Rob Couteau
from "Wonder: A Picaresque Work of Fiction"
Introduction by Christopher Sawyer-Lauҫanno: "It's a Wonderful Life"
What is it ye would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search. – Horatio to Fortinbras, Hamlet
Merriam-Webster’s defines “Wonder” as 1: a cause of astonishment or admiration; 2: the quality of exciting amazed admiration; 3a: rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience; 3b: a feeling of doubt or uncertainty. All of these definitions come into play both for the author and for the reader in Rob Couteau’s new book.
What Couteau has created is far more than a coming-of-age chronicle “with all the David Copperfield kind of crap.” Like the best authors who have chosen to write about becoming their own person, Couteau focuses his sharp eye on the world that formed his being. From the first pages we get a sense of who the protagonist, the fictional “Rob Couteau” is, and what events—from the sublime to the difficult to the ludicrous—formed his sense of identity. This is an account of how consciousness is acquired, how ideas become forces, how the individual reacts and responds to those forces bearing down on his very being.
This is not to suggest that Couteau has written a philosophy tome. While philosophical musings do crop up with regularity, this book is also a rollicking ride through Brooklyn in the ’60s to Venezuela in the ’80s, Paris in the 90s and back to the States. The book is not episodic in the conventional sense of one anecdote or event following another. Couteau is not afraid to flash forward to put the past in perspective, to flash back from the writer he is now to the young artist struggling to make sense of his own time and place in what was often a chaotic milieu. Purposeful digression serves as a talismanic touchstone which adds to and enriches his very compelling and strong narrative.
Unlike many memoirs, Couteau frames scenes so that the reader can see what the young protagonist-author was looking at and experiencing rather than being told explicitly what was happening for him at any given time. In other words, Couteau shows us his life, his friends, his complex family, his intimate relationships, his doubts and misgivings, his certainties and uncertainties, his adventures—large and small—his experimentations with art, writing, sex and drugs. Along the way he reflects on historical events that occurred often before he was born, on writers and writing, on painters and painting.
None of these details is gratuitous. Rather, what Couteau is striving to do, and admirably succeeding at doing, is to remind us that our lives do not exist in a vacuum. We are a part of our time and time is part of us. What Couteau demonstrates so ably is that being engaged in the life of one’s own time—whether journeying across the ocean or around our room, playing pranks, dropping LSD, having sex, reading books, painting canvases, having good laughs—helps to determine who we are. Being is complex as Couteau continually reminds us.
This is a rich book. It is also a long book but it needs to be. Couteau’s brilliant narrative style of limning events from the inside out, of working assiduously to understand the frame that holds it all together and helping us see it, too, could not and certainly would not work in a short book. Vignettes are connected to other vignettes; thought to practice; reflection to enlightenment. For all of the “action,” there are equal measures of musing on what and why those actions happened. The effect is rather kaleidoscopic, or perhaps more aptly Picassoesque, in that each segment interconnects to both the inner and outer realities he is attempting to encompass.
His mission is not so unlike that of Proust who word-painted an entire panorama of his life that included in-depth examinations of his relationships to acquaintances, family and above all passing time. Genet, and that other Brooklyn boy Henry Miller also come to mind for Couteau is always willing to engage us, in remarkably beautiful prose, in his more graphic corporeal encounters. Above all, this book is a ‘song of himself.’ Like Whitman, Couteau is attempting to embrace the full spectrum of what constitutes the human comedy while also embracing the person he is and how that individual is a contributor to this vast human comedy. All the while he is unfolding a belief system that he develops to steer his course on life’s way.
What Whitman wrote in his “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass sums up quite well the immensity of living that Couteau has absorbed into his consciousness and very being: “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
_________________________
A former creative-writing teacher at MIT and a widely published poet, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno is the author of The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris (Grove Press), E. E. Cummings: A Biography (Sourcebooks), and An Invisible Spectator, A Biography of Paul Bowles (Grove Press). His translations from the Spanish, French, and ancient Mayan have appeared in numerous publications, including the City Lights editions of The Destruction of the Jaguar: Poems from the Books of Chilam Balam and Concerning the Angels, a translation of the poems of Rafael Alberti.
* * *
In many ways the Fifties were personified by our reticent “Father Knows Best” president, Dwight Eisenhower, and his doughy, frumpy wife. After a decade of postwar conformism, of “Mom and Apple Pie,” of the American Dream of owning a prefabricated house in a cookie-cutter suburb such as Levittown and pursuing a life of dull but enduring stability, the notion of growing your hair long and blasting rock music from stereophonic speakers wasn’t just a superficial trend or a fleeting fashion statement. For many, it was a slap in the face to such conformism – even a call to arms. If a young man’s hair fell below his eardrums, nowhere else above the Mason-Dixon line could he take his life into his hands more than in Gravesend. Greasers and hitters were known to grab “long hairs” off the street and beat them to a pulp. One of my friends from high school was abducted by a carload of gavones and not only beaten but also sheared of his locks. If you adopted a hippie facade, you weren’t just saying fuck you to the status quo; you were also painting a target on your head and challenging the gedrools to come and fuck with you. This challenge also appealed to many of the local transit cops, who were widely known for their brutality, and whom you might encounter on the hour-long ride home after a night of partying in Greenwich Village. Even in Manhattan, “hard hat” construction workers might just as easily throw a punch at your face as they might flick a cigarette butt at the curb and stomp it out. The only kids spared such trouble were the greasers, who wore their hair slicked back into a Duck’s Ass or “D.A.”: a style originating in the late Forties.
