbrook at his villa. On another afternoon she took us to Juan les Pins, and to Antibes and the Picasso museum, and to see Nicholas de Stael’s paintings.
Downstairs from our rooms at the small villa, Mme. Fratacci recovered gradually. I sat in the kitchen with her, a few times when I saw her there and she asked me in. She was a very quiet woman, staring at a prospect of loneliness, but though she was somber she was not depressing. Her daughters were attached to her like shadows, too timid or too withdrawn for me to be able to coax them into conversation of any kind. Georges neglected his wife and knew it, and seemed unable to imagine doing anything differently. He sat at the kitchen table and had nothing to say to her either in French or in the Nizzarte patois that was her childhood language, and which they had usually spoken when they were alone together. The kitchen, filled with helpless good intentions, would rapidly become suffocating, and if Georges was there he would get up cautiously, as though he were afraid of stepping on something, and lead me out. We would walk into the village, with him talking, perhaps, about Alan and his problems, or about his métier, the world of the arts, Giacometti, Cartier-Bresson, but never about his own life and marriage.
By the time Alan left I was calling almost every day at the tiny house that Georges Belmont had rented for the summer months, overlooking the inner bay of the cape, between the thumb and the palm. The principal room of the house was the everything room. An unmade bed occupied most of it, with Georges’s typewriter on a kind of card table in a corner, by the door to the bathroom. Georges’s wife, José, was often there when I arrived, in her underwear, smoking. She was never not smoking. Georges allowed gaps between cigarettes, but often worked with one smoldering in the ashtray beside him. José had a low, hoarse voice that would have been attractive if what she said had not been almost invariably pejorative, caustic, discontented, and impatient. Her chronic disappointment was directed at Georges, not for any specific shortcomings but as the habitual tenor of her address to him. I found her hard to be around from the beginning, but fortunately she spent as much time as possible down at the beach with their two- or three-year-old daughter, Sophie, in the little sandy cove just below, and when she left, Georges and I could sit and talk. Those days inaugurated a friendship that would last, despite José’s abrasive accompaniment and my own peregrinations during the years that followed, for over half a century.
Georges’s English was fluent, grammatically flawless, with a ready, precise, rich vocabulary. It was English, but American English and American writing were certainly not alien to him. His barely noticeable French accent enhanced its charm. He had learned English as a student, perfecting it at Trinity College, Dublin, where he had been a schoolmate and close friend of a young man named Samuel Beckett, who at that time was known chiefly for his first book, a critical study of Proust. Georges talked of his friend Sam, and of Joyce, during the years when Sam had acted as a kind of secretary for Joyce in Paris, and the three of them, for some time, had met almost daily. Sam, he said, had taken to imitating Joyce in many respects—small mannerisms, turns of speech, Joyce’s walk and clothes. Georges noticed that he had picked up Joyce’s physical hesitancy that was a result of his eye trouble. Then he could not help observing that Sam’s feet were bothering him, to the point where it was painful for him to walk, and that the condition seemed to be getting worse. He brought up the subject with Sam, who at first dismissed it, but finally admitted that he had been wearing shoes the same size that Joyce wore, and they were a couple of sizes too small for him.
For a while, Georges said, Joyce had wanted to go, every Sunday morning, to one particular church, to Mass and to sit through the sermon. They had not been sure why, and had even wondered whether the creed that had surrounded his childhood was exerting its claims, years later. Every Sunday after Mass they would go to a café and sit drinking white wine, and Joyce tended to be quite silent at those times. He would sit with a cigarette between his lips, the ashes dropping off and rolling down his front. It went on for weeks, and then one Sunday, at a moment when they were sitting there saying nothing, Joyce raised his head and began a tone-perfect imitation of the priest’s delivery, phrase by phrase, the manner, the rhetoric, the argument and exhortation flawless. The performance, besides filling Georges with admiration, had led him to ponder how it could be that the imitation was so much more compelling and alive than what it was imitating.
