James Salter - Burning the Days

In 1958 or so I came across Girodias’s edition of Pauline Réage’s famous apostasy, the first cool pages of which were like a forbidden door opening and the rest, as I read, unable to put it down, like the shimmering of a fever — not since reading Llewelyn Powys, paragraphs of whose Love and Death I could recite from memory at eighteen, had my legs given way like this. I am not sure it harmed me but it affected me deeply. Though I thought of it a good deal, I rarely spoke about it, and this preserved it for me until one night in the comfort of an editor’s apartment in New York a young woman, when the subject somehow came up, told how she and her friends at camp one summer had read The Story of O and talked about it incessantly. I felt disappointed. If schoolgirls could stroll through it like a book group, what was there to safekeep?

—

There were the early places of Paris, in the beginning, at the bottom, rooms on an inner court with burned-out lights, when the city was unscalable with endless long errands in the rain, handed-down newspapers, and skipped meals. You were alone with little money and not much nerve and a name on a piece of paper — someone working for a steamship line or in the embassy who was never in the office or returned a call. Europe was still impoverished. The plaster was cracking, the drapes worn to threads. Only a year or two before it had been for sale for a carton of cigarettes. The desperation had been vast and the testimony stood before one’s eyes: ancient telephones, outclassed cars, drab clothes.

Later came the Paris of hotels; they made up a kind of gazetteer, names like those of islands, each with its own aura and size. The Royal Monceau, where the plush exhaled an ancient fragrance and my wife and I — we were new to it — reigned in reduced-rate opulence. The France et Choiseul with its barren courtyard and poorly furnished suites; the Calais tucked in behind the Ritz; the hotel where the girl threw Farr’s clothes out the third-floor window when he wouldn’t pay her; the Récamier squeezed into the corner; the Esmeralda, Badoit outside on the windowsill in the cold; the St.-Regis with its dark, gleaming wood and luxury, the light from above; the Richepense just off the Place Madeleine one winter, incredible loneliness, Prunier down the street, where it was too expensive to go; the Palais d’Orsay, hotel of hotels, sentimentally speaking; the Trémoille.

On the glass top of one of the first night tables, in the Royal Monceau, I think, lay a mimeographed list of recommendations provided by the air attaché. There was Androuët, a restaurant judged unique because the meal was made up entirely of cheeses; and another place, where the menu had been inspired by Rabelais, with daring caricatures; also, the Lido (“sit at the bar”). The Mayol, it said, and we went there. It was dank and old with worn seats. Girls badly fed, stage bare, costumes that had lost their sheen, and one lovely pair of breasts as if, amid it all, France was showing what it could be capable of. I searched for them in the program. The photograph there was a poor reminder, like looking at a passport photo. I could not admit what I was doing, of course. I was with my wife and the untrifling general who had brought me to Europe, Robert Lee, and his wife; we were in middle America.

There was the L’Aiglon, narrow and cream-colored, on the Boulevard Raspail, where I stayed when we were editing the film that Irwin Shaw judged weak. The lizard shoes of a famed director, Buñuel, were outside an adjoining door. Misty winter mornings, the cemetery endless beyond the window, the ivied walls. Simone de Beauvoir in her white nurse’s shoes and stockings, her beauty gone, walking to the boulevard from the café on the corner where she often met Sartre for breakfast.

It was the elegance and attitude of Paris, aspects one saw from the first, which appealed to me, venerable things and luxurious new ones, the life of the streets and the life that survives upheaval and death. The old count who lived on Quai Voltaire in the same building with all his daughters and their husbands. There was an American woman who lived across the way and took pleasure in greeting him. One day she said she was going home on a trip, flying to America. The old count seemed interested. “L’Amérique,” he asked politely, “est-ce que c’est loin?” Is it far away?

The proper order of things is that they be seen first from a distance, then up close. Paris, however, could not be seen that way. It was a city of intimacy, by which I mean privacy, filled with the detail of life, moody, and above bowing to any individual. Kerouac went there once, for two or three days, and left saying, “Paris rejected me.”

It was the skill of Paris to reject one, to make one desirous, just as the tradition of its functionaries at every level was to prevent the city from displaying a false smile. The sternness of the concierges and gardiens gave faith in the power of Paris to endure. The Paris of Atget. Of Brassaï—he was not French; he lived first, as a child, on rue Monge — photos of brothels on rue Monsieur-le-Prince or rue Grégoire-de-Tours; lights of bridges in the mist, not a sound, not even a cigarette dropped in the water, the river stone-still; old Matisse with a nude model, nipples cherry black; the luxurious squalor of the studios, Picasso’s, Bonnard’s; nights of Paris, and everywhere the grandeur, the parade; the game hanging in the butcher shops, the silk clothes in expensive windows, all part of a supplication: Grant unto me, bestow upon me …

On the rue des Belles-Feuilles a car with 77 on its plates — from the rich suburbs to the south — is stopped in the middle of the street, trunk open. Traffic, horns blowing, is backed up behind. Occasionally a man comes out of a building with a box to put in the trunk. Finally, not in any haste, a woman in a long fur coat comes out — the blocked cars are in a frenzy — says a last graceful something to someone, gets in, and drives off without a backward glance. Paris women, their eloquence, their scorn.

In the épicerie another, in jeans and a Levi’s jacket, a turtleneck with a scarf wound insolently about, fine features, magnificent body — brilliant, uncirculated, as they say of certain coins — looking at you without curiosity or shame and then back to regarding the display window. A tall, fair-haired man in a leather jacket is with her. She hasn’t bothered to get in line. She merely tosses back her hair, breathing self-esteem.

Or the blonde in the Closerie sitting in a booth opposite a man, smoking, making slight, continual nods of the head as he is speaking and looking right at him knowingly, as if to say, “Yes, all right, of course,” and even more frankly, “Yes. You can.”

They are not temptations so much as consolations, like the consolation of the proverbial, of things worthy to exist.

In days past you could be prepared for this by taking the boat to Europe, sailing on the France. One stepped into the perfection of the first hours on board, the excitement and sounds, corridors blue with fragrant cigarette smoke, the walls of the ship alive beneath your hand.

I think of the story of Styron and James Jones, who were sailing with their families — it was on the return crossing of the maiden voyage of the France. The Joneses were living in Paris then; they had a house on the île St.-Louis and were traveling with a nanny, their young daughter, and a big dog. The Styrons had children with them.

The two men, invincible, were out all the preceding night in New York. Along the way they met a couple of girls at P. J. Clarke’s and were buying them drinks. Warm feelings drifted back and forth. What are you doing afterwards, the girls wanted to know? Sailing to France, they said, want to come?