The warm shoes indeed, I’d also brought Florida air-conditioned shoes anticipating long hotsun walks in Paris and hadnt worn them once, the “warm shoes” were all I wore the whole blessed time—In the Paris papers people were complaining about the solid month of rain and cold throughout late-May and early-June France as being caused by scientists tampering with the weather.
And my first aid kit, and my mittens for the cold midnight musings on the Breton shore when the writing’s done, and all fancy sports shirts and extra socks I never even got to wear in Paris let alone London where I’d also planned to go, not to mention Amsterdam and Cologne afterwards.
I was already homesick.
Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how “successful” your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.
As usual I was simply concentrating everything in one intense but thousandéd “Ah-ha!”
15.
FOR INSTANCE THE NEXT AFTERNOON AFTER A GOOD sleep, and me spruced up clean again, I met a Jewish composer or something from New York, with his bride, and somehow they liked me and anyway they were lonely and we had dinner, the which I didnt touch much as I hit up on cognac neat again—“Let’s go around the corner and see a movie,” he says, which we do after I’ve talked a half dozen eager French conversations around the restaurant with Parisians, and the movie turns out to be the last few scenes of O’Toole and Burton in “Becket,” very good, especially their meeting on the beach on horseback, and we say goodbye—
Again, I go into a restaurant right across from La Gentilhommière recommended to me highly by Jean Tassart, swearing this time I’ll have a full course Paris dinner—I see a quiet man spooning a sumptuous soup in a huge bowl across the way and order it by saying “The same soup as Monsieur.” It turns out to be a fish and cheese and red pepper soup as hot as Mexican peppers, terrific and pink—With this I have the fresh French bread and gobs of creamery butter but by the time they’re ready to bring me the entree chicken roasted and basted with champagne and then sautéed in champagne, and the mashed salmon on the side, the anchovie, the Gruyère, and the little sliced cucumbers and the little tomatos red as cherries and then by God actual fresh cherries for dessert, all mit wine of vine, I have to apologize I cant even think of eating anything after all that (my stomach’s shrunk by now, lost 15 pounds)—But the quiet soup gentleman moves on to a broiled fish and we actually start chatting across the restaurant and turns out he’s the art dealer who sells Arps and Ernsts around the corner, knows André Breton, and wants me to visit his shop tomorrow. A marvelous man, and Jewish, and we have our conversation in French, and I even tell him that I roll my “r’s” on my tongue and not in my throat because I come from Medieval French Quebec-via-Brittany stock, and he agrees, admitting that modern Parisian French, tho dandy, has really been changed by the influx of Germans, Jews and Arabs for all these two centuries and not to mention the influence of the fops in the court of Louis Fourteenth which really started it all, and I also remind him that François Villon’s real name was pronounced “Ville On” and not “Viyon” (which is a corruption) and that in those days you said not “toi” or “moi” but like “twé” or “mwé” (as we still do in Quebec and in two days I heard it in Brittany) but I finally warned him, concluding my charming lecture across the restaurant as people listened half amused and half attentive, François’ name was pronounced François and not Françwé for the simple reason that he spelled it Françoy, like the King is spelled Roy, and this has nothing to do with “oi” and if the King had ever heard it pronounced rouwé (rwé) he would not have invited you to the Versailles dance but given you a roué with a hood over his head to deal with your impertinent cou, or coup, and couped it right off and recouped you nothing but loss.
Things like that—
Maybe that’s when my Satori took place. Or how. The amazing long sincere conversations in French with hundreds of people everywhere, was what I really liked, and did, and it was an accomplishment because they couldnt have replied in detail to my detailed points if they hadnt understood every word I said. Finally I began being so cocky I didn’t even bother with Parisian French and let loose blasts and pataraffes of chalivarie French that had them in stitches because they still understood, so there, Professor Sheffer and Professor Cannon (my old French “teachers” in college and prep school who used to laugh at my “accent” but gave me A’s.)
But enough of that.
Suffice it to say, when I got back to New York I had more fun talking in Brooklyn accents’n I ever had in me life and especially when I got back down South, whoosh, what a miracle are different languages and what an amazing Tower of Babel this world is. Like, imagine going to Moscow or Tokyo or Prague and listening to all that.
That people actually understand what their tongues are babbling. And that eyes do shine to understand, and that responses are made which indicate a soul in all this matter and mess of tongues and teeth, mouths, cities of stone, rain, heat, cold, the whole wooden mess all the way from Neanderthaler grunts to Martian-probe moans of intelligent scientists, nay, all the way from the Johnny Hart ZANG of anteater tongues to the dolorous “la notte, ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta” of Signore Dante in his understood shroud of robe ascending finally to Heaven in the arms of Beatrice.
Speaking of which I went back to see the gorgeous young blonde in La Gentilhommière and she piteously calls me “Jacques” and I have to explain to her my name is “Jean” and so she sobs her “Jean,” grins, and leaves with a handsome young boy and I’m left there hanging on the bar stool pestering everybody with my poor loneliness which goes unnoticed in the crashing busy night, in the smash of the cash register, the racket of washing glasses. I want to tell them that we dont all want to become ants contributing to the social body, but individualists each one counting one by one, but no, try to tell that to the in-and-outers rushing in and out the humming world night as the world turns on one axis. The secret storm has become a public tempest.
