Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [36]
I was extraordinarily lucky to be starting a career at that time, when Paris was still a great center of intellectual and artistic energy. Art and life were beginning again after the long dark night of the German occupation. As Cyril Connolly once wrote about French writers, “Intelligence flows through them like a fast river.” The river was indeed flowing fast. The great figures of twentieth-century art were still in full activity. There were new magazines, new books, new art galleries, new plays, new hopes. Even new music was beginning to make its way.
Writers, publishers, art dealers from all over stayed at the Pont Royal or met there. Fred, the Swiss concierge, knew them all and kept a fatherly eye out for me. When I came home from work he might tell me, “Monsieur Skira left this morning to visit Monsieur Matisse in Vence. Monsieur Matisse didn’t sound a bit pleased when he telephoned.” (The Swiss publisher Albert Skira was chronically late and never answered letters, which infuriated the supermethodical Matisse.) Or he might say, “Monsieur and Madame Miró are arriving tomorrow from Barcelona for a week. Monsieur Curt Valentin is expected from New York Tuesday.” (Curt Valentin was the most imaginative New York art dealer of the day.) “Monsieur Stephen Spender came in from London and was looking for you.”
My room with its turkey-red carpet, brass bed, and nubbly white coverlet offered few amenities: one chair; an old-fashioned stand-up wardrobe; watery lights. The telephone was cradled uneasily on two metal prongs. Its function was mainly symbolic. Even the most exasperated jiggling rarely caught the attention of the standardiste. Often it was quicker to go out, buy jetons, and call from a café. Once, in a rage of frustration, I stormed down to confront the telephone operator face to face, only to find her standing in her cubicle, tape measure in hand, intently fitting a friend for a dress while her switchboard flashed futile appeals.
The bar, downstairs from the lobby, was conspiratorially dark, and filled with deep and overstuffed brown leather armchairs and sofas. This was my club, a quintessentially Parisian listening post where you went to find out who’s in, who’s out, and who’s gone away and will never come back. Publishers and authors negotiated over the new fashionable drink in France: “le Scotch.” The painter Balthus, more Byronic than Byron himself, would drop by and give me news of Picasso. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were regulars. At that time their fame and the provocative aura that surrounded the word “Existentialist” (practically nobody knew what it meant) had made them objects of universal curiosity, and they had abandoned their previous headquarters at the Café de Flore for the less exposed Pont Royal.
Later, when I had an apartment, I continued to see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though neither of them cared much for Americans in general. Once when Sartre came to lunch he gave an offhand demonstration of mental agility: without stopping the general conversation he deciphered, one after another, the formidably difficult word-and-picture puzzles on my dessert plates.
Although I moved from the Pont Royal I never left the quarter. It was, and is, a neighborhood of bookstores and publishing houses. The grandest, Gallimard, is a few steps from the Pont Royal. I used to go to its Thursday afternoon garden parties every June; they were long on petits fours and short on liquor. Alice B. Toklas lived around the corner from my office and was always ready to receive the favored visitor with enormous teas. She was exquisitely polite, and even when very old she would insist on serving the guest herself. When I did her some small favor, she sent a charming note of thanks in such minute handwriting that I had to take out a magnifying glass to read it. Although her dress was monastic, she loved elaborately flowered hats, and would appear at my apartment, a diminutive figure under a herbaceous border that not even Russell Page