Left Bank Right Bank

LEFT BANK RIGHT BANK

20 years in Paris

By Janet McMahon

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

This is a personal journal and, while striving to be true, is meant to entertain. Names have been changed to insure privacy, and certain events have been telescoped, truncated and merged for the sake of the story.

© 2017 Janet McMahon

all rights reserved

Cover photos © by George Goode

walden@outlook.fr

Cover design by Hannah Devine

Printed in the United States of America

At McNally Jackson Bookstore

52 Prince Street, New York, N.Y. 10012

ISBN TK

For Alberto von Fach

And for George

And Sze-to

With thanks to Fran, Sandra, Tony and Magee

Chapter 1

1988

What makes the trip worth the price is fear. It destroys our interior scenery. . . Far from our own people, our language, torn from all our supports, deprived of our masks. . . our whole self comes right to the surface.

– Albert Camus, Amour de Vivre

It was the eve of the binary era – good or evil, yes or no, black or white, one or two, me or you.

I still believed that things were meant to be. That there were signs. That things meant other things.  I was nearly forty. When my hair fell a certain way I resembled George Harrison.

Back then in Paris the streets were still shiny with tailpipe exhaust, just as they used to be in New York before the days of unleaded gas.  The air at street level still had that old fifties smell of Esso.  There was no tagging, no sandwich shops, no cheap Chinese imports. Up and coming neighborhoods were staked out with Tex-Mex restaurants, as there was no sushi. There was no Google, so everyone was rather lost.

In the absence of fast food, nearly every neighborhood had a workers' restaurant, a place for all the men in the building trades. They could go in there in their dusty work clothes and nobody minded. The food was simple and inexpensive. You rarely saw a woman in there.

On every market street there was a narrow horsemeat store, handsomely decorated with gilt lettering and a golden horse head. There were small fruit-and-vegetable stalls, fish stores, meat stores, cheese – and you could tell that these had been in place for generations. They were what used to be called 'establishments.'   Some of the stores had names spelled out in gilded wooden letters, or elaborately hand painted, engraved into the limestone facade or even set in mosaic.  You can still see them, even though most of the stores have changed.  On Rue Castiglione you can read the shops' names set in tiny mosaic tiles on the sidewalk: Catherine, Swann, Bon, Sulka.  Swann and Sulka are still there.  Or maybe not.

Back in the U.S. I never looked at things and said to myself, Take this in, study it; soon it will be gone forever.  Here, I do that all the time.  Is it because of the time or is it the place

France had been free for only forty years from wars and occupations.  In fact, it was just after post-WWII reconstruction – les trente glorieuses.  It was just a year after the trial and imprisonment of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief known as the Butcher of Lyon.

There was still the odor of Gitans and Gauloises.  The French word for fag, pardon the expression, is clope. I'm talking about cigarettes. The verb: "cloper." Always le mot juste.  Like the slang for dog: clebs. How do they do it. What a word.  At the same time, they have an enormous tolerance for glottal-stop abbreviations and acronyms in which every single letter is vigorously pronounced: FNAC, CNIT, SNES, SMIC, CNAF.

Then there's the French genius for baby-talk: bibi, bobo, foufou, froufrou, fla-fla, gaga, gogo, zozo, lolo, loulou, coco, cri cri, crincrin, coucou, cra-cra, doudou, pipi, caca, zizi, glouglou, gri-gri, dodo, jojo, titi, chichi, chouchou, nana, néné, nounou, dada, boui-boui, mémé, fifille, tata, tonton, teuf-teuf – and of course tou-tou, which means clebs.

We were fresh from three years in Greece.  In 1984 Nicky and I had decided to leave our safe, comfortable American lives and create a little trouble by moving to Greece and living on a shoestring.

Whereas your normal emigrant leaves home because of trouble and hopes to find safety and comfort in a new land.

Getting married had something to do with it. Marriage is a time-marker, a signpost leaning toward the future. Having and holding from this day forward, that sort of thing. Till death us do part. It seemed ominous – no offense meant to Nicky because he looked at me and felt the same thing. We decided to have and to hold in a strange land.

We spent three years in Greece. It was so strange that I wrote a book about it. After that we moved to France. What a surprise: Paris was just as strange as Athens. Because like the man said, when we’re far from our own people, language, supports and masks, we find out that it’s not the cities and countries that are strange: it’s us.

Nicky says I had an ecstatic experience in Greece. Maybe so. I had certainly fallen for the whole country, and especially Athens, which was chaotic and polluted.  Paris, on the other hand, was, as they say, Paris.  Earth’s most beautiful city. Yet Paris seemed to me to have been already loved enough, coddled into submission, like a prized princess, bejeweled and swaddled in mink, serenely looking out over her fawning suitors.