(Two years later, when Georges was living in a villa at Villescresnes, just south of Paris, I stopped to see him, and while I was there Beckett came over. It was the day of the publication of Molloy, and he and Georges were feeling celebratory. Beckett had been told that there were to be some good reviews. José told him confidentially that she quite liked the book but was “not convinced,” as she put it, by his French, which she said he wrote like a foreigner. And then she went out somewhere, and Georges suggested that the three of us make gazpacho for lunch. Beckett was given the job of slicing the cucumbers. I watched him with something approaching amazement. His slices were so fine they were all but transparent, and they were perfectly consistent from one end of the cucumber to the other. Years after that I wrote to him from London. I had been asked to put together a program of contemporary poems for the BBC Third Programme, and I greatly admired the few poems of his that I had seen and wanted to know whether he might have others that had not been published. In my letter I said that he probably would not remember me, but that we had met at Georges’s house, and the three of us had made gazpacho. I told him how I had admired his slicing of the cucumbers. He wrote back that, as far as poems were concerned, the cupboard was bear [sic], but that he did indeed remember that day, that lunch, the cucumbers. “I was thinking,” he wrote, “about my mother.”)
Georges had also become a close friend of Henry Miller’s and had translated several of his books. He knew a good deal of contemporary American fiction, both literary and popular. He was a modest, gentle, hardworking man, who was trying to use his long hours of daily translating to buy himself a little time to work on poems and a novel of his own. I felt that he was somewhat at the mercy of his circumstances, his marriage among them, though he dealt with them without complaint and with a steady flow of energy. His mind, his perceptions, the language in which he expressed himself, were fine, authentic, and judicious, but he seemed to live with an ultimate doubt of himself, to suspect that he was a shadow of others.
A friend of his, renting another small, brand new-dwelling on that side lane, was an Irish novelist named John Lodwick, who had been in that part of France during the war as a clandestine operator for the British armed forces. He had been parachuted into the region to maintain contact with the Resistance and to assist in sabotage against the Germans in the late stages of the occupation. While there he had met Jeanne, a beautiful, already ravaged woman, who said little but obviously possessed a powerful character, and lived with a deep rage, which John ascribed to her experiences during the war, when she had been raped by the Germans and had seen them murder several members of her family. He said that she had been able to take it out on several of the Germans before they left, but that had scarcely soothed her or reassured her about what life had to offer. He had fallen in love with her just the same, the moment he met her, in the Resistance, and had returned to her as soon as he could. They had a little boy named Malachi, still in his crib.
John liked his red wine at all hours of the day. Usually he did not show the effects of it until near sundown, when he was apt to be preoccupied and irritable. He had published some short fiction, and a book about amphibious commando operations during the war, which had received a good press and some success, and he had carefully assembled a large scrapbook of press cuttings, which he liked to display. It was the one object to which he seemed particularly attached. All three of us loved the writing of Joyce, and talked of it, and about Joyce himself. John shared my fascination with Camus and Mann. He had not yet read Doctor Faustus but had been reading about it, and knew the central story, and asked about the book. At one point he wanted me to say whether, if—like the composer who was the protagonist of Mann’s great novel—I had been offered a period of years of artistic fulfillment in exchange for something I thought of as my soul, I would have accepted. I was startled by the question, and answered that I thought I would have had difficulty believing in the “devil’s” offer at all, and the authority for making it. I thought that if the talent and urge and character were there to begin with, such a bargain would be meaningless. If they were not there, no “bargain” could help. John seemed troubled by my answer and I could not tell why, but there was something about him that suggested a man possessed and struggling with forces that he could not control.
