The Man in a Hurry

AN ART OF LIVING. A LETTER TO PAUL MORAND FROM A CLOSE FRIEND

From Lettres de château by Michel Déon (Gallimard, 2009)

After a freezing winter, the heatwave of summer 1976 came like a second omen. Who was to blame? The gods? We had fired them. The politicians? They were on holiday and, in any case, they turned out to be the most surprised of all. The press was not yet riding its climate hobbyhorse, which it desperately depends upon for survival. It was not a matter of climate change or of planetary disaster, but of those people dying from indifference, some frozen, others wilting or starving. By printing two-column headlines on their front pages, newspapers were certainly able to exaggerate the prospect of a world reduced to a ball of ice or a burning desert. An elderly man is not averse to contemplating the notion of this kind of devastation.

In 1976 Paul Morand was eighty-eight years old, my own age, which today, in 2008, may perhaps draw me closer to him, not that we were ever very far apart, in fact. In one sense, we share the same curiosity: how much time is there left?

Five years previously he had published Venices, bringing his work to a close, leaving behind odds and ends in his bottom drawer, but resolved solely to maintain his Journal inutile [his “pointless diary”, as he himself called it], which stopped on the 10th of April 1976 with his replies to questions posed by a women’s magazine:

ELLE: “What do you think of love today?”

I: “It’s the age of the caveman.”

ELLE: “What will follow it?”

I: “The age of the barrack room (Mao, Brezhnev).”*

In May 1976, we were expecting him in Ireland. He would be travelling with Claude Gallimard, whose firm published both of us. On transferring flights at Heathrow, where the plane for Shannon was delayed, the departure board announced a shuttle flight leaving for Jersey, a place he did not know. He gave Claude the slip and jumped aboard. It was to be the final flourish of a traveller who behaved as though he were being pursued by the Devil.

We know what happened next: Brittany, his wandering around in the Mini Cooper sports car (Paris to Vevey in six-and-a-half hours), from Les Hayes to Bourdonné, from Brittany to Switzerland, from the Château de l’Aile to avenue Charles-Floquet and the emptiness of the vast apartment where everything reminded him of his wife Hélène. Heat discourages one’s determination, including the will to go on living. Ever since her death, surrounded by friends though he was, his life had been beset by grief. On the evening of the 22nd of July, the hostile or merciful hand of death gripped him by the throat. He still had enough strength to be driven to the Hôpital Necker, where he died on the 23rd.

We had, of course, been sorry about his volte-face at Heathrow, while at the same time we understood his reasons. As far as Ireland was concerned, an article about hunting in La Revue des voyages and a short story, ‘Bug O’Shea’, had said a great deal.

For him, there remained the Unknown: Jersey.

Up until his last breath, this nomad would reject a French cemetery. His family was buried in a grave in Yerres.† The prospect of finding himself — should we say “waking up?”—in some confused mass, in serried ranks, among the tombs of a large city and having “enemies or strangers” roaming around appalled him. It is understandable. In Trieste, he had chosen “a sort of forgotten pendulum above the Adriatic ogive”, the funerary monument to Hélène’s family. She was already buried there.

He was delighted to be accepted in this refuge even though he risked being regarded as an intruder:

“It is,” he wrote, “a noble stone pyramid, six metres high, a piece of Italian eloquence, above which an angel twice as tall as a human opens a black marble door to the afterlife, as thick as that of an empty safe.”

At the same time as he changed burial places, he changed dogmas:

“I shall be watched over by the Orthodox faith towards which Venice has led me, a religion of joyful stillness that continues to speak the language of the Gospels.”

He was not frightened of death. He dreamt of it as though it were another life:

“Perhaps there are kindred souls who wait for the deceased and greet them with cries of joy, like newborn babies, on the other side of life…” (1930)

It is true that he did not envisage this final resting place without a few luxuries or liberties. He was born into a well-to-do middle-class background — his family was “radical”—that society so well depicted by Gide or Martin du Gard. At the age of eighteen, after a flirtation with Marxism at a time when it could still be considered chic, he was induced away by the influence of Hélène and that disillusionment which awaits all the world’s great “seers”.

“Would anyone,” he noted sadly, “wish to take responsibility for my suicide or for doing my work?”

