A Letter from Paris Read online

  All the city buildings covered in holes, the general mood ‘dark and sombre’ (most probably because they were starving), how rarely Londoners smiled or engaged in cheery conversation on the street. Then an explanation of how he adored Roy Campbell so much because he was loud and blustery and animated, which contrasted so starkly with the usual English reserve.

  There was a description of dad’s first bedsit in Regent’s Park, with wallpaper so ugly it made him hallucinate, and smells of cooking from downstairs while his stomach roared. The patron had confiscated his ration book in return for weak tea in the morning and one cooked egg each week. While dad struggled with hunger and tuberculosis — which still hadn’t been diagnosed — a man gassed himself in the room next door to dad’s, so the owner removed all the locks on the doors in case it happened again.

  What a time to be in London …

  I learned he hadn’t actually wanted to live in London, but it was hard for Australians to get out of England. Desperately in debt and fighting to recover from six years of war, the British wouldn’t allow Australians — still considered part of the British Empire — to take themselves or their money across the Channel.

  But he had somehow managed it. How, dad, how?

  Suddenly I was on a random bus ride with him from France to the Pyrenees, where he wanted to see Andorra even though everyone said it was ‘closed’. But he was refused entry back to France and instead smuggled in by a nice Spanish man who carried his trunk up the hills in the snow. Did he have TB then? The diary entry wasn’t dated.

  I pictured his six-foot form happily heaving up a snow-filled hill because the Spanish had been so friendly, mistaking him for a smuggler of contraband substances, so glad to be hosting such a celebrity that a random family had cooked him dinner.

  Then we were back in London, as his diaries and letters dipped and flew around. There was another ‘club’ in Harley Street, and drinks with more poets — Dylan Thomas even came to a dinner in Holland Park.

  From London, his Australian mate Al — poet Alister Kershaw, a friend he’d loaned the fare to England — sent him ‘maddening’ letters postmarked Le Lavandou, France. Al had moved in with the English writer Richard Aldington to a rented villa near the sea in the South of France. The food and the mood in France sounded so different to the post-war exhaustion in England.

  Dad ached to get there and join them.

  Finally, after producing the proof of his TB and a doctor’s certificate saying the sun in the South of France would help him recover, he was granted thirty pounds of his own money to spend in France.

  Then there were pints of ‘warm beer’ with Albert Tucker in Soho, where they hatched a plan for Tucker to get to Paris, too, to see some original Picasso paintings. Tucker gave dad a couple of small Foujita paintings he’d acquired when he worked as a war photographer in Japan, in return for a loan. He told dad to sell the paintings in Paris when he needed French francs, because the art dealers near the Seine would know their value. Foujita had once lived and painted in Montparnasse.

  However, dad wound up in Dublin instead of Paris somehow — and I still had trouble making out the dates or the reason — but he seemed desperate to look for ‘that spark in the eye’ that was his Irish ancestry, and Tucker offered to wire him a hundred francs instead.

  Don’t miss Paris in the Spring, Dease. And, if it helps, a curse on all your blights! Tucker wrote, affectionately.

  Months later (or was it a year?) when dad finally made it to Paris, after a stint in the South of France with Al and Richard Aldington (was this the year he’d met Michelle?), he’d walked and walked the city at night, which is where he’d stumbled upon Tucker in a laneway in Saint Germain, bent over a plate of sausage.

  I chuckled and smiled, reading dad, searching for more. A hundred pounds given to another writer, sums of money flying about, so many risks and so much money just to travel and expand and see the world. Even simply exchanging money required so many signatures and international verifications. The time and cost involved in getting foreign currency in the 1940s was outrageous.

  But the throwing about of art and money between those who didn’t have much helped me see dad’s figure come closer to light.

  Words, a life, thousands of pages. Dad left us all this.

  I turned and turned the pages in the folders in the boxes. Here was a slip from a 1949 service at Westminster Abbey, inside a diary entry about Spain.

  After a villainous journey in a Spanish bus crowded with priests, peasants and poultry, I reached the frontier …

  Then a whimsical idea to move to Vienna and search for a flat reminded me of when I went flat-hunting in New York, sifting through CraigsList, one listing offering free rent in exchange for a tenant who fed their pigeon in the nude.

  Vienna, 1949

  The Prince discoursing on the installation of bathroom fittings for a paying guest was rather strange.

  Then back we galloped to those first days in London — he’d arrived it seemed, on 1 August 1947. He was so excited to be out of Australia, he called the date his new Birthday.

  Rambling diary entries on art, music, love, and life. How music was more spiritual to him than the church, how love was the only reason for life. The pleasure of being in Europe, where knowledge of history and aesthetics and music and art weren’t considered luxuries for an elite few.

  The diaries and letters took me across the world.

  Vienna, 1949

  Asked a policeman the way. Said he was going there too. I limped along but he didn’t mind dawdling, he said. The weather led to policeman’s uniforms in summer. I said Australian ones wore shirts open at the neck. He said ‘yes and shorts?’ I said ‘no’, he thought then said ‘no of course not, that wouldn’t be right would it with some policemen with big fat knees and others with thin ones’ … what an aesthetic view. Ha.

