Paris Ghosts
(From a trip taken March 31-April 3)
Qui suis-je? Who am I? And why have I decided to return to this city? There is the pretense that I have come to visit a friend whom I have not seen in some time, that I am repaying a visit he made to Istanbul some seven or eight years ago. Something else, however, I feel, has pulled me here. I tell myself that I am going to track down the ghost of Henry Miller, which sounds as plausible as anything, and repeat the phrase to a few people. The only books I have packed are my paperbacks of Black Spring (in English) and Nadja (in French). They are the only guidebooks I need, I tell myself.
There was a time when I wanted to move to Paris and came close to it — a dream supplanted by the idea of joining the Peace Corps and then supplanted again by moving to Istanbul. It was the first European city to leave its mark on me when I came during a year abroad at age 20, and I had been back for a week here, for a few days there. And now there was an overwhelming desire to return.
Never mind the way that I arrived. I will only say that when I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, the rubber floor of the escalator in the plexiglass tube still bounced beneath my step the way it had the first time I arrived there. And when I had collected my friend Maxime’s keys from his friend in Belleville, I walked down steps in the park which were the exact opposite of that tube in both direction and substance.
My point of departure will be the Place de Nation. I arrive shortly after noon. My keys let me in a door on the Rue Fabre d’Églantine and then into a small elevator to the fourth floor. It is one of those old, high-ceilinged apartments — in fact, my very idea of what a Paris apartment should be. I eat a lunch of quiche at a café across the street and then take the metro to Châtelet for a haircut. And once I have done that, once I feel I have remade myself in some way, I am free to explore. And from there it is a short walk to the Seine. Outside Nôtre-Dame Cathedral there is a line of hundreds of people. I have decided not to go anywhere a tourist would go, and so I walk around all sides of it, watching the roofers work on the reconstruction, ongoing since the fire of 2019. I cross the river and spend some time looking through the book stalls. There is a lot of Henry Miller (in French), which I take as a good sign. Not just the Tropics and Sexus-Plexus-Nexus either, but some books that are even hard to find in English. It is late afternoon already and is time for some oysters — for me, the greatest of all foods. The lack of oysters in Istanbul has always been one of my major disappointments living there, but in Paris they are served everywhere. I pass the entrance to Shakespeare and Company, which now has a permanent queue of people waiting outside the door, and down a small street to an oyster bar looking out at St-Severin. I start reading one of the sketches in Black Spring, and there, at that little table in the sun with a glass of wine and the oysters, I momentarily find the perfect place. When I rise to pay an hour later, I catch the sunlight through my empty wine glass dappled on the book cover and am momentarily reluctant to disturb it, momentarily reluctant to go.
When I do hit the street again, I slip into St-Severin for a few minutes. I will step into several churches during the three days I am here: St-Julien-le-Pauvre, St-Sulpice, St-Germain-des-Prés… all equally beautiful and unremarkable to my eye, and all places I have been before. In each of these churches I am reminded of a story I wrote that year I was a student in England, when I was 20, that I penned during my stay in Paris, about a tourist who slowly gains faith as he encounters people praying in churches around the city. At the time it was one of the best stories I had written, but now I cannot remember which of these churches I wrote about.
My feet take me up the Blvd St-Germain-des-Pres and then to 15 Rue de Condé, the first place I ever stayed in Paris, when I met my family there a few days before Christmas in 2000. I have seen photographs of myself in that apartment many times in the years since then, and now to be standing outside of it seems somehow like I am traversing memory itself, in a way that I am sure I would not feel when, say, crossing the Pont-Neuf.