In Athens we had no money but neither did anyone else. Paris is more like New York or London, you feel naked and vulnerable without a full wallet.

In any case I was incapable of two ecstatic experiences in a row.  Gorgeous, fabulous Paris was sort of a letdown.

Snapshot – Nicky took this picture at the Clignancourt flea market one day in the winter of 1988 when everything there seemed either too ratty or too precious. That's me, crouched down in an alley with my back against the wall holding a sausage baguette in one hand. They used to say don't eat those things, they'll make you sick. With the other hand I'm taking a limp french fry from a piece of wax paper on an upended orange crate. It was a chilly gray Sunday. Wearing a wool jacket with the collar turned up, my hair cut boyishly short and curling my lip in contempt, I look like a runaway or a thief. I asked Nick to take the picture because that's what I felt like that day, up against the wall in a foreign place with my greasy suspicious sandwich.

* * *

In his book the Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wonders,

Is there a dreamer of words who doesn't resonate at the word 'armoire'?

Well, actually–

Only someone poor in spirit would put any old thing in an armoire. To put in any old thing, any old way, in any old piece of furniture, shows a signal weakness in the work of dwelling.

Uh-oh.

"Order is not just a question of geometry. Order is a recollection of family history."

Now we're getting down to it: He's not talking about growing up in a madhouse.

Bachelard goes on to extol lavender – how it alone imparts a Bergsonian duration in the hierarchy of sheets, because one doesn't take a bedsheet out of the armoire until it's been permeated with the scent of lavender. Bless his heart, he must have been a marvelous housekeeper.

But wait. Bachelard continues:

"Home, in the life of man, staves off contingencies, it is a repeated guideline to continuity. Without it, man would be a dispersed creature. The home shelters man from the storms of heaven and the storms of life. It is body and soul, the first world of the human being. Before being 'thrown out into the world,' as the instant metaphysicians say, man is set down in the cradle of the home."

Ex-actly. What if the storms and contingencies are in the home and the continuity and cradle are on the outside? Then you have no armoire-resonance, no Bergsonian lavender. You seek shelter in the soothing rain before being thrown back in, into the storms of life on the inside.

* * *

Armoire à glace – Metaphor derived from the imposing size of old Norman armoires made with very solid wood and which held all of a household's linens: A strong and powerfully built man.

-- Wiktionary

Even before you get there, Paris is a heavy piece of furniture in your mind. An armoire à glace.

How many times have you seen the popular postwar films – An American in Paris, Gigi, Au Bout de Souffle. Photos by Atget, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson are so fresh in your mind that you feel you know Paris as well as you do your home town. Starting in childhood Toulouse-Lautrec and Utrillo showed you Montmartre; Man Ray, Montparnasse; Manet, Renoir and Seurat, the river and parks. You have read Hemingway, Baldwin, Janet Flanner. You could probably sketch from memory Sartre and Simone sitting over coffee at les Deux Magots. You can smell the cigarettes, hear an accordion. Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise. When you actually go to Paris it is not so much to discover as to recapture.

London or Rome may also have made an imprint. Berlin, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, New York. But only Paris is associated with Perfection. You do not aspire to be a Londoner, a Roman. You do not have a crush on their fashions or manners. Only Paris inspires yearning, dreaming, a constant search for the city's essence – all limited by preceding images long out of date. 'Paris' is like 'love': you say it in italics, you're proud of it, you think it's a ticket to something, but you don't really know what it is.

* * *

The thing to do was cook. The kitchen in our fifth-floor walk-up was the smallest I ever saw outside of a boat. You cooked standing in one spot, pivoting like a point guard. Toy refrigerator, narrow gas stove, sink, et voilà. I loved that kitchen for its compactness and its cheery south-facing window. Plus we had an oven, which we never had in Greece.

I borrowed cookbooks from the library and copied the recipes. These books were very serious. They all had to do with famous chefs. There were fierce polemics over whether to put cheese in a gratin Dauphinois, over how many ingredients were allowed in a salad Niçoise, the one and only way to make a genoise. Exactly which leaves were authorized in a mesclun mixture. When or whether to break the crust on the cassoulet. One French chef was quoted intoning as he filleted a sole, This fish will not have died in vain.

New verbs: saisir, raidir, luter. Vanner, paner, revenir. Get this one: mortifier, to age game or beef. A cocotte is a stewpot but also a fancy prostitute or a term of endearment. An appareil can be an airplane, a telephone, a camera or a batter – cake, not baseball.