But Jean-Pierre Lemaire the Young Breton poet is tending the bar, sad and handsome as none but French youths can be, and very sympathetic with my silly position as a visiting drunkard alone in Paris, shows me a good poem about a hotel room in Brittany by the sea but after that shows me a meaningless surrealist-type poem about chicken bones on some girl’s tongue (“Take it back to Cocteau!” I feel like yelling in English) but I don’t want to hurt him, and he’s been nice but’s afraid to talk to me because he’s on duty and crowds of people are at the outdoor tables waiting for their drinks, young lovers head to head, I’d-a done better staying home and painting the “Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine” after Girolamo Romanino but I’m so enslaved to yak and tongue, paint bores me, and it takes a lifetime to learn how to paint.
16.
I MEET MONSIEUR CASTLEJALOUX IN A BAR ACROSS the street from church of St. Louis de France and tell him about the library—He invites me to the National Archives the next day and will see what he can do—Guys are playing billiards in the back room and I’m watching real close because lately down South I’ve begun to shoot some real good pool especially when I’m drunk, which is another good reason to give up drinking, but they pay absolutely no attention to me as I keep saying “Bon!” (like an Englishman with handlebar mustache and no front teeth yelling “Good Shot!” in a clubroom)—Billiards with no pockets however not my meat—I like pockets, holes, I like straightahead bank shots that are utterly impossible except with high inside-or-outside English, just a slice, hard, the ball clocks in and the cue-ball leaps up, one time it leaped up, rolled around the edges of the table and bounced back on the green and the game was over, as it was the eight-ball slotted in—(A shot referred to by my Southern pool partner Cliff Anderson as a “Jesus Christ shot”)—Naturally, being in Paris I wanta play some pool with the local talent and test Wits Transatlantique but they’re not interested—As I say, I go to the National Archives on a curious street called Rue de les Francs Bourge
ois (you might say, “street of the outspoken middleclass,”) surely a street you once saw old Balzac’s floppy coat go flapping down on an urgent afternoon to his printer’s galleys, or like the cobblestoned streets of Vienna when once Mozart did walk with floppy pants one afternoon on the way to his librettist, coughing) —
I’m directed into the main office of the Archives where Mr. Casteljaloux wears today a melancholier look than the one he wore yesterday on his clean handsome ruddy blue eyed middleaged face—It tugs at my heart to hear him say that since he saw me yesterday, his mother’s fallen seriously ill and he has to go to her now, his secretary will take care of everything.
She is, as I say, that ravishingly beautiful, unforgettably raunchily edible Breton girl with sea-green eyes, blueblack hair, little teeth with the slight front separation that, had she met a dentist who proposed to straighten them out, every man in the world shoulda strapped him to the neck of the wooden horse of Troy to let him have one look at captive Helen ’ere Paris beleaguered his treacherous and lecherous Gaulois Gullet.
Wearing a white knit sweater, golden bracelets and things, and perceiving me with her sea eyes, I ayed and almost saluted but only admitted to myself that such a woman were wronks and wars and not for me the peaceful shepherd mit de cognac—I’d a Eunuch been, to play with such proclivities and declivities two weeks—
I suddenly longed to go to England as she began to rattle off that there were only manuscripts in the National Archives and a lot of them had been burned in the Nazi bombing and besides they had no records there of “les affaires Colonielles” (Colonial matters).
“Colonielles!” I yelled in a real rage glaring at her.
“Dont you have a list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army in 1756?” I went on, getting to the point at least, but so mad at her for her Irish haughtiness (yes Irish, because all Bretons came from Ireland one way or the other before Gaul was called Gaul and Caesar saw a Druid tree stump and before Saxons showed up and before and after Pictish Scotland and so on), but no, she gives me that seagreen look and Ah, now I see her—
“My ancestor was an officer of the Crown, his name I just told you, and the year, he came from Brittany, he was a Baron they tell me, I’m the first of the family to return to France to look for the records.” But then I realized I was being haughtier, nay, not haughtier than she was but simpler than a street beggar to even talk like that or even try to find any records, making true or false, since as a Breton she probably knew it could only be found in Brittany as there had been a little war called La Vendée between Catholic Brittany and Republican Atheist Paris too horrible to mention a stone’s throw from Napoleon’s tomb—
The main fact was, she’d heard M. Casteljaloux tell her all about me, my name, my quest, and it struck her as a silly thing to do, tho noble, noble in the sense of hopeless noble try, because Johnny Magee around the corner as anybody knows can, with any luck, find in Ireland that he’s the descendant of the Morholt’s King and so what? Johnny Anderson, Johnny Goldstein, Johnny Anybody, Lin Chin, Ti Pak, Ron Poodlewhorferer, Anybody.
And for me, an American, to handle manuscripts there, if any relating to my problem, what difference did it make?
