The monument presents Baudelaire swathed like a mummy with his head bare, lying on a slab a few inches above the ground. When I visited, the sky was gloomy and a bat flew over my head. I left a small bunch of flowers from a pilgrim. I didn’t hear any marimba music, or even a solemn oboe. Instead, I felt unease and read a poem called “Obsession”: “I see the black, the empty, and the bare!”
WALKING ACROSS the Île Saint-Louis yesterday, I remembered Bishop’s metaphysical poem “Quai d’Orléans,” which is set on the Seine and is one of many that Bishop wrote about Paris with a sense of intense emotion kept at bay. The opening paints the scene:
Each barge on the river easily tows
a mighty wake,
a giant oak-leaf of gray lights
on duller gray;
and behind it real leaves are floating by,
down to the sea.
Then the speaker addresses a friend:
“If what we see could forget us half as easily,”
I want to tell you,
“as it does itself—but for life we’ll not be rid
of the leaves’ fossils.”
Behind these lines is a terrible episode, an automobile accident in which Bishop and two friends were forced off the road while driving in Burgundy to look at churches. All three women were thrown from their car as it rolled, and Margaret Miller’s right hand and forearm were missing when it was over. The next months were spent in a Paris apartment on the quai d’Orléans awaiting Miller’s release from the hospital. In her notebook, Bishop soberly contemplates the severed arm:
The arm lay outstretched in the soft brown grass at the side of road and spoke quietly to itself. At first all it could think of was the possibility of being quickly reunited to its body, without any more time elapsing than was absolutely necessary.
“Oh, my poor body! Oh my poor body! I cannot bear to give you up. Quick! Quick!”
In his sympathetic book Becoming a Poet, the critic David Kalstone writes that “Quai d’Orléans” “is colored by all the losses the accident entailed and recalled, though none of them is specifically its subject: her friend’s mutilation; her own childhood losses; the loss of self-control and surge of vulnerability. . . .”
Bishop dedicated the poem to Miller, who was her classmate at Vassar and had been an aspiring painter. In it, “seeing is inescapably tied to scarring,” Kalstone tells us, so much scarring that Bishop would never again return to Paris.
Part II
TODAY I ENCOUNTERED fifteen horses marching down the avenue in the cold, bright sunlight. The horses were many shades of brown, and the riders wore black coats with long gold swords dangling from their waists, which matched their boot spurs and the chin straps on their helmets. I could hear the horses’ hooves striking the pavement long before they were visible, and when they stopped at an intersection, all of us on the sidewalk, in cars, or on motorcycles couldn’t help but pause and admire them, smiling as the wind played with their brushed tails. High up, the handsome riders conversed among themselves, and when the traffic light changed, one rider at the front lifted his arm, and they all crossed the boulevard Saint-Michel toward the Luxembourg Gardens. Later, returning from the post office, I encountered the horses again, and their phalanx seemed to me like a poetry muscle exercising itself to remain strong, the precise movements of each horse and rider like the lines of a poem moving across a blank page, representing the highest degree of control—of selection and omission—as when language is assembled into art.
LAST NIGHT I ATE DINNER with James Lord, the biographer of Picasso and Giacometti, at a hotel across from James’s building on the rue des Beaux-Arts—formerly the Hôtel d’Alsace, one of a string of cheap hotels where Oscar Wilde spent his last days while suffering from “mussel poisoning,” as he called it, which caused red splotches on his arms, chest, and back, making it difficult for him not to scratch. Because of this itching, the ailment was not thought to have been syphilis, though it was certainly syphilitic in origin.
His doctors made sixty-eight visits to room 16 during Wilde’s final weeks as the symptoms became graver, making the following report: “There were significant cerebral disturbances stemming from an old suppuration of the right ear. . . . The diagnosis of encephalitic meningitis must be made without doubt.” Wilde died with no family present, and a priest applied sacred oils to his hands and feet, though he wasn’t Catholic. Richard Ellmann’s moving biography records the last moments:
A loud, strong death rattle began, like the turning of a crank. Foam and blood came from his mouth during the morning, and at ten minutes to two in the afternoon Wilde died. . . . He had scarcely breathed his last breath when the body exploded with fluids from ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices.
When I arrived at James’s elevator landing, he gave me the bisous—kisses with our cheeks touching—instead of the usual American handshake, and I presented him with pink lilies, which he promptly put in a silver urn that had belonged to his father. We sat in the living room, where James drank a Diet Coke and I sipped a scotch—he under the large Giacometti portrait, the most commanding artwork in the apartment, which had required eighteen sittings before Giacometti completed it.
I knew this from reading Plausible Portraits, James’s little book recording his visits to Giacometti’s studio. In it, James writes, “From the beginnings of civilization it has been the human likeness which has