These took the form of recurring violence, a theme of violence in his life, and occasional glimpses of it in his demeanor and his expression, like the fin of a shark. It was there in some of the stories he told, and he told them at all hours of the day, sometimes starting, apparently, out of nowhere, and when he told them I could not help but listen. Many had to do with the war, the clandestine operations against the Germans, which had filled several of his most formative years. They told more often of escapes than of encounters or confrontations or moments of engagement. More than once, according to his accounts, he had made his way out of France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, after completing operations for which he had been sent into the region. Once, he said in a story that he returned to and that clearly haunted him, he had got to the border near Andorra and had run out of money. A man there, who he knew worked in the black market, lent him some, to get him over the border. His creditor was taking a long chance, but John was planning to be back. The man was a Jew, who hoped to escape also, before he was caught, and would need the money, he said, to be able to buy his way out if they did catch him. John did come back on his next trip and learned that the man had lost the gamble, had been caught and deported, and John felt a complicated, ineradicable responsibility for it, and was sure that the man had not escaped sooner because he did not have the money John had borrowed from him.
On one of his trips out, John said, he and two other men were escaping by foot over a high pass. They had been hiding by day, travelling at night, for most of a week. One of the others was a man with whom he had been on missions before and knew relatively well. The other one had joined them later. They did not know much about him, he was not much help, and he kept getting on their nerves. They told each other that he was only too likely to make some stupid mistake and get them all caught. They were short on sleep and food. John and his friend found that they really did not like the other man. They saw it in each other, in the way they watched him and referred to him, and they admitted it to each other with their eyes, and eventually with words. Up on the high trails they began to wonder how far they trusted him. They decided to get rid of him and call it an accident. They picked a moment at night, in a high wind, and at a precipitous ledge on the trail they pushed him over.
So John said. I wondered, though, not always at the time but afterward, how many of John’s dramatic stories, or what parts of them, were true, and how much of them he himself believed.
He told me one about Yeats, whose poetry he knew I carried with me.
Yeats had died on the 28th of January, 1939—“disappeared in the dead of winter,” as Auden wrote in his elegy. He and his wife, George, had been staying, that winter, at the Hotel Idéal Séjour, on Cap Martin near Roquebrune and Menton. Yeats’s health had been failing, in stages, for years. At St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, just over ten years after his death, with the war having come and gone in the intervening decade, I thought of what I had read of the accounts of his life and death in the biographies that had been written by then. I had an image of a hotel up on the mountain at Menton, and of his last days alone up there with his wife. But the Hotel Idéal Séjour, which George—Mrs. Yeats—had found a year earlier, and where they had spent the winter before, was in fact a quiet maison de repos dedicated to such winter retreats. They had much of the villa, and its garden overlooking the sea, to themselves, and Yeats was surrounded by friends, some of whom were spending the winter nearby. They included Dorothy Wellesley, and Hilda Matheson, Walter Turner, Desmond and Mabel O’Brien, and Yeats’s last paramour, Edith Shackleton Heald. Several of them were present on what Auden called “his last afternoon as himself.”
Yeats had known for years that his time was limited, and he had told his wife that if he died there at Cap Martin he wanted to be buried in the nearby cemetery at Roquebrune, and then a year later dug up and taken to the one at Drumcliffe near Sligo, in Ireland, which he had named in the poem Under Ben Bulben. He had hoped that the delay would allow him to escape an Irish public funeral of the kind that had been organized for his lifelong friend, the writer George Russell. Yeats was buried according to his wishes, at Roquebrune, but before the year was out France and most of the rest of Europe were involved in World War II, and his body remained at Roquebrune until September 1948, less than a year before the summer when we sat talking about him across the bay. By then the age before the war seemed to have been gathered into a remoteness like that of the classics.
But John told his story about “last year,” when the Irish navy had sent a corvette, the Macha, to Villefranche Harbor, just west of St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, on the way to Nice. According to John Lodwick, one of the Macha’s officers had been driven to Roquebrune for the ceremonial removal of Yeats’s coffin, and while there had visited an old Irish lady who had been in Roquebrune all through the war. She had been deeply disappointed, John said, when the officer’s gift to her, after those years, had been neither Bushmill nor Jameson whiskey, but a box of tea. While the visit and the ceremony of removal and the journey with honor guard from Roquebrune to Villefranche were going on, others of the Macha’s crew, John said, awaited the funeral cavalcade beside the small harbor of Villefranche, where there were convenient cafés, and there they had sampled the local products, and were well primed by the time the cars wound down the steep hill and drew up beside them. So well, in fact, that although they managed, with some difficulty, to load the coffin onto the waiting launch, when they got out to the corvette and were engaged in hoisting it aboard they bungled it and the coffin fell into the water and had to be fished out and bound securely before it could be swung onto the warship.