One of his last letters illustrates the tone of a correspondence that never became bogged down in generalizations:

FROM P.M. TO M.D:

11th November 1975

Thank you, cher Michel, for your letter of the 25th which arrived the day after a small stir caused by Castries’ speech. He spoke of “a Gaullist gathering… a disparate hotchpotch”. Debré almost left the Coupole when Maurice Schumann was admitted…

FROM M.D. TO P.M.,

THIRTY-THREE YEARS LA TER:

March 2008

Cher Paul, there is nothing to stop one from replying to the same letter twice. The first reply is probably lost. The second rounds it off many years later. If I dare respond to your “cher Michel” with “cher Paul” after addressing you goodness knows how many times with the traditional “cher ami” it’s because we are the same age at last: eighty-eight. The years in between have slipped away in the sands of time. Wisely, Paul, you would not have stopped growing older and I would never have caught you up and so at about this time we would be celebrating your 120th birthday. This is also the day that I dare to use your first name. A step not taken lightly. From Venice, in 1974, you complained: “In Paris there’s no longer any difference between the pavement and the road: at parties I lose myself among so many first names…”

They would lose themselves in the company of Cocteau who, to hear him talking about his circle of friends, lived in a kindergarten filled with Loulous, Jeannots, Francettes, Zizis, Dédés… I forget, having failed to ask him, which infantile names he used for Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Picasso or perhaps… Einstein.

I notice you have begun to use the familiar tu form of address. As a respectful friend I should not display too much humility, even though I find it hard to use tu myself, but anyway… let’s try. Your time clock stopped at eighty-eight years. Mine also stands at eighty-eight. We are therefore on a relatively equal footing. It’s worth pointing out that this number eight has clung to you since your birth. In 1988, you would have reached a century. Reduced to ashes, you have remained tremendously fruitful. I should have made a note of everything that has been published: new editions, unpublished work, updated material, correspondence, preparations for a Pléiade edition, and the Journal inutile. You have probably never been so much in the public eye since you left us. The volumes of my Morand collection bristle with yellow bookmarks. If I pick up any of your books at random, one of these bookmarks unveils a sentence that catches the eye:

“I should like to die at the age of eighty-seven, thus a further two years of reasonable life, although without much interest.”

The trouble is that one doesn’t make up one’s mind about anything apart from considering suicide as a cowardly but comfortable solution. In this context, who, from the age of five, has not wanted to hang himself time and again, to bleed himself dry or to drown? Our most enduring sorrows stem from childhood. The rest of existence is spent either defying them or rectifying ruins. Oh, I know, remorse, regret and alarm signals blight our later years, but I can see, in your case — apart from brief confessions in which everything is played down — some wonderfully ribald stories: “… sperm still abundant”.

Life spoilt you. Even the little games at the Académie amused you. Having taken your seat much later than me, you didn’t have time to become blasé or even get irritated. Elected in 1968, you died in 1976, barely eight years later (still that dreaded eight) whereas I accrued thirty years of attendance beneath the Coupole, from 1978 to 2008, in the eighth fauteuil.‡ Yet another eight, a sign of fate that should not be overlooked. Of those who took their seats with you, there are only four survivors: Druon, Ormesson, Lévi-Strauss, Marceau.§ The secret plotting and the political-literary manoeuvring that went on did not have time to tarnish your satisfaction, following two rebuffs, at being one of the forty. Hélène cared about the Académie as much as you did, if not more. Beneath the aura of the Immortel, there is a ferocious struggle for seats at the table. There are certainly the beginnings of many violations of protocol, and hostesses no longer know by heart the dates of election which the hierarchy determined. You did not serve as a young Protocol Attaché in London (1917) without soon understanding the sensitivity of a milieu that frequently has no other proof of its existence on earth. A photograph of you, probably taken in London, shows you in uniform: white silk trousers, shoes with buckles, tailored frock coat. A visiting card is clipped to it: “Paul Morand, Attaché au Protocole” and, below, in your own handwriting: “What a pretentious young man!”

