Children of Paradise is preoccupied with the struggle between feeling and thought. Since our hearts are always too cold and our heads too hot, it is difficult for us to find the correct balance. “I’m sorry I think too much,” one character in the film admits. Fortunately, the heart can sometimes pick up signals the head misses.
Sometimes, in my friendship with Octave, I feel such an intense, almost dreamlike sweetness, I must take a step back, or away, into reality . . . I must remind myself that, in fact, all the people on the earth do not love one another and the earth does not shine like the sun. In part, I come to Paris because I am a dreamer. It is a place where I am able to escape the shadows—a “place of clear light, like poetry or freedom,” to quote Seamus Heaney’s poem “Oysters,” about an evening spent in the West Region of Ireland, which was for him a place of refreshment and renewal. In the poem, Heaney is eating a meal of oysters with friends as the Atlantic Ocean light is coming up, and he is carried away beyond himself. The poet must dwell in silence, he believed, but also in “clamor and comradeship.” At the poem’s conclusion, Heaney, not wanting to be “too trim a poet” of mere nouns, says,
I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
Part IX
IT IS TOUSSAINT, or All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation for Catholics and a national holiday in which the custom is to visit cemeteries and venerate the dead with flowers, so I sought out James Lord at Montparnasse Cemetery. In France, chrysanthemums are the flower associated with death and therefore not brought into the home. Searching for James in that garden of death, I struck up a conversation with a gravedigger from Dublin who seemed eager to speak English. He was thin and spoke with a cigarette between his lips. His eyes seemed large inside his head, like in a Cocteau drawing. He was pushing a wheelbarrow around the cemetery but volunteered to escort me down a long, dusty path between the forgotten tombstones of Division 6 to James’s grave. The gravedigger lay a potted chrysanthemum on the pink marble sepulcher, and when I shook his hand in gratitude, I could feel the dry soil of Paris, the same soil that Baudelaire was able to transform into rhapsodic poetry.
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH JAMES helped keep me warm during a long, damp winter in Paris. This is what writers do—we keep each other warm—during periods of solitude when we are writing. After James died—at home, of a heart attack, at eighty-six—a letter came, saying, “You give real, true flowers, for which I am grateful as a friend can be. I, alas, can offer only the make-believe variety.” Included was a small, Matisse-like drawing made with ballpoint scratches at 4 AM, when he was sitting, sleepless, on the edge of his bed.
In the only picture I have of him he is a ghostly figure sitting on the little white sofa in his studio at 19, rue de Lille, the same address at which Max Ernst lived with his wife, the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Looking at the photograph now, I am reminded of what James wrote about “the very difficult, almost oppressive” portrait Giacometti made of him: “When in solitude I did look at it . . . I recognized that this was a portrait of extraordinary power and intensity, a work which clearly appeared to have been devised for eternity, uncannily reminiscent of the purpose and effect of the Egyptian art which Giacometti admired more than any other, thus an image over which hovered the adumbration and presentiment of death. . . .”
JAMES DID NOT THINK there were any first-rate living painters—at least, not any of Picasso’s stature. When I asked him about Francis Bacon, he said he was a stylist, “not first-rate, though a nice man.” About the second-generation abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, who often smeared paint with her fingers and who wanted her paintings “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower” and “coy young girls,” he said that they had been friends until her heavy drinking had caused a break. After he sold the painting he owned by her at Sotheby’s, he received an inquiry about the provenance of the work, and the buyer turned out to be Mitchell herself. James said he owned no first-rate paintings. He believed a drawing could be a masterpiece and that the ability to recognize a masterpiece was innate, but that an appreciation of art could be cultivated. The same is true for poetry, of course.
STROLLING ON THE RUE DE SEINE, I was approached by a woman who pretended to find a large gold ring on the pavement right at my feet. She held it up before me with a surprised look, hoping I would naïvely pay her for it. I was on my way to visit James, and when I recounted the incident for him, he laughed out loud, saying, “My dear, that is the oldest trick in the book.”
At the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, I often watch, with a different sort of naïveté, a small, grainy video