The game was to make a main course for under fifteen francs, or about three dollars. Beef cheeks, oxtails, chicken wings, turkey cutlets. Pizza, pasta, soups, soufflés and our favorite Auvergnat potatoes: sliced and pan-fried with diced bacon and melted Cantal cheese.

I was reading a book by J-K Huysmans set in fin de siècle Paris about a man who spent half his time trying to find a decent meal within his budget. What he found were nasty dives where the company was repulsive and the filth stupefying, the meat fetid, the glasses with mouth-marks on them, the silverware encrusted with egg yolk. He found wine tasting of ink or benzene, cooked dishes with an aroma of lamp oil. Industrial chicken broth, meat shrunken like boot-soles, eggs that smelled like farts.

This did not conform to my notions of Parisian cuisine. It hadn't occurred to me that cuisine is for the well off, that maybe unlike in Greece and Italy there wasn't a tradition of decent poor-people's food outside the farm kitchen. And in fact, the fancy Parisiennes I met were proud of their incompetence in the kitchen. Cooking was sort of, how shall I say, concierge. Once I made a Greek meal for a couple of Parisian journalists, and the gentleman, when he found out that the food wasn't take-out, pronounced me a nice little housewife. It was not a compliment.

* * *

We had a new friend, Gabriel, who we met through friends back in the States. Gabriel was a chef who had spent most of his career in Chicago and was now back in Paris cooking for one of the French ministries. Fiftyish, handsome, both modest and authoritative, with fallen arches and sore legs after a career on his feet starting at age fourteen. His English was excellent, but he had an amusing mania for putting the accent on the second syllable of any English word unless it actually belonged there, in which case he moved it to the third syllable. Thus 'syllable' became 'syl-ah-bel,' 'favorite' became 'fay-vorr-eet, 'and one of his favorite words, 'shenanigans,' became 'shenan-ee-gans.'

I called Gabriel at work to ask him what to do with a tendron of veal. He said, Cook thee hell out of eet. He said, eet is with these cuts that you learn about cooking. After all, he said, you can't poot your shoes on before your pants. I said thanks, Gabriel. I could tell by the clanging and bellowing in the background that he was busy in his enormous kitchen.

No shoes before pants. Cook it till it begs for mercy.

Eventually I got Gabriel over to our minuscule kitchen to watch him make a classic blanquette de veau. I had bought tendron and flanchet of veal – they are both from the ribs, like bacon, but the flanchet is just to the rear of the tendron. In English we don't even use separate words for the two cuts. The butcher told me you could use either or both in a blanquette.

Imposs-ee-bull, according to Gabriel. He took the tendron and browned it a little, added minced garlic and onion, a chopped tomato, and some thyme, or-e-gann-o, rosemary and pepper. Covered it partly and started it cooking. Then he took the flanchet and made a blanquette. In no way would he let the flanchet touch the tendron. This is training. Gabriel described his experience in cooking school as a cross between boot camp and indentured servitude. He had no happy mem-ore-ies to share.

In one of his books Michel Guérard, of nouvelle cuisine fame, recalled his training as a brutal separation from adolescence. Rough, sharp and cold as flint; there were rare moments of light and enthusiastic learning, but always underscored with despair, discipline and rebellion.

* * *

M. Folantin kept telling himself he would have to cross the river to dine, but he was seized by a profound disgust whenever he stepped out of the Left Bank.

– J-K Huysmans, A Vau-l'Eau, 1894

You would like to think the Left Bank is very how shall I say, rive gauche. Arty, bohemian, intellectual. You're thinking of the Latin Quarter. Or possibly Boulevard Saint Germain, which retains its Sartre-and-Beauvoir reputation despite now being touristy, expensive and, yes, still charming. It is not, however, where you go to be on the cutting edge, it's where you go to spend money. And if you're not an intellectual, you can try at least to look like one, slouched among the tourists at les Deux Magots or Flore.

Don't be offended by the word 'tourist.' Half the world dreams of seeing Paris, and half of those actually go there. It must be the most visited city on earth. We are all tourists, all of us foreigners.

The Post Office recently tried to do its part to revive the avant-garde spirit by repositioning the freestanding mailboxes on the Boulevard Saint Germain so that they no longer stood up straight but tilted at a jaunty angle. Art, culture, surrealism, that sort of thing. It didn't work out because the rain fell straight into the mail slots. All the mailboxes had to be straightened out again, what a bore.