Hair was the outward manifestation of a cultural, political, and sexual philosophy; and, just as the Christians had burned pagans at the stake for wearing the wrong amulet or skinned them alive because they disagreed over how many angels danced on the head of a pin, varying hair lengths triggered a cryptoreligious fervor. If you walked on the wrong block during the wrong time with the wrong set of goldilocks on your noggin, your head might suddenly be handed back to you.
* * *
Acid also lent me a profound sense of resilience. Once I survived that hellish ordeal, life’s other challenges seemed to pale into insignificance. After that harrowing experience, little else seemed to faze me. I increasingly exhibited an insouciance and devil-may-care-attitude that astonished my peers; for I felt as if little in life – the ordinary challenges and enervating obstacles – was worth getting flustered over. Or so I thought. I had yet to learn firsthand about death and taxes … not to mention the decrepitude of old age.
***
Even Picasso, who’d never stepped foot into America, had a file opened on him by J. Edgar Hoover: a 187-page dossier that tracked his movements for over twenty-five years, beginning in 1945. Ever trained, like an owl, to keep his eyes pinned to either side of the cosmic duality, Picasso had once confessed: “If I wouldn’t be a Communist, I’d be the worst kind of bourgeois.” How this must have rankled and confused poor old J. Edgar! Of course, the French préfecture de police had him under surveillance ever since June 18, 1901, until the German Occupation in 1940. Picasso’s Parisian concierges were always obliged to secretly transmit every snippet of gossip to the appropriate authorities.
And all this because culture poses a threat. But once television reigned supreme and the mass media and its pernicious influence spread like the cancer that it is, such authors and artists were quickly forgotten. And now, can you even name ten famous painters? I mean, celebrated, living, contemporary painters? I doubt it. Yet, in the heyday of painting, when the GIs liberated Paris, whose doorstep did they sleep upon? Who’s atelier did they yearn to visit? They wanted to meet Picasso, and they even slept there, on the floor of his studio, something that inspired Gertrude Stein to compose a novel immortalizing such starry-eyed GI Joe’s called Brewsie and Willie. But once all this had changed, the CIA moved elsewhere, and the funding for such capers more or less dried up. Now, they couldn’t care less about what you or I read or write in some arcane, obscure literary journal. But it wasn’t always like this. And now, authentic culture has been replaced by something far easier to control: a so-called pop culture. First the sheep were glued to their television sets, then to their computer monitors, then to their handheld hells. And now, there’s little to protect them from such corporate-controlled mindlessness. For how many teenagers have ever even seen a Picasso? Except, perhaps, one that’s digitalized on a computer screen. (By the way, not the same thing!)
In the late Nineties, one of my students in Paris informed me – with a display of nervous incomprehension and resonant distress – that, the previous summer, she’d been staying with an American family in Indiana; and, one day, she went outside wearing a T-shirt that said Picasso. It was embossed with a reproduction of that famous flowing heavenly signature ~ Picasso ~ and the teenagers on the white picket fence street had asked, Who’s Picasso? They even pronounced it PICK-a-so, which is amusing when you think of it, PICK-a-so, for this evokes the picador that the master had so often immortalized in his countless drawings, paintings, and lithographs. And before she could answer, one of them asked – quite seriously and as clueless as only a Midwestern hick can be – But was he a basketball player? For all they possessed was a so-called basketball culture.
And upon hearing this, my poor dear student became utterly distraught. The word disappointment comes nowhere near what she was experiencing. It was as if everything connected to Picasso and, thus, by extension, to that golden era in France – to that turn-of-the-century revelation that had swept into the world through avatars and iconoclasts such as the Douanier Rousseau, with his illuminated dream forests and portrait-landscapes of neurotic French families, eternally staring from stuffy tearooms or isolated, country lanes; not to mention the monaural masterworks of Erik Satie, with his brilliant “score” of buzzing aeroplane propellers, wailing sirens, and clattering typewriters that formed a key ingredient in an event that triggered everything: the theatrical production of Diaghilev’s Parade, in 1917; or the proto-Dadaist antics of Alfred Jarry, with his automated speech and filthy, schoolboy humor that was elevated to the level of high art, not to mention his Browning automatic, which he’d once fired just inches before the face of a startled pedestrian who’d merely asked for a light for his cigarette, and so Jarry had extended the blazing gun with the word, Voilà! – it was as if all this had never occurred! And, even worse, with the question, Who’s Picasso? France had itself ceased to exist, and then everything associated with Paris, with Picasso, and with his band of wild boys had vanished without a trace.
***
As summer approached, some friends and I decided to embark upon a camping trip that would eventually take us all the way to California and back. I suppose it was in imitation of Jack Kerouac and his On the Road crew that, come July, we drove in such a frenetic, hectic manner all across the States, but the national obsession to run away and escape from something had begun well before Kerouac. It also hadn’t eluded my attention that J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye not only leads to but strangely anticipates Kerouac’s road book:
Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d go away…. I’d start hitchhiking my way out West. What I’d do, I figured, I’d go down
to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I’d bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I’d
be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me and I’d get a job. I figured I could get
a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars.
Kerouac? Not at all. It’s from the final pages of Catcher, just before Holden Caulfield cracks up. And you could say that, just like Holden, Kerouac cracked up, too, although his decline was far more prolonged, incremental, and alcohol-induced. Although Salinger had suffered a nervous breakdown in his mid-twenties, which he drew upon when writing Catcher, later on he went bonkers on the other side of the psychic spectrum, neurotically obsessing over organic food, enemas, and yoga meditation. Just like Kerouac, he never matured past the age of fourteen; but, unlike Jack, he wanted to live to be at least 120.