It is nearly supper-time, and I feel like eating early, so I walk into Brasserie Lipp, which is mostly empty. Normally it’s impossible to get a good table, but I am seated near the front, with a good view of the doorway. My meal is a simple cut of steak au poivre, in a sauce heavy with black pepper. My eyes keep coming back to a hand-written sign on the wall explaining the exact circumstances under which checks will be accepted. When is the last time anyone has tried to pay by check? When I am done, I cross the street to Café de Flore for a coffee. This café is one of the places in Paris I truly feel I have a history with. When I was 20, I had a coffee here and fell in love with their cups and saucers, with the café’s name elegantly printed in green. I also felt I had been ripped off with their price of 35 francs (5 dollars) for a coffee. When I used the bathroom upstairs before I left, there was no one but me on the upper floor, and there, on every table, was a porcelain ashtray with their emblem on it — and so I slipped one into my bag. It is one of the only things I have ever stolen, and today it sits on my desk in Istanbul. At the top of the stairs there is a glass cabinet with their dishes for sale; the ashtray is now 35 euros. But there was also something about the bathroom, I remember: a yellow bar of soap on a piece of brass, so that it looked like a drawer handle, for washing your hands. I return to the bathroom again, only to find that it is gone.
That evening, when I return, Maxime is home, and we sit up for a couple of hours catching up and discussing the future of the unpublished books both of us have written, among other things. I knew him from my MA course at Durham, when I was 30. He visited me in Istanbul several years ago, too, and he is one of the few people I keep up with from that second year in England.
In the morning, after breakfast, I take the metro to Le Marais to visit the Musée Picasso. I feel like I am walking through the collection backwards, from one era to the one preceding it, and then jumping forward several decades each time I climb the stairs. My two favorite eras are the 1930s, when he produced all those etchings with minotaurs, and the early-1970s, right before he died, with the musketeers painted in bold, free strokes, like children’s paintings. It would be hard to find two eras more different from each other in his oeuvre. And a thought experiment begins to form in my head: at what point in his career, if Picasso had died early, would he still be regarded as the artist he is today? After his blue and rose periods, he would have been seen as a unique but minor artist. After the long Cubist era, he may have been considered a major figure of 20th century painting, but he would have been lumped in with Braque and permanently tied to one movement. After the Neoclassical period of the 1930s, he would have appeared a very different artist. I ask Maxime, and he says at some point in the middle, if he had died, he might even be considered a lesser artist than if he had died earlier or later — at that point the jump from style to style would have made no sense, whereas today each era seems merely a small part of a 70-year career, where we expect and admire the eclecticicsm.
I spend the next hour or two in Le Marais, which I have always had a strong affinity for. After staying at the apartment on Rue de Condé, when my family returned home, I remained in Paris for a week at a series of hostels in buildings from the 17th and 18th century here. The biggest difference between who I am as a traveler now and then, I realize, is that rather than just wander, I buy things. I visit one shop for a bottle of cologne and at another buy Breton shirts for myself, Oya and Julia. I do walk through the Place des Vosges, which is maybe the most perfect of all squares in Paris. As I approach the Seine, I scan the book stalls, this time on the right bank, and find exactly what I was looking for: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes in a nice Livre de Poche edition. I bought the same novel the last time I visited Paris, loaned it to a friend, and never saw it again. My walk takes me to the Luxembourg Gardens, where the serenity of the place is disturbed now and again by dust storms. I pause at the wonderful Medici Fountain, at the far end of a pool, shaded by trees. There is a long promenade that extends from the southern end of the gardens, which I follow to where it empties out almost immediately in front of the restaurant I have dreamed of returning to most of all.
