FOR ME, THE 1920S AND 1930s RADIATE A GLAMOUR they can only possess for someone who didnât live through them.
Shorn of grim features such as the Great Depression, the 1919 influenza epidemic, the Russian revolution and the Holocaust, Europe between the two world wars appears to blaze. Or at least it did to someone growing up in an Australian country town in the 1960s. But like the Hawaiian tsunamis that petered out on Bondi Beach as modest swells, the upheavals that revolutionized art and culture on the other side of the world were ripples by the time they reached us.
I could see the ghost of a new philosphy of design in the streamlining of our Bakelite mantel radio, and recognize Surrealism in the two-dimensional landscape and amputated torsos of a poster for brassiĂšres by Hestia (popularly thought to be an acronym for Holds Every Size Tit In Australia), but both looked ill at ease in a country that still based its architecture and its ideas on the English home counties, and where the cutting edge of automobile design was represented by the boxy, underpowered Triumph Mayflower.
Australia, I quickly decided, held nothing for me. Notwithstanding our national song, âAdvance, Australia Fairâ, the country seemed to be not advancing at all but devolving, the people patiently retracing their steps down the evolutionary line, heading back to the Triassic and a way of life you could depend on. In my jaded view, Australians swam like fish and thought like sheep. I wanted out.
My life entered a phase of dual existence. Sitting in the Koala Milk Bar drinking a milkshake, I could squint my eyes and transport myself in imagination to the CafĂ© Radio on Place Blanche in Montmartre where, dawdling over a corrosively black cafĂ© express, I watched covertly as a succession of chain-smoking, driven-looking individuals arrived, some with female companions as taut and pale as lilies, to find seats in the huddle that radiated out from a burly man in a green tweed suit, complacently drawing on a pipeâthe sage of Surrealism, AndrĂ© Breton, possessor of, it was said in awe, âthe most haunted mind in Europeâ.
Another day, while I might be pushing my bicycle along a cracked concrete pavement under the pungent pepper trees of Junee, my world circumscribed by a horizon shimmering in 40-degree heat, in fantasy I stood rapt in the early summer of 1925 under blue skies in a light breeze on Place du TrocadĂ©ro. Below me cascaded a hillside of terraces, stylized statuary and spouting fountains, a carpet of white that leapt the Seine to join, under the feet of the Eiffel Tower, the pavilions of the Exposition des Arts DĂ©coratifs. Some of its buildings were sharp and white as sugar cubes, others voluptuously curved, but all dazzlingly announced the arrival of a style so new it had no name. Though the Americans would christen it âstreamliningâ, to the rest of the world it would always be, in honour of the Exposition, art dĂ©co.
That I would one day live in Paris, be part of a French family at the very heart of where these great movements were born and flourished; that I would live in the building where the publication of James Joyceâs Ulysses was planned, and every day climb the stairs up which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas once panted, sprinted or lumbered; this seemed a fantasy close to insanity.
But it doesnât do to minimize the power of love.
All Paris stories are to some extent stories of loveâlove requited or unrequited, knowing or innocent, spiritual, intellectual, carnal, doomed. The love that brought me to Paris combined a little of them all, as a poorly written movie tries to cram in everything that might draw an audience. My story featured coincidence, the supernatural (or something very like it), Hollywood, and a long-lost love miraculously rekindled, only to be nearly snatched away. . .Cheap romantic nonsense, I would have said had I seen it on screen. But, as NoĂ«l Coward remarked in Private Lives, âExtraordinary how potent cheap music is.â
Living in Los Angeles in 1989, on the rebound from a broken marriage, Iâd become friendly with Suzy, a woman in mid-level movie management whose long-time lover, an irascible and addictive film-maker, had recently died. Though heâd treated her with casual cruelty, she felt bereft without him, particularly since sheâd also lost most of her relatives to Hitler.
âIf only I could be sure that we would be reunited someday,â she said tearfully, âI think I could go on.â
As a practical woman in the movie business, Suzy put this concept into pre-production. With me as company, she began to audition systems of belief, looking for one that would guarantee reunion with her lover after death. We visited card readers and mediums, and a spiritist church in Encino, where the audience sat enthralled as an elderly lady, seated at a card table with her devoted husband holding her hand, gabbled in what we were told was the voice of the famous medium Edgar Cayce. At one point, the word âAntichristâ surfaced from the babble. An instant later, a tiny earth tremor shook the hall. We exchanged significant glances with our neighbours. Aaah!
âFuck this,â Suzy murmured. âI feel like eating Mexican. How about you?â
The last candidate was a man in the remote suburb of Commerce, who needed subjects to be hypnotized as part of some ill-defined project. Suzy didnât feel like surrendering control of her mind unless somebody she trusted had done so before, so she despatched me into that wilderness of 24-hour poker clubs and used-car lots to check him out.
Joe was a young psychologist who believed that weâve all lived before in other bodies. As part of his work at a mental hospital, he used hypnosis a lot, and was convinced that, in a trance, people might reveal that in another life they had met Jesus Christ. I told him frankly that the works of the Blessed Shirley MacLaine had inoculated me against this concept. Any lingering belief was extinguished by the regiments of cocktail waitresses and bus drivers claiming to be the reincarnations of Napoleon, Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba.
âWell, OK,â Joe said amiably. âBut as long as youâre here, why not give it a try?â
That session and those that followed in Joeâs poky little apartment were revelatory. He never pushed me back into any former existence, but along the way I did re-experience some startling events in my own life which Iâd presumably suppressed. After half a dozen visits, however, it became clear that any former lives I might have had were so boring that Iâd slept through them.