***
Our journey culminated in a picturesque drive along Highway 1, straight down the Coast, beginning in Washington State. Once we entered northern California, the foggy mists of Oregon cleared away and, suddenly, we were gazing over that placid dreamy Pacific: so markedly different from the roaring Atlantic. In his memoir, Timebends, the playwright Arthur Miller remarks upon this contrast: “There was always something listless, almost forlorn,” he says, “about the lazy Pacific, unlike the sharp and cold and saltier Atlantic that was so fill of anger and ideas.” I was intrigued by the fact that, for the most part, you couldn’t even swim in the Pacific; it was far too dangerous, since the ocean floor dropped away so precipitously, and the tide might suddenly sweep you away.
After stopping at Humboldt State Park in northern California, we set up tent and entered the redwood forest. Despite being Brooklyn boys, that’s where we felt the most at home: seated beneath those prehistoric, majestic boughs known as the Sequoia sempervirens, or Coast redwoods. Perhaps it was because the trees of West Twelfth – struggling as they were to survive, sucking up what little moisture they could from under that suffocating, steaming pavement – had always been the most vital detail in our childhood landscape. But what impressed me almost as much as the towering trunks was the forest floor itself, which was so thickly carpeted from centuries of fallen redwood needles that the silence was beyond description. You were just enveloped in it. The hand of creation cradled you gently and quietly in the bosom of this eternal forest.
The following day, when we stopped at Big Sur, I continued to toy with the idea that we might somehow encounter Henry Miller. It was a mere two years before his death at the age of eighty-one. But of course, he wasn’t even living in Big Sur anymore; he’d long since moved to Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles: something we weren’t even aware of.
As we stood on a leafy mountaintop and gazed across the undulating sea, I finally understood why Henry had chosen this place. In terms of a natural aesthetic beauty it was a crowning point: a pinnacle in America. Miller must have been overwhelmed by this beatific vista, especially after all those years in dusty, smog-encrusted Paris. Indeed, Big Sur was the counterpoint, the antidote to all that.
Seven years before Kerouac’s legendary trip out West, and seventeen years before the publication of On the Road, Miller had embarked upon his own cross-country tour, in 1940. In comparison, it was a far more leisurely expedition than Kerouac’s maniacal blast into space. Miller’s trek lasted a full 354 days, and he lingered at various points along the way: interacting with ordinary people, soaking in the local flora and fauna, and raging over the culturally barren, desolate pavements that stretch from one dreary state to the next. But the most glaring contrast between the authors centers round Henry’s profound hatred of America. After discovering himself in Lutèce and briefly visiting the paradise of prewar Greece, he was suddenly back again, and what was there? Just an open road leading to all this wilderness: to those gargantuan untamed geological formations – monstrosities that inspire a profound and savage awe – but what of human culture? Where were the monumental cathedrals, the ancient museums, the haunts of Dante and Shakespeare? While strolling through Las Vegas one evening, he records his dismal impressions in a journal:
The sense of utter desolation. Loneliness. Madness. Two days in Vegas and I’d be a raving lunatic. The walk in fields at night.
The stars clouting me. The sinking feeling of being again in my own country, amidst empty souls. And the name so beautiful.
Vega! A great star! And this awful desolation – this appalling nothingness. Nothing anywhere in world to compare with it.
The loneliest spot in Tibet or Mongolia couldn’t produce in me such a feeling of devastation. I am no longer a man, no longer
a human being. I am a lost soul – a haunted man.
Miller’s hatred is so deep and all-consuming, his despair so unrelenting, that nothing he encounters during this arduous trek serves to spark or inspire his daemon. The only exemplary thing about The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is its title. Otherwise, it remains Henry’s only major work that I can’t sink my teeth into, for it lacks that uncanny transcendental vision and chilling inspiration that usually accompanies his rollicking prose. But fortunately, Miller also maintained a journal during this trip, which was later published in a facsimile edition and titled The Nightmare Notebook. Although it’s far less polished, thanks to this rawness, it far outshines the finished product, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
Besides his ruminations on Vegas, there’s a line in Nightmare Notebook that neatly sums up Henry’s harebrained scheme to capture what Kerouac called the “American Night.” When Miller ran into Gypsy Rose Lee at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York and he told her about this project – to drive across the dead American cow carcass and chronicle whatever he experienced along the way – she dryly remarked: “I could think of a lot better things to do than tour America.” Indeed. In fact, Henry might have been better off staying right there and writing a book about Gypsy Rose. Without realizing it, he’d finally met a woman as wily as himself. A lady who’d probably committed at least two murders and whose mother once shoved an uncooperative female journalist off a fire escape, plunging to her death. But instead, he pushed off, setting sail for New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Yet, eventually, this wild-goose chase led him to precisely where he was supposed to be and to where we were now standing: ogling this heavenly ocean, to use an odd turn of phrase, this foaming, churning sea that always brought Miller such bliss.
Even during the beginning of his road trip, once he’d made it as far as Richmond, Virginia, Henry must have suspected that Gypsy Rose was right. In a letter to Anaïs Nin, he writes:
The country continues to be marvelous […] But the contrast between the earth and the people who inhabit it is tremendous.
Nowhere else is it so marked, I imagine, as in America. Is it because they (or it) have no soul?
About eight months later, writing from Hollywood, he concludes:
Here nothing is sacred.
Five lines that, in their profound simplicity, outweigh all of Kerouac’s jejune (by comparison) chronicle. Indeed, even more notable than Nightmare Notebook, his contemporaneous letters to Nin comprise Miller’s real book about sitting in a jalopy and discovering America. But unfortunately, at the time, no one seemed to realize this or thought of promoting it as such. Undoubtedly, these missives, postmarked from two-bit towns in the middle of nowhere, represent some of Miller’s best ruminations about this idiotic cultural wasteland that runs from the drear outskirts of Mannahatta to the slimy seagulls of the San Francisco and that will forever remain an inhospitable, uncultured domain fit merely for dinosaurs.