  The local madman raised his hat to me.

  There were memories of Melbourne, too, with names I recognised from the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide circle, such as Alister Kershaw and the infamous Max Harris and the painter and writer Adrian Lawlor, whose book about bohemia dad had bought a printing press just to publish, back in Melbourne before he left for London.

  I got to know dad in his pages. The friends he loved were interesting, not repressed or conservative or stuffy. He loved people who were honest; he kept going on about honesty and lack of pretension.

  I remembered another reference I’d read or heard somewhere, that dad had associated with ‘unsavoury types’ in Melbourne. Was it the artists who were considered ‘unsavoury’ back then? Why was it so ‘wild’ to hang out with artists? Why was modern art — or just thinking vaguely outside the square — once considered so morally reprehensible?

  This was the closest I’d ever felt to dad. To touch his notebooks and the address book he would have kept close to his heart in his inside suit pocket felt almost religious, like I was reaching into his tomb and waking him up again. The words were alive, his life was alive, and the feelings transferred to me in a way that filled me with grief and return at the same time.

  Michelle, Michelle, must look for Michelle, I’d vaguely assert, but then another encounter on a London street, or a monk bowing to him in Italy, or a description of the power trips of London shopkeepers would distract me.

  I didn’t expect dad’s life to be so interesting, to be honest. I didn’t expect him to speak to me so deeply. His travels and thoughts, reflected in his diaries, mirrored my own. Even the way he recorded snatches of dialogue, feelings leftover from a dream … my own diaries are echoes of dad.

  Dad’s diaries filled parts of me I had no idea were empty, so that within minutes of opening the first box I was in quiet tears, oblivious to the librarian who just minutes ago had pressed ‘enter’ on this strange and ghost-filled journey.

  On that first day, in that first hour, every page I read led
to more questions.

  There was London, where he had to queue three times in one day, trying to get an egg. Then he was in Paris, being cooked nightly omelettes at the Hotel Floridor, treated to a litre of wine.

  The Hotel Floridor sounded like a Wes Anderson film — the hotelier always drunk, the Nigerians on the top floor who blocked the lift so their radio would work, the widowed Maîtresse with the sick little dog who lived in the room beside him, had a lot of ‘uncles’ who came to stay, and offered dad shots from her whisky bottle. Dad really liked her, because she knew how to enjoy life. I loved his open and non-judgemental nature.

  Every entry in France went into extensive detail of the food, acknowledging the luxury that it was, post-war. No wonder he adored France — and of course, he would have immediately recognised Michelle as being French. He fell in love with the place because it rescued him from starvation. France didn’t just mean staying alive; it was where he could heal and recover.

  They had eggs.

  I forgot where I was, what I had to do, who I was. I read so many of his thoughts at certain points, I felt as though dad was within me and that it was me walking those streets, marvelling at beauty, searching for eggs, awe-filled and intensely moved by a first trip to the hallowed halls of the British Museum in London, almost like a pilgrimage to a cathedral, then that first train trip to Paris, and his recognition that the French knew how to enjoy life. His eerie feeling, in France, that he’d finally come ‘home’.

  Why the hell can one only feel truly alive when writing, or trying to write? he’d pencilled in the margin of one diary, after writer Richard Aldington had requested he research some letters at a library in London.

  Aldington. Why did this figure seem so important to dad? I made a mental note to look him up when I got home.

  I read my way through the diary to September 1949, and found that’s when dad’s own mother, Maude, died — it was unclear how, just that she’d been sick and confined to bed with crippling arthritis for decades. My grandmother. Dad’s emotions, coursing across the page, ranted and raved at how much she suffered, in ways I’d written when I lost my own mother.

  At the time, he was back in London; just before he’d called Michelle, I remembered from her letters.

  When Maude died, he’d been staying at his sister Alice’s cottage in Hampstead. The sad news was delivered late at night via telegraph boy. Dad described sleeping on a camp bed in their spare room after staying up by the open fire with Alice and Grant, drinking sherry.

  Just as I’d slept on a camp bed at my brother’s, and stayed up drinking and talking with Ayala after we got the news about losing our mum.

  No sooner had I visualised this eerie parallelism than there were descriptions of the funeral service he and Alice held at a little Church of England in Kensington, walking the streets to give the news to his mother’s elderly brother Charlie, who was also visiting London at the time. All these family members I never knew, described in post-war London.

  Then, in his diary, was the description of how eerie it was to receive a letter from his mother two days after he’d learned that she’d died. The ghostly sense of reading her, holding her written etchings in his hands, when she’d already left the earth.

  As it was for me, sitting here with dad.

  Between scrawled notes for his mother’s eulogy and references to his chosen Bible verses were lines from a poem by A.E.

  I had found that exact book of poetry, transcribed lines from that very same poem, in my own diary. It had always made me think of dad.

  I’d pull myself back to try to find Michelle, remembering they were in contact in October 1949, but learning about dad, and my grandmother, and all of this intense family history, had changed my focus.

  I forced myself to search for Michelle’s name, even though I wanted to know about everything else. All I found was a scrawled entry from June 1949:

  … lunch with Michelle, dinner with Michelle.