I never enquired about your behaviour during the sessions at the Académie, at the entrance to the hall and on the way out. Did you maintain the traditional silence of the “newcomer” for a year and only speak when you were asked? Did you, at a doorway, allow Jules Romains or Guéhenno to pass first? They loathed you and led a fairly spiteful campaign against your election. The letter which I partially quoted — the rest will come at the end — refers to a brief episode in the guerrilla warfare that our colleagues waged. In his response to the speech made by Maurice Schumann (I should say his “thanks”, according to our rules) the duc de Castries could not stop himself making a cutting remark about the spokesman for Radio-Londres during the war. It was true to tradition and the malicious Castries did not miss his opportunity.

One imagines you being rather discreet, adopting a mounting hardness of hearing out of reticence unless, as Ramón Fernandez suspected in an article in La NRF (1941): “One senses a kind of timidity about Morand, which explains a good deal.”

Wherever you happen to be, your first “timid” reflex is to discover how to get out of the trap. At the Académie this can be somewhat complicated unless one is struck off, a rare event over almost four centuries. Ancient traditions protect us from Supreme Power just as Supreme Power protects us from the rules of the Kings’ Courts. A pity that the Académie should suffer from the vices of democracy over its elections. Your friend and protector, Philippe Berthelot, under whose direction you started out at the Quai d’Orsay during the First World War, said that “democracy is the right of fleas to devour lions”.

I’ve been dipping into Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade (1916–1917), that contemptuous indictment of one of the myths of our time, a myth that has unleashed so many terrible wars and buried entire civilizations. Your pessimism is reassuring. In this diary, maintained so methodically when a hectic life left you with little time to sleep, your mind was quick to seize the core of the matter: the confusion of a nation involved in the first of the great massacres of the twentieth century which was governed by men who behaved as though they were running an electoral campaign. We remain in the wings, the main stage is obscured. Pot-bellied, superfluous generals pass through, at times covered in laurels, at others treated as codgers and fools.

Where are you during this tragedy? While a charnel house is being constructed at Verdun, you are at the Medrano Circus watching an act in which performing geese do a Spanish dance. The Ministry hasn’t sent you there, that Ministry in which you are the perfect civil servant, skilfully organizing your free time. At lunchtime or dinner the chances are that you can be spotted at the Ritz, the Crillon, at La Pérouse or Maxim’s. Wealthy and often titled ladies, already in possession of highly secret decisions made by the Cabinet who sat that very morning, hold open table. Marcel Proust joins you for the pudding course. Rationing isn’t much of a problem. On the two days a week without meat, you console yourself with lobster and fish. If there’s no white wine, you drink champagne. A young and extremely rich Romanian girl, a princess moreover through her first marriage, entertains a great deal and is invited on other days to join the inner circle. Her shrill, peremptory voice is not frightened of coming out with outrageous remarks. Some of her utterances seem to you Heaven-sent: “A man who is not unfaithful to his wife is not a man.”

So might marriage not be a prison after all? A door still remains open. They go out to admire the moonlight and they return at breakfast time. Who would not jump at such a guarantee?

At times, you embarrass your staunchest friends. The deftness with which you escaped the butchery of 1914–18 leaves an unpleasant taste. Your friend Valery Larbaud, ruled out of active service on account of his bad health, offered his services for several months emptying chamber pots and serving meals on trays in a Vichy hospital before taking refuge in Spain, in Alicante, to work on his book. The family he lodged with included some very lively young girls. They made him run a few risks, rather less serious ones than those experienced in the trenches by the men of his generation, but nevertheless… How we might have wished that Péguy, Alain-Fournier, Codet and so many others could also have escaped the slaughter! The sacrifice of your life — or even just a left arm, which your friend Giraudoux considered a lesser evil — would not have shortened the endless killing by a single day. Your death, on the other hand, would have deprived the age of a portraitist so brilliant that he might have been taken for its creator.

To those who had the cheek to ask you what you thought of yourself, you replied apologetically:

“People think me subtle, adaptable and intelligent; quite the reverse, I am blunt and foolish.”

To what extent would you have liked the quite compelling portrait of Lewis in your first novel to be your own?

“Lewis entered the room heavily and sat on the ground, laying two large, steaming boots by the fire and settling his dog, which gave off a foul smell, between his knees; excessive fastidiousness led him to appear as though he was shunned in elegant places because he quite enjoyed giving the impression that he was rough and ill-mannered.”

