A Letter from Paris Page 13

  I could finally annotate their year and locations.

  There were so many of Saint Clair.

  Ninette had loved dad, as friends who’ve been through wars and known each other since their twenties and lived in foreign countries together do. She described him as one of the most beguiling ne-er do wells I have ever known, writing that he deeply loved music, and reading, and driving far and wide. The new books about dad were growing in a stack beside my bed.

  I fell asleep feeling that perhaps not all my godmothers had died.

  As eager as I was to tidy things up and move on, I also understood there were still more secrets to my dad, hiding in boxes and bookshops.

  Chapter Ten

  Chasser la joie

  As I numbly returned to work in the winter dark, June became July. I found a pen the shape of the Eiffel Tower and placed it on my desk, wondering how I could write my way across the sea. My contract was ending and I didn’t want to seek another one. I was battling stronger urges to get to Paris, go back to freelance writing, move house to get away from my awful neighbour, perhaps drive to Canberra and read the Aldington letters.

  But money, money …

  In my last week at the government job, I sent out five pitches for stories and freelance writing work, getting three commissions quickly. It felt like a sign, like maybe I could trust myself to take some creative risks again.

  I’d been thinking more and more about when I had made writing work, and how. When all my inner voices had told me that I’d come from ‘failure’ and there was no future in it, and how I’d fought to reverse that belief.

  Because I couldn’t not write. It was the only thing that made me feel relevant to the world as the best version of myself — carving stories out of ideas, figuring things out on the page.

  I remembered how I used to feel about dad as a writer, knowing he’d had one book published but thinking he’d left hundreds of other ideas unfinished and incomplete. Someone had written of dad that he was ‘amateur’, and so I’d always fought to be the complete opposite — to change that family story.

  Yet by now I’d read many of dad’s short stories and essays — and they were really good. I found his writing lively and intelligent. He’d had so many essays and articles published. Once I started recording his list of published work — and knowing from experience just how difficult it can be to get published — I wondered how I could have ever believed the ‘amateur’ comment.

  Perhaps dad was the one who had felt a failure? In one two-year block when he was working full-time as a teacher back in Melbourne, building a house in the country with Gisèle, and fruitlessly pitching stories about life in France to Australian publications, the word ‘failure’ recurred in his diaries again and again.

  Coralie and Clém continued to keep up our correspondence, reporting career highs over in France from their creative pursuits. Coralie published her first book, Créer, jouer, rêver: toute une année créative en famille (Create, Play, Dream: a whole creative year with your family), which contained hundreds of DIY games to play with children under six, while Clém auditioned in New York and secured a lead role in Ron Howard’s epic series Mars, a huge coup that soon saw her flying to Morocco to shoot the series. I scanned their Instagram accounts daily for visual news, cheered by their successes.

  It made me question what I was waiting for, because once upon a time it had always been me with news of wild creative pursuits and crazy new dreams. I felt I’d lost something, or forgotten an old part of myself, caught up in fear and restriction and the sadness of missing dad and dealing with my neighbour. Perhaps it was time to do what I always told friends to do when they were confused. To chase joy, follow the feeling that brings the most peace, however illogical it might seem to the ego or the bank balance.

  Screw misery and martyrdom. What was money for, if not for freedom and happiness?

  My neighbour’s shouts reached a higher decibel, and I found myself shallow-breathing, tiptoeing to see if her reflection in the window would show me what was going to happen next. As she jumped up and down screaming and swearing, I pulled the blinds shut and searched online for new apartment listings.

  I remembered my friend Deanne from the lovely apartment I’d once rented where we shared a cat named Catty. Then two years after my mum died, Deanne and her partner had asked me to mind their big house in the country. They furnished a spare room just for me and gave me a reason to flee what had become a traumatic city full of reminders of sad events. For six weeks I fed their chickens and cats in quiet and peace, and walked on crunchy country paths until the kinks in my psyche began to unravel. The quiet of the country — how their house shaped like a boat had healed me.

  In that house, I’d written so much until finally I had formed some kind of clear narrative around the destruction. It was winter when I stayed, and the trees grew silently in the dark beside my window, the fog always lifting, no matter how cold the morning.

  The thought of their friendship made me smile, and I impulsively messaged Deanne:

  I have to get out of here, my neighbour is really scaring me. I think she might be on ice …

  Deanne replied at once:

  Lou — grab your cat and come stay with us in the country. But also — your old apartment is available … It went up on Domain this morning …

  I typed out my application on the spot. It was after one in the morning. My neighbour was, by then, bashing the roof with what sounded like a large hammer. I pressed send and went to bed, shallow-breathing until the sun came up.

  Nine years, four interstate moves, numerous deaths, and a lot of life in between, and the only thing that gave me peace of mind was to think of returning to that sunny apartment with the communal garden. The place I’d made good, loyal friends, drafted my first book, and manifested freelance writing work with a lightness and ease I now found extraordinary.

  In the morning, while Melbourne skies poured with rain, the real-estate agent called to say I could move back in straightaway.

  I started packing.