If I could afford it I would like to live in the Faubourg Saint Germain, the area east of the boulevard. Quiet, civilized, bourgeois with a capital B. Eighteenth-century mansions lie behind massive oak portals with polished brass handles. Graveled passageways lead to serene courtyards with severely tended boxwoods. Henry James and Edith Wharton dined there constantly. The prime minister is housed there, as well as the parliament and various ministries. I'm always struck by the palette: clamshell, sawdust, elephant, oatmeal. Now and then a heart-rending teal or Wedgwood blue.

It seems that in the Faubourg Saint Germain you don't buy your apartment, you inherit it. You dress conservatively and go to church. You have scads of obedient children. The boys' shorts and the girls' dresses, all too long, are in brown, navy, forest green or red. Thus these colors are proscribed for grownups. When Diana Vreeland said pink was the navy blue of India, the Parisians had no idea what she meant about navy blue. In Paris, if you were hoping for a pair of navy heels, you can just forget it. You don't need them anyway, because there is no navy suit or dress. Nor a purple one, by the way, unless you find a shop for ladies over seventy. In Paris you wear purple only to distract the eye from your dowager's hump. Nor is green recommended. Better stick to black.

When I first started to read Proust back in the States, I followed the story on a map of Paris, and was surprised that although the best families were Faubourg Saint Germain, all the novel's action seemed to be across the river on the Right Bank. A French friend explained that these families, notably the Guermantes, came from the Faubourg Saint Germain but had moved across to the Right Bank. As the novels unfold it becomes apparent that this migration was part of the devolution of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle class.

I live on the Left Bank, in the sedate, petit-bourgeois fifteenth arrondissement. Nearby is a neighborhood called Javel where there used to be a chemical plant that made bleach. To this day bleach is called eau de Javel in French. Try that at your next dinner party. On the Quai de Javel is an old Citroën plant, where the first European mass-produced automobiles were made.

We are fortunate to live near the race-car-repair district. Not because we need our race car repaired, but because Georges (Jojo) Houel, known as the dean of French Formula One drivers, has long since quit cars to become a restaurateur and he runs a bistro in the neighborhood called Le Volant, the steering wheel. It's loud, steamy, elbow-to-elbow, filled with photos and mementoes of auto racing. The home cooking is wholesome and forthright. Boeuf Bourguignon served from a copper pot with steamed potatoes. Lamb chops and spinach, sautéed rabbit (façon Jojo), prime rib, salt cod on mashed potatoes. A friendly blond lady takes your order and scolds you if you don't clean your plate. At the end of the meal white-haired, soft-spoken Monsieur Houel emerges from the downstairs kitchen in his chef's garb and makes the rounds, shaking hands with old friends and new customers, making sure everyone has enjoyed their meal. The thing you like about this place is that it's no big deal but the food is cooked with care and precision and served hot-hot-hot. It nourishes you better than food that's meant to be beautiful or stylish. It's good for your mental hygiene.

Still, Clorox and auto repair and mental hygiene are not what you think of when you say 'Left Bank.'

There's high-stepping Montparnasse, with its theatres and big brasseries on the boulevard, although without a trace of its former avant-garde artists and writers. No Hemingway, no Steins, no Man Ray, Apollinaire or Picasso. The Sorbonne remains, as does the rest of the Latin Quarter, and Luxembourg Gardens. There's an observatory, a cemetery, catacombs – The Left Bank even has its forgotten planet, the thirteenth arrondissement, which also contains Chinatown.

The Left Bank is handsome and historic. I prefer it for its southern charm and softer light, being on the south side of the Seine.

But what you're looking for when you think Left Bank has gently evaporated, despite the Sorbonne, despite the annual awarding of the literary Goncourt Prize from a table at the Brasserie Lipp on Boulevard Saint Germain.

The edge, the fervor, the sense of rebellion, have passed away. Now, the Left Bank feels middle class or upper. Now, if you want to be Sartre and Beauvoir, you go to the Right Bank.

* * *

Now all the antique dealers and rare-book sellers are vegetating in this neighborhood, and they flee to the other side of the river as soon as their leases are up. Ten years from now brasseries and cafés will have invaded all the shopfronts on the riverbank! Ah, clearly Paris is becoming a dreary Chicago. . . We might as well take advantage of the time given us before the definitive invasion of the great vulgarity of the New World.

J-K Huysmans, A Vau-l'Eau, 1894

There were five butcher shops on our Left Bank market-street. One of them I called the good butcher. Compact, dark-haired, gleaming with health, he and his staff of exemplary young assistants, all in matching red aprons, approached their work with the care and discipline of brain surgeons. The butcher's sparkling wife was at the cash register and in a pinch she could hack off a lamb chop without compromising her allure.