With a sigh, Joe finally accepted defeat. âBut I really appreciate your time, John. And Iâd like to give you a gift.â
As I looked around his threadbare home, trying to think of a diplomatic way to refuse, he went on, âI donât mean money. I mean a post-hypnotic gift. Think of the three things that have given you the greatest pleasure in life. Then, as you name each, Iâll squeeze your left wrist. And from now on, every time you squeeze that wrist youâll re-experience the same pleasure.â
My choices, nominated while still in a trance, astonished me. Not great sex, wild music, drug highs or roller-coaster ridesâjust the solitary pleasures of someone who, though usually surrounded by people, felt himself alone.
The first was the pleasure of getting up before the sun, and sitting down in the pre-dawn silence with a cup of coffee to start writing.
The second was the memory of a song, âFinishing the Hatâ, from Stephen Sondheimâs Sunday in the Park with George, about the painter Georges Seurat. While he paints the great canvas Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte, agonizing about how to render in tiny points of colour the reality of something as prosaic as a hat, his exasperated mistress is lured away to America by a baker who, though no Seurat, can give her the love and attention she needs.
He asked for my third choice. Again, it was connected with Paris.
Years before, Iâd been romantically involved with a young French woman named Marie-Dominique. Weâd travelled around the world together and had wonderful times, but her life as a radio journalist in Paris and mine as a writer in America or Australia gradually drew us apart.
Now, in a memory so vivid that I felt Iâd been physically transported back ten years and across the world, I was standing with her on a winterâs day in the huge flea market of Clignancourt, on the outskirts of Paris. We were eating thin frites with mustard out of a cone of paper. I could taste the salt and the fat, see the wind ruffling the fur collar of her coat, feel the cold through my feet. Emotions too complex to analyse lifted me like a wave.
Driving back home in a daze, I rang Marie-Do in Paris. Wouldnât she like to visit me in Los Angeles? Not long after, she did.
From the moment she got off the plane, we both sensed a fundamental change in our relationship. Ten years before, Iâd been married and sheâd been starting her career. Now my marriage was over, and she, still unmarried, was established as one of Franceâs top radio journalists. Like a bottle of wine that only comes into its best after itâs had time to breathe, our love was ready to drink.
For the next ten days, we barely spent a minute apart. And in the quiet times, almost without discussing it, we became aware that this part of our lives was coming to a close. We would return to Paris, set up a home, marry, have children.
Within three weeks, to the astonishment of my friends, Iâd emptied my apartment, disposed of my possessions, and booked a flight to Paris, a city where Iâd never lived, in a country where I knew nobody, and whose language I couldnât speak. I was fifty, Marie-Dominique twelve years younger, and nobody believed it would last a fortnight, if indeed it survived as far as the airport.
They could not have been more wrong. But then, they hadnât reckoned on one thing. They hadnât reckoned on Paris.
WE LANDED IN PARIS JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1989, in a snowfall that sifted down like terminal dandruff. In Los Angeles, sprinklers swished over green lawns and the sun sparkled off Santa Monica Bay. Midwinter Paris, on the other hand, appeared dark and menacing, a city hunched over the Seine like a predatory animal over its prey.
For my first weeks, I woke before dawn and sat by the window of Marie-Dominiqueâs tiny flatâthe kind the French call a studioâchilled to the bone. Had I done the right thing, to uproot myself in three weeks from a city where I had friends, where I was comfortable and where I could earn an easy and pleasant living? I loved the woman whoâd inspired this lunacy, longed for us to have children, and to spend the rest of my life with her. But at 4 a.m., in winter chill, good reasons for such a move looked diminishingly small.
But then the sun would come up, and light would fill a sky across which the trails of outbound airliners scrawled broad brush-strokes of dusty pink. The cathedral of Notre Dame emerged from the mist, Godâs liner, at anchor in a sea of roofs, and the peace that is such a part of Paris would flood into me all over again.
It isnât easy, more than a decade later, to reconstruct the change that I experienced in those first weeks. But occasionally I see it reflected in the eyes of others. Like those of my friend Paulette.
Paulette and I met in the Seventies, when I was teaching at the college in Virginia from which sheâd just graduated. Five foot nothing, she sported, then as now, a boyâs haircut and a taste for schoolmarm skirts. Her southern accent was rich as molasses, and she really did, without affectation, call everyone âyâallâ, but the cornpone was camouflage. A tough, clever mind was evident in her penetrating gaze that recalled Truman Capoteâs description of himself in his faun-like youth: âtall as a shotgun, with rather heated eyesâ.
A century and a half ago, Paulette, a Colt Dragoon pistol held firmly in both hands, would have stood in a crinoline at the gate of her plantation, ready to defend it from anything Sherman threw at her. But, born too late to sacrifice herself for the Confederacy, she had to be content with a position as vice-president of a major auction house and a world reputation as an expert on rare photographs.
To attend the college where Paulette and I met, you needed only to be two things: a woman, and rich. Among its many agreeable features was its Abroad Program, under which students could study in London or Paris. Reactions to this experience varied radically. The most extreme was illustrated by Lulu, a peppy, short-haired brunette with a few million dollars in her trust fund, who used to enliven classes by turning up in well-filled T-shirt and jeans under a full-length mink. Lulu elected to spend her year abroad in Paris.
At the party to celebrate her groupâs return, a college trustee, in halting French, enquired if sheâd had a good time. Transposing Luluâs r...