  No further detail, no descriptions of Michelle or how he felt about her, just a personal admonishment to focus on working and try not to let the hunger in London dull his senses.

  I felt awful that I had nothing to send Coralie about Michelle. She’d found me just two nights ago, and her beautiful emails had guided me to the library. If it wasn’t for Coralie, and Michelle’s beautiful letters, I wouldn’t have found my dad.

  After thirty-two years, he was back in my life. The decisions that he’d made — things I’d heard whispers of, hints of, never quite known — I was hearing in his own voice, in his own words.

  I tried to be methodical. I pulled out a blue folder marked ‘diary — January 1948’ and found myself in Zurich, Switzerland, where he was apparently confined to a sanatorium with TB. But I had to go back, even from Switzerland, to find out why he’d come from Dublin, so then I had to open a diary from 1947 and look at his passport, just to check one of the hundreds of date stamps. From there, I’d pull out all the notebooks, searching for one with a corresponding date, eventually finding one that jumped from 1947 to 1951.

  Desperate to learn more about his Irish grandfather, who’d emigrated from the Constabulary and never spoken of Ireland again, dad had made his way to Dublin (me! In Dublin! he jotted gleefully), but he only managed one or two conversations with friendly Irishmen in a pub in O’Connell Street before the rain and cold sliced through his infected lungs and he was unable to walk.

  Dublin, 1947

  Doctors say I have signs of a TB condition. What this means exactly I don’t know. They say that if I ‘go slowly for some months, build up resistance and avoid cold’ I may clear it up for good. Or not? Maybe just waste a few precious months of wild living … ?

  Medical bills. Dates. Times. The results of an X-ray: double pneumonia, left-lung tuberculosis. More medical bills. The struggle to get currency on the black market (fifty pounds just to get a hundred), approval notes from bank managers, calls back to Australia (a shilling a minute), no luck getting Swiss francs.

  It must have been 1947 or 1948, because there was an undated letter to his mother, telling her not to worry about his health, unaware it was she who would die soon and not him.

  All my love, Denison.

  His life zig-zagged wildly — letters from Arthur Boyd were stuffed into a folder alongside a card for one of David Boyd’s first pottery shows in London — and there seemed to be no space between the TB and his recovery when he was suddenly back in London, drinking beers with Roy Campbell or heading to the military club on Pall Mall.

  Ah. He was a member because he had served in the military, it seemed. Little pieces of his history, and Michelle’s references, started to fit into a larger story.

  There was a long diary entry on the sanatorium: stark white with perfectly numb nurses; how he wished he was in the ward with all the other patients (inmates, he called them), not stuck in silence with no one interesting to talk to. Being bored seemed worse to him than being sick. Through it all, the determination not to waste time. The hatred of confinement.

  More references to money — to the power games between the haves and have-nots in London, and this sense that he despised money not for what it was, but how it made some people not tell the truth.

  It was mysterious and extreme, his attitude to money, and seemed intricately tied to this sense I got of his wildness and impulsiveness, to the reason I was supposed to feel ashamed of him.

  Reading on, I found this diary entry from Paris, 1951:

  It was a fine day and I stayed out late into the evening, visiting various offices and businesses in my work as a translator and freelance journalist. When I returned up the narrow flight of stairs to the Hotel Floridor, there were people everywhere, and as I brushed past them to get my key off the hook one of them grabbed me and showed me a Press card. Two others started to talk to me about my plans and where was I from?

  What was all this? I sighted th
e hotelier, my mate Louis, who had known me three years. He gave me a big wink and raised a glass of wine in salute.

  I had never seen wine in the office before, and now there were bottles everywhere.

  The man from the big American daily was at my elbow, asking questions. Who was I, where had I been, where was I going? He wanted to know. I brushed through to Louis, followed by the mob, and demanded what the hell was going on.

  ‘It is all right, Denis, the whole Press has been in and out tonight. They think you are some missing Englishman, and they are all buying drinks.’

  A correspondent I knew slightly caught me by the sleeve and started making more sense, and backed it up with a glass of good champagne. ‘Have you heard of a chap called Maclean?’ he asked me. ‘You look a bit like him, and half of Europe is on the hunt for him.’

  We adjourned to my room, looking out over the square with a few of the journalists and a bottle, and sorted the matter out while Louis fought off the rear guard or sent them out for more wine.

  I began to understand. I had been meaning to visit a friend of mine in Berlin, calling into Pan-Am office in the Opera district to ask about ticket prices. I had not concluded the deal. Oddly enough, my friend was in American intelligence, but not in counter-espionage. George (Bailey) was in interrogation of Russian defectors with the U.S. Army unit. Someone from Pan-Am must have reported a British type, over six feet high, dark, seeking a way out to Berlin.

  Who was Maclean and why was he so important? The Times correspondent filled me in while he asked me a few questions and we sipped his Veuve Cliquot.

  Fortunately, I was known to our Embassy — there were other Australians like Roly Pullen, the Herald correspondent in Paris, who knew me, and Louis (if he ever sobered up) could vouch for me. About midnight, we all parted the best of friends and went to bed.