As Humbert Humbert says of his own road trip with Lolita: “We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.”
* * *
Despite all that I’d learned during those twelve years, and despite the ever-vigilant regard I’d exercised, day and night, to, like any good Parisian, forestall and guard against any possible calamity (even though, unlike the French, it was the French way of doing things that I had to guard against), I’d committed a fatal error that would leave an indelible mark upon my imminent departure.
Even though there was just one client ahead of me and one behind me, I should have known better than to step away from the line and re-count my filthy lucre at an adjacent countertop. That one slip meant that the person behind me was called next, and, when my turn finally came after a series of ridiculous halts, delays, and pauses during which the big hand on the overhead clock crept past an additional thirty minutes (for in France, one person in a line means nothing; the teller might decide to sneak off to the men’s room to read Emile Zola, or to the cloak room to stare at a creamy white wall for another twenty minutes while dreaming of a slice of Camembert, or to the janitor’s room to call his girlfriend and whisper about some bizarre, baroque sexual fetish; for anything was indeed possible, although not in the same manner that they meant it back in ’68), whoosh … off he went.
“Un moment, monsieur!” the clerk shouted, waving his large waxen hand over his shoulder like a stop sign. “S’il vous plaît, monsieur,” he repeated “un moment!” Then he flew like a bat down into the cellar, then back again, but then he sat there for another thirty minutes counting and re-counting and stacking and unstacking wads and wads of dough; then he took off again, into the Crypte de la Banque Libanaise. And he might just as well have traveled all the way to Lebanon on a donkey burdened with gold bullion for all the time this was taking. But, unlike most Parisian fonctionnaires – I’ll give him this – he actually worked at a nerve-racking, frenetic pace; he was clearly driven. But regardless of that, there was no question of simply stopping, pausing, taking a “time out,” and cashing my sad little sack of hard worked, hard-to-scrape-together dough. No, such a commonsensical gesture might invite vast, cosmological disorder and, thus, even greater distress than the debilitating anxiety that continually rippled across this poor man’s dandruff encrusted, unsmiling, grave face.
And it’s the word grave (pronounced, in French, “grAHv”) that has brought us here, dear reader; for it was only from his lips that, a few years earlier, I’d finally heard it. On that day, I’d also stood there with just one customer in front of me: a smartly-dressed Algerian, who wore a dapper mint-green suit of the kind that many French businessmen wear, featuring those impressionistic colors that dominate the haberdasheries in Paris and that you’d never see on a British businessmen in London or an American in New York. We were standing beside the bulletproof glass with our respective currencies in hand when this same dandruff-bespeckled clerk with his thinning ginger hair discovered that the bills the Algerian was exchanging were counterfeit. When he stared at “the Arab” and asked where he’d gotten his loot, the man replied – very matter-of-factly, and sounding completely unperturbed about the fact that his cash was now deemed as worthless – “At the bank.” Despite this innocuous reply, now he was considered a suspect, a possible criminal passing along monopoly money. Indeed, a rather serious affair in France, a nation in which you were – despite what the law said – always guilty until proven innocent, and especially guilty if you were an “Arab,” and spectacularly guilty if you were a dapper-dressed Algerian carrying fake French notes.
The pasty-faced clerk continued to regard him with a steady, somber, beady-eyed intensity, then replied: “C’est grave, monsieur.” And then, after a dramatic pause, and with his voice dropping an octave, he added: “C’est très grave.” Motioning with his meaty hand, he beckoned for this client to follow him, so the Algerian stepped away from the line and was buzzed through a glass door at the end of the glass wall that separated us from the sanctum sanctorum of the interior, where three big, fat, overweight secretaries sat, clacking like well-fed chickens, and never once doing an honest ounce of work. Instead, these overgrown hens loved to laugh in that typically depraved, vicious, and sadistic manner of the French, rolling their mascara-lined eyes and slapping their fat whorish haunches whenever the harried clerk was attempting to calm an irate customer who couldn’t believe that, in a supposedly civilized land such as France – and, in fact, in the capital city of this supposedly first-world country – it required so much time to exchange a couple of dollar bills. What the fuck is wrong with you people; do you have your heads up your ass? And believe me, it wasn’t just a case a so-called Ugly American. I witnessed just as many Europeans of every stripe go haywire. Even the Italians had rarely witnessed anything like this. And besides, in Sicily, even if things were nearly that ass backwards, at least the fonctionnaires maintained a semblance of humanity about them. You could yell or scream, and at least they’d yell or scream back at you. And then, perhaps, the next day, you’d run into each other at a local café and laugh about it, or maybe even share a glass of wine or two. Or, if not that, then you’d attempt to castrate each other or blow each other’s brains out. At least there remained this relationship: a human connection, an exchange of some sort – whether enlivening or fatalistic. But here, the citizenry possessed cold, metallic hearts, and they addressed each other like disembodied specters or preprogrammed robots. Difficult to imagine that such a remarkable city was constructed by the ancestors of such daft automatons. It just didn’t add up. Something must have radically changed there, in Paris. Perhaps, it was the result of that spirit-crushing Second World War. For the Paris of the 1990s was nothing like the Paris of the roaring Twenties, with its bustling cafés dotting boulevard Montparnasse, packed to the gills and with the music blaring and the outdoor terraces overflowing with revelers, throwing back shots of whisky as Kiki de Montparnasse gyrated her banana-ensconced bottom, and with signs of joie de vivre everywhere and so plain to see. But now, instead, it resembled a mortuary, and we were among the living dead.