However you may have behaved, dear Paul, no one would believe you. Or were you, rather, thinking of the way you treated women when in your Journal inutile you noted sharply:

“I’m a shit.”

Said none too soon! Did Hélène not give her blank cheque? It would have been very grudging of her to blame you for affairs that were foreseen in your agreement. The fact that she may have suffered as a result made her love you all the more. She was not made of marble. In your fictional works, which are sometimes transparent — the new generations, or whoever they were, not having inherited their parents’ skills — the preliminaries are brief. It’s depriving oneself of the best part.

I open… Ouvert la nuit. No single favourite story, they’re all gems. ‘La nuit nordique’ has delighted me ever since I was a teenager. Aïno, a cool Scandinavian girl, yields to the traveller’s fine words on the shortest night of the year in Sweden:

Aïno gripped her hands around my neck.

“You’re an international swine,” she said.

I took her in my arms. She remained there the rest of the night, for the sun, after a quick shower, was already bustling about.

Since I complained to you that such a night was far too brief, you came back at me:

“Ten minutes is a long time. Two would have been enough.”

Women were never angry with you. They treasured your notes, which were often written in lead pencil, which was easier to rub out. In the inscription to a press officer, I recall: “To X… in memory of the Savoy, affectionately, P. Morand.” Not exactly a cheap hotel. The drawing rooms in which these beautiful ladies entertained you bear witness to your lightning passage through a life that had come to a halt following your departure (or your flight, if you prefer). Your photograph could be seen everywhere, on mantelpieces, on bedside tables, in a desk with drawers that contained expeditious love letters from you, and in particular the photo that I like very much: three-piece suit, an elbow resting casually on a dresser beneath a delicate portrait of a young girl by Marie Laurencin; sometimes you are in a bathing suit or dressed as a deep-sea diver on the Passable beach at Cap-Ferrat, or now and then wearing dungarees at the wheel of a racing Bugatti, the famous 57. One of your former priestesses owned a bronze bust of you and used to say: “According to the mood I’m in, I tap him on the cheek as I pass by or stroke his forehead.” Would you ever have written such a poignant story as ‘La Mort du cygne’ without your intimate relationship with Josette Day, the one-time ballet student at the Opéra before she became famous as a film star thanks to the close attention of Marcel Pagnol and her friendship with Cocteau? One of these ladies whom I shall not name said to me: “I am Hécate!” To be as precise as possible, she was not the only woman to make such a claim, and, perhaps, at the time that Lewis et Irène was published, there may have been a woman who claimed to have inspired the character of Elsie Magnac, the earlier version of Hécate. Elsewhere, in the same novel, people thought they recognized a famous fashion designer who protected herself admirably from the ogres of finance. This lady friend was not very pleased when, at a fancy dress ball given at her private mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, among the Pierrots, the cardinals and the Punches, you appeared in evening dress and a white tie, immaculate apart from one minor detail: a strip of shirt-tail was sticking out from your fly-buttons. Lewis himself could not have provided more of a shock. I take the liberty of reminding you of these scraps from the past and from your books, since novelists easily forget their waxen or flesh-and-blood characters after having imprisoned them for life in two hundred pages. The reader is a better keeper of memory than the author.

Your short note of the 11th of November 1975 has occasioned a very long reply. I can sense you longing to go outside for some fresh air, but I should like to add a comment about the body of your work that reflects you like a revolving mirror.

Hiver caraïbe, Bouddha vivant, Air indien, those portraits of cities, Londres, New York, Bucarest, reread today are perfect faded snapshots akin to Lartigue’s beautiful photographs.

You make little of your travel writing. Wrongly so. The world deserved the very rare example you provide of a simultaneously loving and lucid eye. These tales are your roving memory, your silhouette standing out amid the chaos.

Whenever a writer sees “other people” he ceases to inspect his own navel.

I was saying that your note had occasioned a long response to which, for all your chronic impatience, I should like to add a word about your books. A tornado suddenly shattered this work that was so self-confident and we probably then assessed its vulnerability, which made it more precious still. An accident along the way humanized and sensitized it. Did it need this? Perhaps it was necessary for it to move forward openly and less hurriedly. Let us refer to Ernst Jünger’s diary, kept during the years 1991–6:

Politics is the pox of literature, writes Paul Morand. An excellent maxim that he himself did not adhere to sufficiently, still less so his wife. I had put them on their guard. He was one of those writers on whom his youngest disciples relied, however much they may have compromised themselves politically or morally.

