Desolation Angels (47 page)

I saw little of the kid Portman on the trip. We were both miserably gloomy on our backs on burlap covered bunks amidst the French Army. Next to my bunk was a young French soldier who said not a word to me for days and nights, just lay there staring at the bunk springs overhead, never got up with all of us to line up for beans, never did anything, not even sleep. He was coming home from duty in Casablanca or maybe even war in Algeria. I suddenly realized he must've gotten a drug habit. He had no interest in anything at all but his own thoughts, even when the three Mohammedan passengers who happened to be bunked up with us French troops suddenly leaped up in the middle of the night and jabbered at gay lunches out of paper bags:—Ramadan. Can't eat till a certain time. And I realized again how stereotyped is the “world history” given us by newspapers and officials. Here were three miserable skinny Arabs disturbing the sleep of one hundred and sixty-five French troops, armed at that, in the middle of the night, yet not one bucko or first lieutenant yelled out “
Tranquille!
” They all bore the noise and discomfort in silence that was well nigh respectful for the religion and the personal integrity of these three Arab men. Then what was the war about?

Out on deck in the daytime the troops sang on the deck eating beans out of their ration pots. The Balearic Islands passed by. It seemed for a moment the troops were actually looking forward to something gay and exciting and
home,
in France, in Paris especially, girls, thrills, homecomings, delights and new futures, or perfect happy love, or something, or maybe just the Arc de Triomphe. Whatever visions an American has of France or Paris who's never been there, I had for them:—even of Jean Gabin sitting smoking on a wrecked fender in a dump with that Gallic heroic lip-pressing “
Ça me navre
” which had made me trill as a teenager to think of all that smoky France of realistic honesty, or even just the baggy pants of Louis Jouvet going up the stairs of a cheap hotel, or the obvious dream of long night streets of Paris full of gay troubles good enough for a movie, or the sudden great beauty in a wet overcoat and beret, all such nonsense and all of it completely evaporating away when the next morning I saw the awful white chalk cliffs of Marseilles in the fog and a gloomy cathedral on a cliff making me bite my lip as if I'd forgotten my own stupid memory. Even the soldiers were glum filing off the ship down into sheds of customs guards after we'd negotiated several dull canals to our slip. Sunday morning in Marseilles, now where? One to a lace livingroom, one to a pool hall, one to an upstairs apartment in a suburban cottage on the highway? One to a third floor tenement. One to a pastry shop. One to a woodyard (as dismal as the woodyards on rue Papineau in Montreal). (That suburban cottage has a dentist living downstairs.) One even to a long hot wall in mid-Bourgogne leading to aunts in black in the parlor glaring? One to Paris? One to sell flowers in Les Halles on howling winter mornings? One to be blacksmith off rue St. Denis and its black coated whores? One to lounge with nothing to do before the afternoon movie marquees of rue Clignancourt? One to be big sneering telephoner from Pigalle nightclub, as it sleets outside? One to be porter in the dark cellars of rue Rochechouart? Actually I dont know.

I went off by myself, with my big rucksack, towards America, my home, my own bleak France.

60

In Paris I sat at the outdoor chairs of café bonaparte talking to young artists and girls, in the sun, drunk, only four hours in town, and here comes Raphael swinging across Place St. Germain seeing me from a mile away and yelling “
Jack! There
you are! Millions of girls surround you! What are you
gloomy
about? I will show you Paris! There's love everywhere! I've just written a new poem called Peru!” (Pewu!) “I have a girl for you!” But even he knew he was kidding but the sun was warm and we felt good drinking together again. The “girls” were snippy students from England and Holland looking for a chance to make me feel bad by calling me a jerk as soon as I gave no indication I would court them a whole season with flowered notes and writhings of agony. I just wanted them to spread their legs in a human bed and forget it. My God you cant do that since Sartre in romantic existential Paris! Later these very girls would be sitting around in other world capitals saying wearily to their escort of Latins, “I'm just waiting for Godot, man.” There are some really ravishing beauties going up and down the streets but they're all going somewhere else—to where a really fine young Frenchman with burning hopes awaits them, however. It took a long time for Baudelaire's ennui to come back waving from America, but it did, starting in the Twenties. Jaded Raphael and I rush off to buy a big bottle of cognac and drag a redhaired Irishman and two girls to Bois de Boulogne to drink and yak in the sun. Through muzzled drunk eyes, tho, I do see the gentle park and the women and children, like in Proust, all gay as flowers in their town. I notice how the Paris policemen hang around in groups admiring women: any trouble comes up they have a gang there and of course their famous capes with built in crowbars. Actually I feel like digging Paris life that way, by myself, personal noticings, but I'm doomed to several days of exactly what you would find in Greenwich Village. For Raphael later takes me to meet disagreeable American beatniks in apartments and bars and all that “cool” comes on again, only it's Easter and the fantastic candy stores of Paris have chocolate fishes in their windows three feet long. But it's all a big ambulation around St. Michel, St. Germain, around and around till Raphael and I end up in streets of night like in New York looking around for where to go. “Couldnt we find Celine someplace micturating in the Seine or blow up a few rabbit hutches?”