And then, suddenly, I realized that I’d come full circle. Fourteen years earlier, during my first afternoon in Paris, I found myself standing on a considerably longer line in a French bank near République, attempting to change my dollars into francs. And the clerks there were no faster than molasses as they lingered round like revenants, scratched their heads insouciantly, ambled about lethargically, made small talk, puffed and unpuffed their sallow cheeks, lazily answered the telephone, and did everything they could to forestall dealing with the next irate customer on line or providing anything more than a most infinitesimal amount of service. Until finally, a fidgety American businesswoman with smoldering green eyes and fiery red hair lost her patience and exploded. Throwing up her hands, she shouted: “As long as you conduct business this way, this will always be a third-world country! Nothing ever works here! Everything’s managed idiotically!” Then she spun round and stormed out, making a beeline for the front door.
Another American, a dour-faced businessman who was standing beside me, turned to his colleague and muttered, “Well, that’s just the way it is. She’d better get used to it.” Clearly, he’d been living there so long that he’d given up. He couldn’t even imagine things being conducted differently. Unlike that steaming woman, he’d simply waved a white flag, surrendered the fight, and succumbed to it.
Witnessing all this during my first day in Paris as a carefree tourist with plenty of time on my hands, I too looked down upon her – “such a busybody businesswoman!” – convinced that she exemplified nothing more than the Ugly American. But I had no conception – as she did from living, or dying, day after day in the languorous French capital and thus accruing years of such frustration and despair – of everything that was contained in that beatific explosion: that righteous howl of what it feels like to have the most precious moments of your life ripped away, trampled upon, utterly wasted, and repeatedly tormented in a limbo ruled over by such reprehensible fonctionnaires. Even Prometheus, with his liver pecked away daily, had never been subjected to such indignities.
And for many years, I even referred to President Mitterrand – that broom-handle-up-his-ass stiff who reveled in walking and talking like a zombie – as Le morte vivant, the living dead. Until one of my students finally said, Mais, Robere, you know, you shouldn’t say that. After all, it’s not his fault that he has cancer. But until then, I had no idea that he was cancer-ridden. During the period in which I’d dubbed him Le morte vivant, only Mitterrand knew that he was ill, and he’d commanded his private physician to keep it a secret. Thus, he’d managed to get reelected, and no one was the wiser.
***
In many ways the Fifties were personified by our reticent “Father Knows Best” president, Dwight Eisenhower, and his doughy, frumpy wife. After a decade of postwar conformism, of “Mom and Apple Pie,” of the American Dream of owning a prefabricated house in a cookie-cutter suburb such as Levittown and pursuing a life of dull but enduring stability, the notion of growing your hair long and blasting rock music from stereophonic speakers wasn’t just a superficial trend or a fleeting fashion statement. For many, it was a slap in the face to such conformism – even a call to arms. If a young man’s hair fell below his eardrums, nowhere else above the Mason-Dixon line could he take his life into his hands more than in Gravesend. Greasers and hitters were known to grab “long hairs” off the street and beat them to a pulp. One of my friends from high school was abducted by a carload of gavones and not only beaten but also sheared of his locks. If you adopted a hippie facade, you weren’t just saying fuck you to the status quo; you were also painting a target on your head and challenging the gedrools to come and fuck with you. This challenge also appealed to many of the local transit cops, who were widely known for their brutality, and whom you might encounter on the hour-long ride home after a night of partying in Greenwich Village. Even in Manhattan, “hard hat” construction workers might just as easily throw a punch at your face as they might flick a cigarette butt at the curb and stomp it out. The only kids spared such trouble were the greasers, who wore their hair slicked back into a Duck’s Ass or “D.A.”: a style originating in the late Forties.
Hair was the outward manifestation of a cultural, political, and sexual philosophy; and, just as the Christians had burned pagans at the stake for wearing the wrong amulet or skinned them alive because they disagreed over how many angels danced on the head of a pin, varying hair lengths triggered a cryptoreligious fervor. If you walked on the wrong block during the wrong time with the wrong set of goldilocks on your noggin, your head might suddenly be handed back to you.
* * *
Acid also lent me a profound sense of resilience. Once I survived that hellish ordeal, life’s other challenges seemed to pale into insignificance. After that harrowing experience, little else seemed to faze me. I increasingly exhibited an insouciance and devil-may-care-attitude that astonished my peers; for I felt as if little in life – the ordinary challenges and enervating obstacles – was worth getting flustered over. Or so I thought. I had yet to learn firsthand about death and taxes … not to mention the decrepitude of old age.
***
Even Picasso, who’d never stepped foot into America, had a file opened on him by J. Edgar Hoover: a 187-page dossier that tracked his movements for over twenty-five years, beginning in 1945. Ever trained, like an owl, to keep his eyes pinned to either side of the cosmic duality, Picasso had once confessed: “If I wouldn’t be a Communist, I’d be the worst kind of bourgeois.” How this must have rankled and confused poor old J. Edgar! Of course, the French préfecture de police had him under surveillance ever since June 18, 1901, until the German Occupation in 1940. Picasso’s Parisian concierges were always obliged to secretly transmit every snippet of gossip to the appropriate authorities.
And all this because culture poses a threat. But once television reigned supreme and the mass media and its pernicious influence spread like the cancer that it is, such authors and artists were quickly forgotten. And now, can you even name ten famous painters? I mean, celebrated, living, contemporary painters? I doubt it. Yet, in the heyday of painting, when the GIs liberated Paris, whose doorstep did they sleep upon? Who’s atelier did they yearn to visit? They wanted to meet Picasso, and they even slept there, on the floor of his studio, something that inspired Gertrude Stein to compose a novel immortalizing such starry-eyed GI Joe’s called Brewsie and Willie. But once all this had changed, the CIA moved elsewhere, and the funding for such capers more or less dried up. Now, they couldn’t care less about what you or I read or write in some arcane, obscure literary journal. But it wasn’t always like this. And now, authentic culture has been replaced by something far easier to control: a so-called pop culture. First the sheep were glued to their television sets, then to their computer monitors, then to their handheld hells. And now, there’s little to protect them from such corporate-controlled mindlessness. For how many teenagers have ever even seen a Picasso? Except, perhaps, one that’s digitalized on a computer screen. (By the way, not the same thing!)