In fact, you did not affect politics, politics affected you. You made fun of it thanks to a scepticism inherited from Philippe Berthelot, your sponsor as well as Jean Giraudoux’s at the Quai d’Orsay. A senior civil servant serves the state and the state decrees, well or badly, its political policies. At a particular moment in the history of France, our state was split in two as if with an axe. It had two half-heads. We hesitated between serving the one or the other. Millions of lives and their futures were caught in two nets. This time, luck was not on your side. From being First Minister in Berne, you found yourself virtually on the street. In Switzerland:

… the knot on which saws are broken; invasions have shaped it like a joiner’s plane, obliged to deflect in the midst of the grain.

In exile? Not really. Let us say rather: in purgatory. One gets out eventually. In the meantime, borders are closed or closely watched, you are struck off the ministerial list, your salary is suspended, in Romania the Soviets confiscate Hélène’s income, in France publishers show caution and your books have little success except in bibliophile circles, which is a far better sign of posterity than you might think.

Not destitute, but you could be seen pedalling on an old bicycle to do your shopping in the market. Hélène and you nibble away together. The winter is particularly harsh and you shiver in gloomy rooms. By great good fortune, the Lausanne municipal library in the canton of Vaud is a warm shelter. Deprived of geographical space, you spend the afternoons there consulting the histories of Europe and Asia, the greatest possible escape. A copy of Montociel, rajah aux Grandes Indes is inscribed to Josette Day: “… this account of a journey during a time when I no longer travelled, Paulm. 1944–6.” Montociel, unfortunately, was a failure as a novel. One does not look for the “new Morand” there. In another book, you write to the same person: “… this journey in time, her devoted Pmorand.” The two condensed signatures, which already look like text messages, recall L’Homme pressé [The Man in a Hurry]. The pill is not merely bitter, it is sad, as you had foreseen in 1931:

There is something lovelier than Paris; it is nostalgia for Paris.

In the full ripeness of his years (fifty-seven), a man whose books flew from one success to another was unwisely approaching the Tarpeian Rock. You responded courageously with the writer’s supreme weapon: some masterpieces, Le Bazar de la Charité, Milady, Parfaite de Saligny, Fouquet and one of the greatest and most dramatic novels of the twentieth century: Le Flagellant de Séville. Venices would be the testament and farewell to the friends of your youth, to the ghosts, to a miracle of serene beauty, the city that overcomes everything that is ponderous:

In Venice, my insignificant being had its first lesson on the planet, as I emerged from classrooms in which nothing had been learnt.

There were a few of us who, in our early years, were able to recognize a memorable elder colleague who was threatened by the baseness of current events. Of those young friends, practically none remain apart from Jean d’Ormesson and myself.

For all that, the Journal inutile does not always spare us. There is something healthy about that and it reminds your friends of relativity. Fortunately we are no longer at an age when we wound each other with chilly words. Our warm caresses did not blind you and I can imagine, being restored to favour, the irritation with which you swept aside these caresses. Including my reply to your own 1975 letter whose ending you have probably forgotten:

… Jean d’Ormesson is on his way to 200,000 and nothing is going to stop him. Kléber is at France v. England. Solzhenitsyn did not care for Nabokov. He has turned his back on Russian exiles living abroad. For him you can only resist in your own country (what a justification for Vichy, by the way!). When are you coming? I’m going to make some brief visits to Vevey but it’s hard to leave a distressed woman who is on a protest strike against life. Cabanis’ book on Saint-Simon is a success, mainly because people haven’t read any of it.

P.S. I realize that from the start of this letter I’ve been using the informal tu. Would you mind if this slip of the pen became the rule? I admire your life together; a good team.

Tibi, semper, Morand.

* Morand is making a pun on the French words cavernes and casernes.

† A small town some twenty kilometres south-east of Paris.

‡ Members of the Académie française — the Immortels—are only forty in total and are elected to numbered seats or fauteuils on the death of a predecessor.

§ This was written in 2008. In 2014 only Jean d’Ormesson survives. Maurice Druon and Claude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009 and Félicien Marceau in 2012.