  When I ran out of boxes only three-quarters of the way into packing, I saw how much paperwork I’d accumulated in the last six months of research. Piles full of printouts of dad’s letters from the library, books I’d found that mentioned him, my own notes, a printed draft of a memoir dad had written about his childhood, and then my own diaries — A4 spiral-bound notebooks I’d been keeping every day since I was sixteen.

  Just moving them from house to house was annoying — how had dad managed to keep his records preserved so well when he moved overseas? They would have come by ship. More money, more expense. How expensive reading, writing, and living in a world of letters would have been in his time.

  Once I had the internet connected in my new (old) place, I would be able to write, send photos, even Skype without a second thought. But dad would have had to lug his typewriter, manually copy and bind drafts, and physically mail his writing to publishers and magazines, waiting months for replies. He’d have to send telegrams and pay by the character if a message was urgent. It was a luxury. One of his letters referred to how ‘squanderous’ he was, because he didn’t write over both sides of a sheet of paper.

  But he didn’t waste money. The joy and peace he found in the printed word was not a waste. Anyway, if he’d written on both sides, I’d never have been able to read it. His letters were now my luxury, too.

  I moved house in one day, letting my cat roam the empty apartment before the truck arrived with all our things. I looked outside to see the succulents mum had lovingly planted on one of her visits, nine long years earlier.

  I started to unpack my things in the new space, feeling mum’s presence as real and loving and thriving as the garden outside. I felt her like relief, like she might be coming up the garden path sometime soon. And even if she didn’t, she was still there in the living garden she’d planted.

  It was pr
ofound, returning to that apartment, like I’d returned to a family home. I thought of all the times, since mum’s death, that I’d wished there was a house to return to, somewhere to gain a palpable sense of her presence.

  Moving back to that place felt like she’d returned, not me. I could even see her tiny form, bent over and rustling about in the dirt like it was one of her canvases and only she could see the finer points of how to make it bloom. The relief and happiness I felt at choosing something just because the thought made me smile confirmed that I needed to go to France.

  Chasing joy isn’t extravagant, Lou. You only get one life.

  Without a screaming neighbour, I could finally hear myself think.

  A familiar shuffle hobbled up the garden path, and I recognised Mick, the elderly man who’d lived upstairs ten years earlier. My God — Mick was still alive? An eighty-something man with a giant hearing aid who’d been on dialysis for his liver, he’d seemed like every day might have been his last back then. But he’d even managed to outlive his ancient Siamese cat.

  ‘Mick!’ I waved from the kitchen, surprising myself with how happy I was to see him again. He waved back and stooped down to pat my cat with a smile before shuffling off to his waiting taxi.

  I sat on the front step in the winter sunshine, staring at mum’s plants, marvelling at their blooming health and the ability to keep growing. They seemed somehow connected to Mick: a reminder that life is just as strong as death. Sometimes — stronger.

  On Monday, I saw him stubbornly walking up and down three flights of stairs to drag his bins in and out of the street, reeking of beer as he passed me with a pink, smiling face after his dialysis appointment.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t bring his bins in,’ whispered a visiting Ayala. ‘The weekly exercise might be keeping him alive.’

  How strange it was, those who had staying power on this earth.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saint Clair, Le Lavandou

  When I’d first opened dad’s boxes for 1949, certain wafer-thin pages had script so evocative I couldn’t let them go. Saint Clair is a dream of the South, he wrote. There is a simple inn nearby, unrationed food, books, records and wine.

  Saint Clair, Le Lavandou. Even the name sounded like a song.

  Typed on monogrammed stationery from Les Sables D’Or, the local inn, the letters and memoirs chronicled life in a small village in the South of France after the war. The waters of the Mediterranean were within a stone’s throw of Richard Aldington’s rented villa.

  There was endless laughter. An innkeeper named ‘Berky’, who knew how to make twenty types of hors d’oeuvre and charged dad a pittance for his lodgings. Sunshine and fresh fish. Talk of Poetry. Nights of music and romantic interludes with visiting Americans. Wine in bountiful supply. Visits from his literary idols — Roy Campbell, Henry Williamson, and others.

  But mostly, a feeling of kinship and homecoming. Because the French know how to live, he kept writing.

  Catha goes to bed. Dusk falling. Richard goes for a bottle of champagne. Returning with the long bottle in his gargantuan hand, Richard begins to talk about superstitions and poetry.

  While dad had still been stuck in London, Alister Kershaw had managed to sell a radio talk to the BBC, thanks to Roy Campbell, which got him the fare across the Channel. From Paris, Al had written to Richard Aldington, praising his poetry from a chair at the famed Art Deco brasserie La Coupole in Montparnasse.

  At La Coupole in the 1940s, anyone who appeared to be a poet, such as Al, would be given access to hot and cold water, soap to wash, even pencils and paper. Such was the French respect for anyone considered an artiste or living la vie de Bohème. Al found that in Paris there wasn’t a constant sense that you didn’t measure up as a human if you weren’t materially well-to-do.