In the late Nineties, one of my students in Paris informed me – with a display of nervous incomprehension and resonant distress – that, the previous summer, she’d been staying with an American family in Indiana; and, one day, she went outside wearing a T-shirt that said Picasso. It was embossed with a reproduction of that famous flowing heavenly signature ~ Picasso ~ and the teenagers on the white picket fence street had asked, Who’s Picasso? They even pronounced it PICK-a-so, which is amusing when you think of it, PICK-a-so, for this evokes the picador that the master had so often immortalized in his countless drawings, paintings, and lithographs. And before she could answer, one of them asked – quite seriously and as clueless as only a Midwestern hick can be – But was he a basketball player? For all they possessed was a so-called basketball culture.
And upon hearing this, my poor dear student became utterly distraught. The word disappointment comes nowhere near what she was experiencing. It was as if everything connected to Picasso and, thus, by extension, to that golden era in France – to that turn-of-the-century revelation that had swept into the world through avatars and iconoclasts such as the Douanier Rousseau, with his illuminated dream forests and portrait-landscapes of neurotic French families, eternally staring from stuffy tearooms or isolated, country lanes; not to mention the monaural masterworks of Erik Satie, with his brilliant “score” of buzzing aeroplane propellers, wailing sirens, and clattering typewriters that formed a key ingredient in an event that triggered everything: the theatrical production of Diaghilev’s Parade, in 1917; or the proto-Dadaist antics of Alfred Jarry, with his automated speech and filthy, schoolboy humor that was elevated to the level of high art, not to mention his Browning automatic, which he’d once fired just inches before the face of a startled pedestrian who’d merely asked for a light for his cigarette, and so Jarry had extended the blazing gun with the word, Voilà! – it was as if all this had never occurred! And, even worse, with the question, Who’s Picasso? France had itself ceased to exist, and then everything associated with Paris, with Picasso, and with his band of wild boys had vanished without a trace.
***
As summer approached, some friends and I decided to embark upon a camping trip that would eventually take us all the way to California and back. I suppose it was in imitation of Jack Kerouac and his On the Road crew that, come July, we drove in such a frenetic, hectic manner all across the States, but the national obsession to run away and escape from something had begun well before Kerouac. It also hadn’t eluded my attention that J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye not only leads to but strangely anticipates Kerouac’s road book:
Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d go away…. I’d start hitchhiking my way out West. What I’d do, I figured, I’d go down
to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I’d bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I’d
be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me and I’d get a job. I figured I could get
a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars.
Kerouac? Not at all. It’s from the final pages of Catcher, just before Holden Caulfield cracks up. And you could say that, just like Holden, Kerouac cracked up, too, although his decline was far more prolonged, incremental, and alcohol-induced. Although Salinger had suffered a nervous breakdown in his mid-twenties, which he drew upon when writing Catcher, later on he went bonkers on the other side of the psychic spectrum, neurotically obsessing over organic food, enemas, and yoga meditation. Just like Kerouac, he never matured past the age of fourteen; but, unlike Jack, he wanted to live to be at least 120.
***
Our journey culminated in a picturesque drive along Highway 1, straight down the Coast, beginning in Washington State. Once we entered northern California, the foggy mists of Oregon cleared away and, suddenly, we were gazing over that placid dreamy Pacific: so markedly different from the roaring Atlantic. In his memoir, Timebends, the playwright Arthur Miller remarks upon this contrast: “There was always something listless, almost forlorn,” he says, “about the lazy Pacific, unlike the sharp and cold and saltier Atlantic that was so fill of anger and ideas.” I was intrigued by the fact that, for the most part, you couldn’t even swim in the Pacific; it was far too dangerous, since the ocean floor dropped away so precipitously, and the tide might suddenly sweep you away.
After stopping at Humboldt State Park in northern California, we set up tent and entered the redwood forest. Despite being Brooklyn boys, that’s where we felt the most at home: seated beneath those prehistoric, majestic boughs known as the Sequoia sempervirens, or Coast redwoods. Perhaps it was because the trees of West Twelfth – struggling as they were to survive, sucking up what little moisture they could from under that suffocating, steaming pavement – had always been the most vital detail in our childhood landscape. But what impressed me almost as much as the towering trunks was the forest floor itself, which was so thickly carpeted from centuries of fallen redwood needles that the silence was beyond description. You were just enveloped in it. The hand of creation cradled you gently and quietly in the bosom of this eternal forest.
The following day, when we stopped at Big Sur, I continued to toy with the idea that we might somehow encounter Henry Miller. It was a mere two years before his death at the age of eighty-one. But of course, he wasn’t even living in Big Sur anymore; he’d long since moved to Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles: something we weren’t even aware of.
As we stood on a leafy mountaintop and gazed across the undulating sea, I finally understood why Henry had chosen this place. In terms of a natural aesthetic beauty it was a crowning point: a pinnacle in America. Miller must have been overwhelmed by this beatific vista, especially after all those years in dusty, smog-encrusted Paris. Indeed, Big Sur was the counterpoint, the antidote to all that.