Due to budget considerations I also frequented the largest and most repulsive meat-shop on the street, where the staff were absolute butchers. The woman behind the pork counter had an oversized head, beady eyes, a big snub nose with enormous front-facing nostrils, and a rough sarcastic manner. She was right at home wielding her axe behind the ashen and red-rimmed pork parts – ears, heads, tails and feet as well as the more abstract hams and roasts. There was something all at once of the crime scene, the morgue and the sty, and I selected my cheap chops with a sense of distaste and foreboding.

Now today, a pork vendor who resembles a pig would delight me, but then I was friable and easily spooked. I was also afflicted by a strange syndrome wherein objects around me seemed to be whizzing by rather than standing still. It was like being on a moving train, the stations passing so fast that I couldn't read the names. In front of a long meat-counter I could barely keep up with the moving objects, much less choose. If I turned my head it was worse. On the street I had the sense that rather than walking I was reeling, careening like a cripple or a drunk.

May I live on until I look back and long for this time in which I am so lost, and remember it fondly, whispering, Ah, Paris.

I thought we'd stay two years.

* * *

My French text is called Le Nouveau Français en Pratique. Learning a language in high school is one thing: doodling in a margin, reciting Racine, gazing out the window, one loafer swinging off the toe of a knee-soxed leg.

This is more brutal: a desperate breaking and entering, cracking codes, ripping apart verbs and participles. Open up, let me in!

At the same time, language-learning takes place in a room of the brain where there is no opinion or desire, no nostalgia, hope or dread. It is a sane and safe spot where verbs are conjugated, nouns declined, adverbs distinguished from adjectives. Despite the exceptions it all makes some kind of sense. This is a great comfort. On my deathbed they will find me reading Intermediate Italian for work and play.

In Greece you could say someone was sympathitikos – meaning not that he was caring or softhearted, but likeable. It's one of those ancient words the Greeks still use, like moira and agora, and when you hear them on the street in Athens, you want to salute or genuflect.

I was glad to find that the French use the word, too: sympa, short for sympathique. As in Greek, the meaning has spread to take in places as well as people. Literally a person is sympathitikos because you and she feel alike, see eye to eye. As for a place, it can be pleasant or nice, but sympathitikos or sympa to me carries more feeling. It's like you're saying to the place, I understand this place, a person can feel comfortable here. The word 'enjoyable' may be just as good, but the 'sym' means 'together,' which draws the speaker and the object together. It's more sympa.

The worst part of living in a new language is the telephone. I hate the telephone. People call wanting to sell things and half the time I have no idea what they're talking about. One guy called asking for Nick, said he was from Barclay's bank and he wanted to sell us on a bank account. I said you can talk to me, I handle the finances here. He went heh-heh like I'd said I had a penis. He still wanted to talk to the gentleman of the house.

Do French women have the vote yet, I wondered . When I was looking at apartments to rent I got a call back from a landlord who would only speak to the man of the house. The funny thing was, he really wanted to rent to us because he liked Americans. I told him he'd have to talk to me and he politely would have none of it. Too bad, it was a nice apartment.

Then we get wrong numbers. I've learned how to say sorry, wrong number. One old coot strangling in his ascot responds thusly: No, Madame, I don't have the wrong number, you are the wrong person. At that moment I vowed to learn some good French insults.

* * *

I saw a reference in a magazine to the section of Paris called Nouvelle Athènes, and made a beeline for it, expecting something like Greektown in Chicago. Stuffed vine leaves, bouzouki music, garish storefronts, gyros and ouzo. What a surprise to find tailored buildings on sedate streets, the Gustave Moreau museum, a plaque about George Sand, and the usual shops and cafés. Thus was life before Google. I didn't realize that the area was called Nouvelle Athènes because of some classically inspired buildings and the intellectual life there in the 19th century. All I knew was I wanted souvlaki and a retsina.

I took my ignorance down the hill and treated myself to a 16-franc coffee at a café near rue Saint-Honoré. I could have made dinner for two for that amount. But as it took three men to serve me, I felt the money was well spent.

There were thirty more francs in my wallet, and I decided to spend twenty at the Louvre.

At the time, there were five different entrances to the Louvre and you could just waltz in and pay without any lines or fuss. I crossed over to the far side of the building to see the Greek sculptures. Cycladic idols, smiling kouris, the kneeling Aphrodite and the Venus de Milo, and then the sculpture that inspired Rilke's poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo.

In the poem Rilke proves that this marble torso, which he names for the sun god, is illuminated from within. Beyond the fact that it represents a well built athlete who seems to be advancing or otherwise gesturing with his right shoulder, conveying a sense of action and energy, Rilke is