  Aldington’s response to Al’s letter was to invite him to visit Saint Clair. He was renting the Villa Aucassin, apparently a huge mansion, the only one of its kind in Saint Clair, built for the regal Harmsworth family of newspaper founders by a famous French architect in the 1920s. Aldington had moved there earlier that year with Netta, his second wife, and Catha, their young daughter.

  Twenty-eight years older than dad, Aldington had moved in London literary circles that included W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D.H. Lawrence, and was once married to the American poet Hilda Doolittle. He’d served as a Captain on the Western Front in World War I, travelled Europe, and spent World War II in the USA, before relocating to France. Dad revered Aldington, regarding his bestselling Death of a Hero to be one of the greatest anti-war novels dad had ever read. Like dad, Aldington had been damaged by his experience of war, and probably suffered from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Al soon invited dad to join them.

  There’s food here, Dease. Fresh fish, even a piano. You can eat well, and talk books. Come to Saint Clair.

  The English told dad to stay put, whispering that the French had even less food, that they’d ‘failed to prepare for the war’ or something odd. But eventually, after finally securing the necessary medical certificates and a sum of his own money, dad set out on a plane to Marseille.

  Winter has ended for me, the long winter of Australia and England, all I have ever seen, where people sit in gardens hidden behind houses, avoiding the street, or drink in closed institutions with their backs to the street.

  Escape to the South is, at last, escape from that conformity feeling. There is an unpolluted sea crammed with succulent red mullet and shellfish, abundant sun, grapes and contempt for red tape.

  He first stepped foot in France in April 1948, feeling, immediately, a peculiar sense of homecoming, despite never seeing France before in my life. He was twenty-seven years old.

  I can pinpoint a monumental shift in dad’s view of life at the moment he entered France.

  Although that initial trip to Saint Clair in 1948 only lasted nine weeks, he returned later that year, and every year until 1951, when Aldington moved to Montpellier. But the importance of dad’s relationship with Aldington, and how that all tied in with his feelings about France, was cemented from that initial trip. It was here he decided to become a writer.

  Aldington was dad’s dearest mentor, his inspiration and ally, but most of all his confidante and friend. Dad didn’t give out trust or respect very easily, especially, it seemed, to the English. But with Aldington there was a mutual understanding of life and literature rooted in their experiences of war and social pretensions.

  Aldington had sought out a place, in France, where he could make the writing life work. Like a protective father, he seemed determined that dad do the same — advising, admonishing, even commissioning dad’s first research work, which would prove integral to the notoriety of Aldington’s book Lawrence of Arabia. Aldington was no dilettante, which is also, perhaps, why dad respected him so much. He wrote from 6.00 a.m. to noon every day, military in his approach to the typewriter. Often, he’d return for another round of writing in the evening, but only after a long, long lunch.

  Lunch at the villa was a sort of quest, a gateway to finding out what was left undestroyed in our worlds … the talk was often about war, the wreckage of it, the waste …

  In one of dad’s diaries from 1950, I found him sitting in the British Museum in London, compiling research for the book on T.E. Lawrence. Scrawled in the corner: Writing, here, I am truly happy. Here I am at peace.

  Aldington helped dad find what truly fulfilled him.

  Back at the library after I moved house, a photocopy of part of an article fell out of one box from the 1950s, and I searched and searched to find the full story online.

  Entitled ‘Lunch at the Villa’, it was a published version of dad’s typed diary entries from Saint Clair. The 3000-word essay chronicled the meeting with Aldington, the time at the Villa, and what made Saint Clair and France so special to poets and artists after the war. Published
in the highly influential Australian weekly magazine The Bulletin in 1981, the article, written over thirty years after that initial trip, made it seem as though he was still walking around the Villa.

  Caught up in the South of France … Stephen Murray-Smith’s line in the obituary started to make sense.

  ‘Lunch at the Villa’ was the most beautiful published work of dad’s that I’d read. If that one piece was all he’d ever published, I would have been proud.

  I wrote about France, I taught French, he wrote in the piece, detailing how hard it was to let France go after he returned to Australia with Gisèle, reflecting on how Al had made the right decision by never leaving France.

  I searched and searched through the diary entries for the origins of what became that story. I even contacted Aldington’s biographer and literary estate, to see if there were more letters that might shed some light on that time. In the Corian obituary, Geoff Dutton wrote that Aldington once remarked that Denison wrote the best letters he’d ever received.

  Did these letters still exist, somewhere?

  I searched online, finding numerous collections overseas and contacting librarians in America and England, yet they only revealed letters that referenced dad. But 150 or so letters from Richard Aldington to dad were held in the National Library of Australia. There was also a ‘notebook’ full of dad’s written research for Lawrence of Arabia.

  I knew I had to get to Canberra to see those letters, and I went through the requisite rigmarole to make the bookings. Inexplicably, I felt like I was about to travel to France. Canberra wasn’t Paris, but to think of touching and reading so many letters written in Saint Clair and around France had me feeling I was already there. I drove to Canberra with the radio howling, feeling I was moving towards something again.