Seven years before Kerouac’s legendary trip out West, and seventeen years before the publication of On the Road, Miller had embarked upon his own cross-country tour, in 1940. In comparison, it was a far more leisurely expedition than Kerouac’s maniacal blast into space. Miller’s trek lasted a full 354 days, and he lingered at various points along the way: interacting with ordinary people, soaking in the local flora and fauna, and raging over the culturally barren, desolate pavements that stretch from one dreary state to the next. But the most glaring contrast between the authors centers round Henry’s profound hatred of America. After discovering himself in Lutèce and briefly visiting the paradise of prewar Greece, he was suddenly back again, and what was there? Just an open road leading to all this wilderness: to those gargantuan untamed geological formations – monstrosities that inspire a profound and savage awe – but what of human culture? Where were the monumental cathedrals, the ancient museums, the haunts of Dante and Shakespeare? While strolling through Las Vegas one evening, he records his dismal impressions in a journal:
The sense of utter desolation. Loneliness. Madness. Two days in Vegas and I’d be a raving lunatic. The walk in fields at night.
The stars clouting me. The sinking feeling of being again in my own country, amidst empty souls. And the name so beautiful.
Vega! A great star! And this awful desolation – this appalling nothingness. Nothing anywhere in world to compare with it.
The loneliest spot in Tibet or Mongolia couldn’t produce in me such a feeling of devastation. I am no longer a man, no longer
a human being. I am a lost soul – a haunted man.
Miller’s hatred is so deep and all-consuming, his despair so unrelenting, that nothing he encounters during this arduous trek serves to spark or inspire his daemon. The only exemplary thing about The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is its title. Otherwise, it remains Henry’s only major work that I can’t sink my teeth into, for it lacks that uncanny transcendental vision and chilling inspiration that usually accompanies his rollicking prose. But fortunately, Miller also maintained a journal during this trip, which was later published in a facsimile edition and titled The Nightmare Notebook. Although it’s far less polished, thanks to this rawness, it far outshines the finished product, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
Besides his ruminations on Vegas, there’s a line in Nightmare Notebook that neatly sums up Henry’s harebrained scheme to capture what Kerouac called the “American Night.” When Miller ran into Gypsy Rose Lee at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York and he told her about this project – to drive across the dead American cow carcass and chronicle whatever he experienced along the way – she dryly remarked: “I could think of a lot better things to do than tour America.” Indeed. In fact, Henry might have been better off staying right there and writing a book about Gypsy Rose. Without realizing it, he’d finally met a woman as wily as himself. A lady who’d probably committed at least two murders and whose mother once shoved an uncooperative female journalist off a fire escape, plunging to her death. But instead, he pushed off, setting sail for New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Yet, eventually, this wild-goose chase led him to precisely where he was supposed to be and to where we were now standing: ogling this heavenly ocean, to use an odd turn of phrase, this foaming, churning sea that always brought Miller such bliss.
Even during the beginning of his road trip, once he’d made it as far as Richmond, Virginia, Henry must have suspected that Gypsy Rose was right. In a letter to Anaïs Nin, he writes:
The country continues to be marvelous […] But the contrast between the earth and the people who inhabit it is tremendous.
Nowhere else is it so marked, I imagine, as in America. Is it because they (or it) have no soul?
About eight months later, writing from Hollywood, he concludes:
Here nothing is sacred.
Five lines that, in their profound simplicity, outweigh all of Kerouac’s jejune (by comparison) chronicle. Indeed, even more notable than Nightmare Notebook, his contemporaneous letters to Nin comprise Miller’s real book about sitting in a jalopy and discovering America. But unfortunately, at the time, no one seemed to realize this or thought of promoting it as such. Undoubtedly, these missives, postmarked from two-bit towns in the middle of nowhere, represent some of Miller’s best ruminations about this idiotic cultural wasteland that runs from the drear outskirts of Mannahatta to the slimy seagulls of the San Francisco and that will forever remain an inhospitable, uncultured domain fit merely for dinosaurs.
As Humbert Humbert says of his own road trip with Lolita: “We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.”
* * *
Despite all that I’d learned during those twelve years, and despite the ever-vigilant regard I’d exercised, day and night, to, like any good Parisian, forestall and guard against any possible calamity (even though, unlike the French, it was the French way of doing things that I had to guard against), I’d committed a fatal error that would leave an indelible mark upon my imminent departure.
Even though there was just one client ahead of me and one behind me, I should have known better than to step away from the line and re-count my filthy lucre at an adjacent countertop. That one slip meant that the person behind me was called next, and, when my turn finally came after a series of ridiculous halts, delays, and pauses during which the big hand on the overhead clock crept past an additional thirty minutes (for in France, one person in a line means nothing; the teller might decide to sneak off to the men’s room to read Emile Zola, or to the cloak room to stare at a creamy white wall for another twenty minutes while dreaming of a slice of Camembert, or to the janitor’s room to call his girlfriend and whisper about some bizarre, baroque sexual fetish; for anything was indeed possible, although not in the same manner that they meant it back in ’68), whoosh … off he went.
“Un moment, monsieur!” the clerk shouted, waving his large waxen hand over his shoulder like a stop sign. “S’il vous plaît, monsieur,” he repeated “un moment!” Then he flew like a bat down into the cellar, then back again, but then he sat there for another thirty minutes counting and re-counting and stacking and unstacking wads and wads of dough; then he took off again, into the Crypte de la Banque Libanaise. And he might just as well have traveled all the way to Lebanon on a donkey burdened with gold bullion for all the time this was taking. But, unlike most Parisian fonctionnaires – I’ll give him this – he actually worked at a nerve-racking, frenetic pace; he was clearly driven. But regardless of that, there was no question of simply stopping, pausing, taking a “time out,” and cashing my sad little sack of hard worked, hard-to-scrape-together dough. No, such a commonsensical gesture might invite vast, cosmological disorder and, thus, even greater distress than the debilitating anxiety that continually rippled across this poor man’s dandruff encrusted, unsmiling, grave face.