“We'll go see my girl Nanette! I'll give her to you.” But when I see her I know he'll never give her to me, she's an absolute trembling beauty and loves Raphael to death. We all go off gaily to shishkabob and bop. I spend the entire night translating her French to him, how much she loves him, then have to translate his English to her, how he knows that
but.

“
Raphael dit qu'il t'aime mais il veux vraiment faire l'amour avec les étoiles! C'est ça qu'il dit. Il fait l'amour avec toi dans sa manière drôle.
” (“Raphael says he loves you but he really wants to make love to the stars, that's what he says, he makes love to you in his funny way.”)

Pretty Nanette says in my ear in the noisy Arab cocktail lounge: “
Dit lui que ma soeur vas m'donner d'l'argent demain.
” (“Tell him my sister'll give me money tomorrow.”)

“Raphael why dont you just give her to me! She has no money!”

“What'd she say just then?” Raphael has made a girl fall in love with him without even being able to talk to her. It all ends up a man is tapping me on the shoulder as I wake up with my head on a bar where they're playing cool jazz. “Five thousand francs, please.” That's five of my eight, my Paris money's all gone, three thousand francs left comes to $7.50 (then)—just enough to go to London and get my English publisher money and sail home. I'm mad as hell at Raphael for making me spend all that money and there he is yelling at me again how greedy and nowhere I am. Not only that as I lay there on his floor he makes love to Nanette all night, as she whimpers. In the morning I sneak out with the excuse a girl is waiting for me at a café, and never come back. I just walk all over Paris with the bag on my back looking so strange even the whores of St. Denis dont look at me. I buy my ticket to London and eventually go.

But I did see finally the Parisian woman of my dreams in an empty bar where I sipped coffee. There was only one man on duty, a nice looking guy, and in walks a pretty Parisienne with that slow tantalizing nowhere-to-go walk, hands in pockets, saying, simply “
ça va? La vie?
” Apparently ex-lovers.

“
Oui. Comme ci comme ça.
” And she flashes him that languid smile worth more than her whole naked body, a really philosophic smile, lazy and amorous and ready for anything, even rainy afternoons, or bonnets on the Quai, a Renoir woman with nothing to do but come revisit her old lover and taunt him with questions about life. Like you can see even in Oshkosh though, or Forest Hills, but what a walk, what a lazy grace as tho her lover was chasing her on a bicycle from the railyards and she didnt care. Edith Piaf's songs express that type of Parisian woman, whole afternoons of fondling hair, actually boredom, ending in sudden disputes over coat money which run out the window so loud even the sad old Sûreté will come in eventually to shrug at tragedy and at beauty, knowing all the time it's neither tragic nor beautiful just boredom in Paris and love for nothing else to do, really—Paris lovers wipe the sweat off and crack long loaves of bread a million miles from Gotterdammerung across the Marne (I guess) (never having met Marlene Dietrich in a Berlin Street)—

I arrive in London in the evening, Victoria Station, and go at once to a bar called “Shakespeare.” But I might as well've walked into Schrafft's:—white table cloths, quiet clinking bartenders, oak paneling among Stout ads, waiters in tuxedos, ugh, I walk out of there as fast as I can and go roaming the nighttime streets of London with that pack still on my back as bobbies watch me pass with that strange still grin I remember so well, and which says: “There 'e is, clear as your nose, it's Jack the Ripper come back to the scene of 'is crimes. Keep an eye on 'im whilst I call the Hinspector.”