Even at the time, I thought John’s tale remarkably reminiscent of the coffin accident on the way into Glasnevin cemetery in Ulysses, and I tried to find out whether others had heard it, and whether or not it might be true. I was in Villefranche once or twice before I left, that summer, but no one seemed to remember it, though it sounded like something that would have become legendary in no time. Eventually I inquired about it from several Yeats scholars and was assured that nothing of the kind had taken place. (R. F. Foster’s magisterial W. B. Yeats: A Life, volume II, Oxford University Press, 2003, tells us as much as we may ever know on the subject.) There had indeed been some confusion at the time of disinterment. When Edith Shackleton Heald returned in 1947 to the site of the original burial, she could not locate it. It turned out that the graveyard authorities had granted a concession for the grave for ten years (George Yeats had a receipt), but they had thought it was for five. The local record had been lost, and apparently the church officials had put the grave in a part of the cemetery owned by the township, in which as a general rule the leases were only for five years. At the end of that time they had exhumed the remains and put them in an ossuary. The French government was called in to sort the matter out, and they officially identified the remains (though how they did that we can only guess) and placed them in a new coffin, which was delivered with due ceremony to the Irish representatives in September 1948 for the return to Ireland. Rumors about the confusion spread at the time, and John may have heard some of them and improved upon them in his own version.
Between Alan’s departure and Maria Antonia’s arrival, when we had the villa more or less to ourselves, my college friends Bill Arrowsmith and his wife, Jean, and Bruce Berlind and his first wife came for a visit. There was room for all of them in the small villa where we were staying. We went to Nice and explored the town. Bill grumbled and argued and was brilliant and difficult. His passions at the moment were Eliot and Pavese. He had extended his classical learning to include modern Italian, and he was already working on his translations of Pavese’s poetry and talking of that most powerful and memorable of Pavese’s prose books, the Dialogues with Leukó. Bill was several years older than I was, and as students and graduate students we had been constant sparring partners, but I had learned invaluable things from him, mostly about modern poetry and the classics. Before I knew Bill he had been one of Richard Blackmur’s first protégés, and prodigies, and he had been one of the founders of the literary magazine Chimera. He was jealous of his early eminence and anything or anyone whom he considered a threat to it. He detested and ridiculed John Berryman, and many of Berryman’s contemporary enthusiasms, from Auden, MacNeice, and Spender to Delmore Schwartz. I remain grateful to him for first leading me to the poems of Wallace Stevens, and for insights into the play of syntax and what it could render possible in poetry, which he had come to from his studies in the Greek and Latin classics, and which I could confirm in my reading of the poems of Yeats and of my other great early enthusiasm, Milton. But Bill was as cantankerous a companion in France as he had been at Princeton, and his responses were grudging and carping about most things, from the architecture of this degenerate post-Latin culture to most of the days’ activities. Bruce, on the other hand, has always been a peaceable man, and he spent much of his time trying to calm things down. Bill’s humor could often be improved by steering the conversation to subjects he was fond of, such as the music of Handel or the writings of Samuel Butler, whose notebooks he loved to quote. It would be years before our long association eased at last into something we both felt sure was friendship.
One moment sets that interlude in the context of history at large. Dorothy and I are sitting in the café on the place at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, with the Arrowsmiths and the Berlinds, unfolding the newspapers we have just bought there, and we learn from the headlines that the Russians have the bomb. The days of the cold war had begun. We sensed it as we sat there.