I first read about La Closerie de Lilas in a book about Paris, in a chapter about the cafés of Montparnasse that were so central to literary life in the 1920s and ‘30s. It is more of a real restaurant and is a good ten minutes far from Le Dôme and the other cafés usually associated with the area. I had a plate of oysters and a coffee here at age 20, when I was on my own, and have kept a chocolate wrapper with the restaurant’s name on it in my wallet for the 24 years since. This time, of course, I have money, and so I get a plate of fine de claire oysters, plus some special “Utah” oysters from Normandy that the waiter insists on, a meal of haddock in beurre blanc, and a couple of glasses of Chablis. At the round table where I am seated, there is a paper table cloth covered in the signatures of patrons over the years, and there he is near the top left: Henry Miller. Other than the trip I took to Frankfurt last year, it has been years since I have had several meals vis-à-vis with myself, and I can’t say I make the best company, but certainly not the worst either. There is the excellent food, and the long room with the windows looking out on the street, and the live piano, but the thing that strikes me as absolutely luxurious is the urinals downstairs, surrounded in red and gold tiles. I am disappointed that I haven’t come across a single one of the pissoirs Miller describes in his books, but if you want to piss like a king, I recommend the urinals at La Closerie de Lilas. I walk up the Blvd du Montparnasse to Le Select to have a coffee and read a few more pages of Black Spring before heading home.
Each morning I walk to a patisserie Maxime showed me the first day, and pick up a pastry called oranais aux abricots, which is covered in almonds, with a cream and apricot filling, and is in close running for the best pastry I have ever had. Wednesday morning we have a longer breakfast before I head to the Louvre. I have promised myself to avoid anything touristy, and so I limit myself to only two hours in the wing with paintings from the Northern Renaissance. Not that tourists don’t go there to see the Rembrandts, but it is relatively quiet, and I can focus on a few paintings that I want to revisit. I walk through half-a-dozen galleries before I find what I am after. The first is a small canvas by David Teniers the Younger, illustrating the Temptation of St. Anthony. I remember standing in front of this picture, utterly bemused, looking at those creatures that surround St. Anthony while he tries to focus on his book. It was my introduction to Flemish painting and the world that Bosch ushered in, and it held one of the great moments of discovery for me. It is still a great painting, but I cannot see it the way I did when I was 20. There is another, one or two galleries later — a landscape by Paul Bril — that also grabbed me when I was younger. As I go between a few of his pictures, I realize now that I cannot remember which one it was. But these landscapes resonate with me just as much now as they did then, maybe more.
When I leave the Louvre, it is early-afternoon, and I am ready for the one other meal I have planned. I take the metro to an area I have never been in Paris, to the Place de Clichy. My first destination is Café Wepler, the very center of Henry Miller’s world during the era when he was writing Black Spring. Their set lunch menu is a feast, with an appertif of Lillet, a plate of oysters, wine, steak with bearnaise sauce, crème brûlée and coffee. I look out the window that Henry probably looked out of as well, but I am almost certainly eating better than he did in those days. His home was in the suburb of Clichy, outside of Paris, and as I pass the Porte de Clichy, it looks less and less like Paris. Haussmann’s reimagining of the city did not extend this far, and it does not have the uniforn “look” the rest of the city does. On a small street, I find the address I am searching for: 4 Avenue Anatole France. And there it is, in front of me, complete with a plaque marking his years here: ICI A VÉCU HENRY MILLER ROMANCIER AMÉRICAIN 1932-1934.
Afternoon has turned into evening. There is just one more place I want to visit, and so I board the metro again for the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the 19th arrondissement. I came out here on my own the other time my family came to Paris, when I was 24, after I read about it somewhere, and the park has been in my mind since then. The faux bois (false wood, cast in cement) railings along the paths are identical to the ones in my own neighborhood park in Istanbul, and I have wondered if they were inspired by the Buttes-Chaumont. The best part of the park is the man-made island in the middle of the lake. It is a brilliant piece of artifice, connected to the mainland by a high bridge, with a folly built to look like a Roman temple at the top. I seem to remember exploring a grotto with a waterfall, too?
Whatever the case, the island is no longer accessible to the public, but I sit for a while on a bench, watching a mother and her child feed the ducks. It occurs to me how much this place reminds me of home: the sounds and smells remarkably similar to those of Seattle. I think also about my old plan to move to Paris, a life I intended to live but never did. I realize, of course, that I am not in search of Henry Miller’s ghost, but my own. “Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring,” says Breton in Nadja. If so, it is not such an awful fate.