61

Maybe you could hardly blame them either because as I walked thru the fogs of Chelsea looking for fish n chips a bobby walked in front of me half a block, just vaguely I could see his back and the tall bobby hat, and the shuddering poem occurred to me: “
Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?
” (for some reason I dont know, just because it was foggy and his back was turned to me and my shoes were silent soft soled desert boots like the shoes of
footpads
)—And at the border, that is at the customs of the English Channel (Newhaven) they'd all given me strange looks as tho they knew me and since I only had fifteen shillings in my pocket ($2) they'd almost barred me from entering England altogether, only relenting when I showed proof I was an American writer. Even then, though, the Bobbies were standing watching me with that faint evil halfsmile, rubbing their jaws wisely, even nodding, as tho to say “We seen the likes a
im
before” although if I'd been with John Banks I'd be in the gaol house now.

From Chelsea I carried that woesome pack of mine clear around downtown London in the foggy night, ending exhausted at Fleet Street where by God I saw old 55-year-old Julien of the future a bowlegged blondy Scotsman emerging from the Glasgow Times
tweaking his mustache
just like Julien (who is of Scot descent), hurrying on twinkling newspaperman feet to the nearest pub, the King Lud, to foam at beers of Britain's barrels—Under the streetlamp right where Johnson and Boswell strolled, there he goes, in tweed suit, “knaows mothah” and all that, bemused with the news of Edinborough, Falklands and the Lyre.

I managed to borrow five pounds from my English agent at his home and hurried thru the Soho (Saturday Midnight) looking for a room. As I was standing before a record store staring at an album cover of Jerry Mulligan's big goofy American hipster face a bunch of Teddy Boys spilling out with thousands of others from Soho boites approached me, like the bluejeaned Moroccan hipsters but all beautifully dressed however in vests and ironed pants and shiny shoes, saying “I say, do you knaow Jerry Mulligan?” How they spotted me in those rags and rucksack I'll never know. Soho is the Greenwich Village of London full of sad Greek and Italian restaurants with checkered tablecloths by candlelight, and jazz hangouts, nightclubs, strip joints and the like, with dozens of blondes and brunettes cruising for money: “I sye, ducks” but none of them even looking at me because I was dressed so awful. (I'd come to Europe in rags expecting to sleep in haystacks with bread and wine, no such haystack anywhere.) “Teddy Boys” are the English equivalent of our hipsters and have absolutely nothing to do with the “Angry Young Men” who are not street characters twirling keychains on corners but university trained middleclass intellectual gentlemen most of them effete, or when not effete, political instead of artistic. Teddy Boys are dandies on street corners (like our own brand of special zooty well-dressed or at least “sharp” hipsters with lapel-less jackets or soft Hollywood-Las Vegas sports shirts). The Teddy Boys have not yet started
writing
or at least publishing and when they do they'll make the Angry Young Men look like academic poseurs. The usual bearded Bohemians also roam around the Soho but they've been there since well before Dowson or De Quincey.

Piccadilly Circus, where I got my cheap hotel room, is the Times Square of London except there are charming street performers who dance and play and sing for pennies thrown at them, some of them sad violinists recalling the pathos of Dickens' London.

What amazed me as much as anything were the fat calm tabby cats of London some of whom slept peacefully right in the doorway of butcher shops as people stepped over them carefully, right there in the sawdust sun but a nose away from the roaring traffic of drams and buses and cars. England must be the land of cats, they abide peacefully all over the back fences of St. John's Wood. Elderly ladies feed them lovingly just like Ma feeds my cats. In Tangiers or Mexico City you hardly ever see a cat, if so late at night, because the poor often catch them and eat them. I felt London was blessed by its kind regard for cats. If Paris is a woman who was penetrated by the Nazi invasion, London is a man who was never penetrated but only smoked his pipe, drank his stout or half n half, and blessed his cat on the purring head.

In Paris on cold nights the apartment houses along the Seine look bleak like the apartment houses of New York on Riverside Drive on January nights when all the inhospitable blasts of the Hudson hit men in spats rounding the corner to their foyer, but on the banks of the Thames at night there seems to be a kind of hope in the twinkle of the river, of East End across the way, something bustlingly Englishy hopeful. During the war I'd also seen the interior of England, those incredibly green countrysides of haunted mead, the bicyclists waiting at the railroad crossing to get home to thatched house and hearth—I loved it. But I had no time and no desire to hang around, I wanted to go
home.