I dont remember how I got out of there but the lady was not pleased and neither was I—But what I didnt know about Brittany at the time was that Quimper, in spite of its being the ancient capital of Cornouialles and the residence of its kings or hereditary counts and latterly the capital of the department of Finistère and all that, was nevertheless of all dumb bigcity things considered a hickplace by the popular wits of Paris, because of its distance from the capital, so that as you might say to a New York Negro “If you dont do right I’m gonna send you back to Arkansas,” Voltaire and Condorcet would laugh and say “If you dont understand aright we’ll send you out to Quimper ha ha ha.”—Connecting that with Quebec and the famous dumb Canucks she musta laughed in her teeth.
I went, on somebody’s tip, to the Bibliothèque Mazarine near Quai St. Michel and nothing happened there either except the old lady librarian winked at me, gave me her name (Madame Oury), and told me to write to her anytime.
All there was to do in Paris was done.
I bought an air ticket to Brest, Brittany.
Went down to the bar to say goodbye to everybody and one of them, Goulet the Breton said, “Be careful, they’ll keep you there!” p.s. As one last straw, before buying the ticket, I went over to my French publishers and announced my name and asked for the boss—The girl either believed that I was one of the authors of the house, which I am to the tune of six novels now, or not, but she coldly said that he was out to lunch—
“Alright then, where’s Michel Mohrt?” (in French) (my editor of sorts there, a Breton from Lannion Bay at Louquarec.)
“He’s out to lunch too.”
But the fact of the matter was, he was in New York that day but she couldnt care less to tell me and with me sitting in front of this imperious secretary who must’ve thought she was very Madame Defarge herself in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” sewing the names of potential guillotine victims into the printer’s cloth, were a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves “Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I’ll prove it with this here manuscript called ‘Silence au Lips’ all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh”—“And in such bad taste, not even one well-defined heroine in domino slacks crucifying chickens for her mother with hammer and nails in a ‘Happening’ in the kitchen” —agh, all I feel like singing is Jimmy Lunceford’s old tune:
“It aint watcha do
It’s the way atcha do it!”
But seeing the sinister atmosphere of “literature” all around me and the broad aint gonna get my publisher to buzz me into his office for an actual business chat, I get up and snarl:
“Aw shit, j’m’en va à l’Angleterre” (Aw shit, I’m goin to England”) but I should really have said:
“Le Petit Prince s’en va à la Petite Bretagne.”
Means: “The Little Prince is going to Little Britain” (or, Brittany.)
17.
OVER AT GARE ST.-LAZARE I BOUGHT AN AIR-INTER ticket one-way to Brest (not heeding Goulet’s advice) and cashed a travellers check of $50 (big deal) and went to my hotel room and spent two hours repacking so everything’d be alright and checking the rug on the floor for any lints I mighta left, and went down all dolled up (shaved etc.) and said goodbye to the evil woman and the nice man her husband who ran the hotel, with my hat on now, the rain hat I intended to wear on the midnight sea rocks, always wore it pulled down over the left eye I guess because that’s the way I wore my pea cap in the Navy—There were no great outcries of please come back but the desk clerk observed me as tho he was like to try me sometime.
Off we go in the cab to Orly airfield, in the rain again, 10 A.M. now, the cab zipping with beautiful speed out past all those signs advertising cognac and the surprising little stone country houses in between with French gardens of flowers and vegetables exquisitely kept, everything green as I imagine it must be in Auld England now.
(Like a nut I figured I could fly from Brest to London, only 150 miles as the crow flies.)
At Orly I check in my small but heavy suitcase at Air-Inter and then wander around till 12 noon boarding call. I drink cognac and beer in the really marvelous cafes they have in that air terminal, nothing so dismal as Idlewild Kennedy with its plush-carpet and cocktail-lounge Everybody-Quiet shot. For the second time I give a franc to the lady who sits in front of
the toilets at a table, asking her: “Why do you sit there and why do people give you tips?”
“Because I clean the joint” which I understand right away and appreciate, thinking of my mother back home who has to clean the house while I yell insults at the T.V. from my rockingchair. So I say:
“Un franc pour la Française.”
I coulda said “The Inferno White Owl Sainte Theresia!” and she still wouldna cared. (Wouldn’t have cared, but I shorten things, after that great poet Robert Burns.)
So now it’s “Mathilda” I’m singing because the bell-tone announcing flights sings just like that song, in Orly, “Ma – Thil – Daa” and the quiet girlvoice: “Pan American Airlines Flight 603 to Karachi now loading at gate 32” or “K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines Flight 709 to Johannesburg now loading at gate 49” and so on, what an airport, people hear me singing “Mathilda” all over the place and I’ve already had a long talk about dogs with two Frenchmen and a dachsund in the cafe, and now I hear: “Air-Inter Flight 3 to Brest now loading at gate 96” and I start walking—down a long smooth corridor—
I walk about I swear a quartermile and come practically to the end of the terminal building and there’s Air-Inter, a two-engined old B-26 I guess with worried mechanics all fiddling around the propeller on the port side—
It’s flight time, noon, but I ask the people there “What’s wrong?”
“One hour delay.”
There’s no toilet here, no cafe, so I go back all the way to while away the hour in a cafe, and wait—