The existential Englishman : Paris among the artists

Guardian Review

The world is not short of anglophone memoirs about living in Paris, but the art critic Michael Peppiatt really had a whale of time after he moved there in 1966. Before long, in this fond account, he is spotting the playwright Eugène Ionesco (with his "pale, clown-like face"), and dining next to Marlene Dietrich, who keeps complaining that her husband "had never allowed her to eat hot dogs". The author is soon running the arts pages of Le Monde's English edition, which in this golden age funds a beautiful flat in the Marais district. There follows a succession of flings with women - his ardent reminiscences of them are very much, to put it as charitably as possible, of their time - and much more name-dropping. Sonia Orwell, a quondam lover, pops up now again; there is an inscrutable appearance by John Cage. Peppiatt goes wine-tasting with Graham Greene, and once finds himself sitting next to Samuel Beckett on a cafe terrace. (Nothing, fittingly, is said.) First among these luminaries is Francis Bacon, already the author's friend before Paris, and with whom many spectacularly boozy meals are shared. "I have to be conscious of Picasso the whole time, you see," Bacon mutters. "There's no way round it." Perhaps the most vivid character, however, is the chain-smoking French doctor who, when Peppiatt comes to see him complaining that he is tired, retorts: "Tired? Tired? You don't think I'm tired seeing sick people for ten hours every day?" Embassy invitations, art writing and luxurious apartments ... the book passes by easily in the manner of quaffable gossip As the decades roll on in a buzz of embassy invitations, freelance art writing and luxurious apartments, the book passes by easily in the manner of quaffable gossip. Stricter editing wouldn't have hurt - and, existential or not, an Englishman ought to know that Cambridge does not have quadrangles (they are courts). Peppiatt left Paris for London in 1994, and the book ends with him returning in 2014, only to think the place now "lacking in identity and purpose". As a one-time cultural migrant to the city myself, I'd suggest he needn't worry: the Marais is now so expensive that the real Paris has simply moved elsewhere. - Steven Poole.