And it’s the word grave (pronounced, in French, “grAHv”) that has brought us here, dear reader; for it was only from his lips that, a few years earlier, I’d finally heard it. On that day, I’d also stood there with just one customer in front of me: a smartly-dressed Algerian, who wore a dapper mint-green suit of the kind that many French businessmen wear, featuring those impressionistic colors that dominate the haberdasheries in Paris and that you’d never see on a British businessmen in London or an American in New York. We were standing beside the bulletproof glass with our respective currencies in hand when this same dandruff-bespeckled clerk with his thinning ginger hair discovered that the bills the Algerian was exchanging were counterfeit. When he stared at “the Arab” and asked where he’d gotten his loot, the man replied – very matter-of-factly, and sounding completely unperturbed about the fact that his cash was now deemed as worthless – “At the bank.” Despite this innocuous reply, now he was considered a suspect, a possible criminal passing along monopoly money. Indeed, a rather serious affair in France, a nation in which you were – despite what the law said – always guilty until proven innocent, and especially guilty if you were an “Arab,” and spectacularly guilty if you were a dapper-dressed Algerian carrying fake French notes.
The pasty-faced clerk continued to regard him with a steady, somber, beady-eyed intensity, then replied: “C’est grave, monsieur.” And then, after a dramatic pause, and with his voice dropping an octave, he added: “C’est très grave.” Motioning with his meaty hand, he beckoned for this client to follow him, so the Algerian stepped away from the line and was buzzed through a glass door at the end of the glass wall that separated us from the sanctum sanctorum of the interior, where three big, fat, overweight secretaries sat, clacking like well-fed chickens, and never once doing an honest ounce of work. Instead, these overgrown hens loved to laugh in that typically depraved, vicious, and sadistic manner of the French, rolling their mascara-lined eyes and slapping their fat whorish haunches whenever the harried clerk was attempting to calm an irate customer who couldn’t believe that, in a supposedly civilized land such as France – and, in fact, in the capital city of this supposedly first-world country – it required so much time to exchange a couple of dollar bills. What the fuck is wrong with you people; do you have your heads up your ass? And believe me, it wasn’t just a case a so-called Ugly American. I witnessed just as many Europeans of every stripe go haywire. Even the Italians had rarely witnessed anything like this. And besides, in Sicily, even if things were nearly that ass backwards, at least the fonctionnaires maintained a semblance of humanity about them. You could yell or scream, and at least they’d yell or scream back at you. And then, perhaps, the next day, you’d run into each other at a local café and laugh about it, or maybe even share a glass of wine or two. Or, if not that, then you’d attempt to castrate each other or blow each other’s brains out. At least there remained this relationship: a human connection, an exchange of some sort – whether enlivening or fatalistic. But here, the citizenry possessed cold, metallic hearts, and they addressed each other like disembodied specters or preprogrammed robots. Difficult to imagine that such a remarkable city was constructed by the ancestors of such daft automatons. It just didn’t add up. Something must have radically changed there, in Paris. Perhaps, it was the result of that spirit-crushing Second World War. For the Paris of the 1990s was nothing like the Paris of the roaring Twenties, with its bustling cafés dotting boulevard Montparnasse, packed to the gills and with the music blaring and the outdoor terraces overflowing with revelers, throwing back shots of whisky as Kiki de Montparnasse gyrated her banana-ensconced bottom, and with signs of joie de vivre everywhere and so plain to see. But now, instead, it resembled a mortuary, and we were among the living dead.
And then, suddenly, I realized that I’d come full circle. Fourteen years earlier, during my first afternoon in Paris, I found myself standing on a considerably longer line in a French bank near République, attempting to change my dollars into francs. And the clerks there were no faster than molasses as they lingered round like revenants, scratched their heads insouciantly, ambled about lethargically, made small talk, puffed and unpuffed their sallow cheeks, lazily answered the telephone, and did everything they could to forestall dealing with the next irate customer on line or providing anything more than a most infinitesimal amount of service. Until finally, a fidgety American businesswoman with smoldering green eyes and fiery red hair lost her patience and exploded. Throwing up her hands, she shouted: “As long as you conduct business this way, this will always be a third-world country! Nothing ever works here! Everything’s managed idiotically!” Then she spun round and stormed out, making a beeline for the front door.
Another American, a dour-faced businessman who was standing beside me, turned to his colleague and muttered, “Well, that’s just the way it is. She’d better get used to it.” Clearly, he’d been living there so long that he’d given up. He couldn’t even imagine things being conducted differently. Unlike that steaming woman, he’d simply waved a white flag, surrendered the fight, and succumbed to it.
Witnessing all this during my first day in Paris as a carefree tourist with plenty of time on my hands, I too looked down upon her – “such a busybody businesswoman!” – convinced that she exemplified nothing more than the Ugly American. But I had no conception – as she did from living, or dying, day after day in the languorous French capital and thus accruing years of such frustration and despair – of everything that was contained in that beatific explosion: that righteous howl of what it feels like to have the most precious moments of your life ripped away, trampled upon, utterly wasted, and repeatedly tormented in a limbo ruled over by such reprehensible fonctionnaires. Even Prometheus, with his liver pecked away daily, had never been subjected to such indignities.
And for many years, I even referred to President Mitterrand – that broom-handle-up-his-ass stiff who reveled in walking and talking like a zombie – as Le morte vivant, the living dead. Until one of my students finally said, Mais, Robere, you know, you shouldn’t say that. After all, it’s not his fault that he has cancer. But until then, I had no idea that he was cancer-ridden. During the period in which I’d dubbed him Le morte vivant, only Mitterrand knew that he was ill, and he’d commanded his private physician to keep it a secret. Thus, he’d managed to get reelected, and no one was the wiser.
***