Orphic Paris

Orphic Paris

HENRI COLE

New York Review Books, New York

This is a New York Review Book

published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 2018 by Henri Cole

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Henri Fantin-Latour, Drawing Lesson in the Workshop, 1879 (detail); Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; photograph by Susan Unterberg

Cover design: Katy Homans

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Cole, Henri, author.

Title: Orphic Paris / Henri Cole.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050815 (print) | LCCN 2017057895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372198 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372181 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Cole, Henri. | Poets, American—21st century—Biography. | Paris (France)—Description and travel. | Paris (France)—Social life and customs. | Paris (France)—Anecdotes.

Classification: LCC PS3553.O4725 (ebook) | LCC PS3553.O4725 Z46 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.54 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050815

ISBN 978-1-68137-219-8

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Contents

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Part IX

Part X

Part XI

Part XII

Part XIII

Part XIV

Part XV

Part XVI

Part XVII

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

À ma mère

“A man alone is in bad company.”

—PAUL VALÉRY

Part I

MY SMALL APARTMENT in the Latin Quarter is on the Street of the Iron Pot (rue du Pot-de-Fer), which I’ve renamed Street of the Iron Poet. The neighborhood on Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, a hill on the Left Bank of the Seine in the fifth arrondissement, is full of students, bookshops, bars, and cinemas, and has the feel of a village. Geneviève is the patron saint of Paris. In AD 451 she led a prayer marathon that is said to have saved Paris by diverting Attila’s Huns away from the city. And in 1129, when the city was suffering from ergot poisoning (a sickness caused by a fungus in rye and other cereals), which affects the nervous system and causes a delirious and psychotic state in which spasms, diarrhea, itching, headaches, nausea, and vomiting lead ultimately to death, the epidemic was stayed after Geneviève’s remains were carried in a public procession through the city.

YESTERDAY I RECEIVED a flu shot, though it will not protect me against the bird flu that is reported daily by the television news, with dramatic videos of birds flying toward France. I bought the vaccine at a local pharmacy for only fifteen dollars and made an appointment with a neighborhood nurse (chosen at random from the phone book) to give me the injection, keeping the vaccine refrigerated in the interim. The injection cost only $4.50, and the nurse wore no gloves and spoke no English, but I liked her and will return to her if I become ill during the months ahead. The expensive medication Tamiflu is not yet available, except to those already afflicted with the deadly virus.

SIX OF MY POEMS were recently translated into Catalan, a language that half a century of Fascism couldn’t stamp out. I wonder if American poetry is as durable? When I am in a foreign country, I am most at home near the shelf of books in English. It is the language where I am a citizen, though Mother was a first-generation Frenchwoman and spoke French and Armenian as a girl. Her parents emigrated to Marseille from Asia Minor after the Armenian genocide of 1915, and as a young woman she worked at the military base exchange, where she met Father, an American soldier. Mother had a beautiful accent, but she was embarrassed by it and by her grammatical errors. My four siblings and I were brought up as first-generation American children, so French is not my mother tongue, though it is my mother’s tongue.

CONTINUING TO WRITE means I have learned to not quit.

Uncertainty is a virtue, and the tolerance of uncertainty.

THIS AFTERNOON I WALKED across Paris, along the rue de Grenelle, to the Eiffel Tower, the symbol of the city, dominating the elegant bridges that span the Seine, a unifying element (both masculine and feminine) that is accessible to all. It took an hour and a half to traverse the city on foot, and when I arrived there were no tourists, so I immediately climbed to the second platform, where only a small group awaited the elevators to carry them up. I bought a ticket and before long was soaring up up up, like a pigeon or a rocket. At the top it was windy and sunny. It felt good to make this journey, which I’d pondered making all my adult life, since first seeing the Super 8 movies of my childhood, in which I am a little boy holding the hands of my young parents visiting from the South of France.

TODAY I VISITED the cenotaph to Baudelaire—in the shade of maples, ash, laurels, and conifers—at the Montparnasse Cemetery in the center of Paris. I think I would like to be more Baudelairean, or unafraid of the grim, in my poems. Also, less melodic. In a letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop speaks of how a single word can have enormous power in a line of poetry, using the example of Baudelaire’s “The Balcony”: Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon (“Evenings lit up by burning coals”). It is the coals that surprises the reader and illuminates the poem’s meaning. Poetry is language that doesn’t shut us out; it should give the opposite experience.

At the end of his life, Baudelaire smoked opium and drank to excess, suffering a stroke followed by paralysis and aphasia. He died with considerable debt, which his mother paid off. In his poems, he explored the changing nature of beauty in industrialized Paris. His Flowers of Evil (1857) is the swan song to romanticism. When it appeared, the government brought action against him as an offender against public morals. In Bishop’s poem “The Bight,” Baudelaire appears in a description of