Sunday night, October 10, Kennedy Airport, on board
[letter]
The props have just been started and the plane is jerking slightly, pawing
at the ground to be gone. There is a subtle 'underground' vibration that
is nevertheless very powerful. On the observation deck people are standing
waving, with their overcoats flapping in the breeze. They seem, except for
the waving hands, to be half-people, because only their legs are lighted.
(I wonder why they wave and wave. It seems to be a contact; held as long
as possible, like the long breaking away handshake). I'm searching among
the legs for Janeen and Gary (who brought me to the airport) but I don't
see them. I'm sad because I would like to wave to someone.
The engines have gathered their strength, tautened, sprung into the air,
and the lights below look like a garden seeded in even rows.
I'm excited! The lights grow smaller, and those just behind us have been
melted down to blurs by the jet blast from the wing engines.
A blond, tousled little boy named Eddie came over to look at the lights
from my window when we banked steeply, and now he has been sitting on my
lap, eating peanuts gabbling with the little French girl in the seat ahead.
Janeen and Gary came over to Uncle's apartment [on Riverside Drive] early
tonight, and we went to the roof to look at the lights: the West River Freeway
a snaking line of lights to Washington Bridge - an outline drawing in blue
lights. Darkness in Harlem. The irregularly placed squares of light in the
high-rise project houses on both sides. ALCOA in reflected red neon letters
across the river in New Jersey. A mass of Lower Manhattan skyscraper lights.
Strings of road lamps like a visual skeleton for the city. I had gone up
and looked at it earlier in the afternoon too, when it was shiny-wet from
a rain just heavy enough to send all the Sunday afternoon kite flyers on
Grant's Tomb Park indoors.
Then we drove through the heavily lit Fairgrounds and along the conveyor
belt highways for miles of dense traffic to the Kennedy Airport. On both
sides of the road, for what seems miles, are strangely designed buildings,
all floodlit, with names like KLM, BOAC, Air France, Swissair, Alitalia,
Iberian blazing in strong whites, reds, and blues. From the general terminal
observation deck we saw the blue runway lights in a sea reaching to a white-lit
rim miles away, with tall red lights looking like the lights on a ship's
masts. Jets moved into their docks with incredible grace. Janeen was as
excited as I. (Gary is tall, blond, beginning to grow a beard, blue-eyed,
humorous, confident and graceful, warm - and a good driver. I approve.)
Auntie made a special meal for tonight (shredded cabbage, raisins, carrots,
broccoli with pork chunks on rice) and we ate it with wine. We had toasts,
"proust" to Europe and to Maria's nursery school. The Dyck family
is so warm and so ideally loving and funny that they are perfect hosts.
Yet I am happy to be going, I need to have an address again and stop
being a guest.
-
Now we are far over the ocean and will not see land again until Iceland
tomorrow morning. Europe tomorrow.
The sky over Kennedy was dusty, from the reflections of many lights.
At two in the morning, here, there are dumpling clouds below us and very
fine cloud fibres around and above us - a few stars, moon reflected on the
wings but not visible. The steady vibration - more vibration than noise
- of the four jet prop engines as a background of completely even texture.
Unbelievably far below is the ocean - I haven't seen it yet - and more incredibly
distant are those stars. Airplanes are mysterious, the gardens of lights
on Manhattan are mysterious. And we?
I am always happy when I come back to realizing the mysteriousness of
everything that is usually ordinary.
-
And looking down this morning is like looking UP on any ordinary day;
the cloud formation is reversed!
-
We are landing, and I can see the wing flaps moving up or down - a movement
of an inch or two inches controls the pelting speed and the enormous weight
of this airplane. We are wrapped in fog this morning.
-
Iceland was wet and foggy. The airport is a US Naval station (Keflavik)
and "no smoking" signs were disappointingly English. I strolled
with a Kansas City philosophy major who sits behind me. We could see only
Navy barracks and a wasteland airstrip with orange dead grass bent half
flat around piles of black boulders. We rose above the fog first: now it
is below us, unmoving, looking like treetops in a ghost forest that stretches
as far as I can see. Glimpses of rippled water with a toy boat and bluish
land in the distance.
Now we have come through a second cloud layer into the sun - but we can't
see anything below us. (While we were rising through the ground fog, Paul,
I could see the lines of air currents passing over the wings, a slow curve
like this [sketch]. This is a jet prop - it has four wing-mounted props
and four jet engines. Haven't been able to discover why.)
-
A ragged group of stony brown islands appeared under the wings not long
ago. The stewardess, in her Icelandic accent, tells me they are the Shetland
Islands. I could trace narrow roads, following the edges of a small lake.
Then another country - green - with rivers and cultivated land. Ireland!
We may be over England now, but there are clouds below us and I can't see
anything.
Meanwhile, I'm having an after-dinner cognac! They also give us red wine
in little bottles, meat-and-potato meals with desserts, rolls, juice, and
a heap of small paper envelopes containing salt, pepper, sugar, Coffee-mate,
butter, chocolate, and a wash cloth! The stewardesses look Scandinavian,
are tall, small-boned, curvy, and chic. There are five on this plane,
each nearly the exact size and shape of the other. Only faces are different.
Correction - the information says we were over Inverness, Scotland. Ground
speed: 390 mph, 630 kmph. Time of arrival at Luxembourg: 1430 hours. Altitude:
17,500'. We'll be over Brussels at 1406 hours.
-
I look up from a book, and suddenly, the clouds are gone and as far as
I can see are fields and houses, the Continent! Europe! Green and brown
fields, irregularly spaced, with clumps of houses held in place by crooked
webs of roads. Hills covered with dark green evergreens and many-colored
tweeds - fall colors.
We've begun to lose altitude as we cross the border from Belgium into
Luxembourg - the sun is shining slantwise over the fields and the glow of
the countryside is partly the sun, and partly my enormous excitement. I
keep smiling hugely at the stewardess and falling from one side of the airplane
to the other in an effort not to miss one village or road or field or stream.
They become detailed as we drop toward them. The thrill of seeing the country
from high up and then drifting down into it is overwhelming - unreal, mysterious.
-
Then the landing in Luxembourg; the first necessity of speaking French
to ask for directions to the right bus from the airport. A three-language
conversation in the bus, with a Belgian and a Fleming, everyone switching
from French to English to German. The Midwest Kansas City boy and I went
looking for a hotel when we got into Luxembourg, after changing our puny
sums of American money for vast sums of Luxembourger franc notes in pastel
colors. Suddenly I had 1477 francs (with no idea of their value) from $29.50
American. Kansas City Jim could speak only English so I was stuck with my
French again. "Avez-vous deux chambres très bon marché
s'il vous plaît?"
Numéro 15! A tall thin window looking down into a tiny square
full of empty wine bottles and looking up at five storeys of shuttered windows
and tiny balçons with laundry hanging over the fancy railings among
the geraniums. In the room, a sink with barely warm 'hot' water, a large
mirrored clothes closet, and a bed with two fat pillows, a quilt and a kind
of featherbed. One chair. Table with a print tablecloth.
The bathroom! Not a bathroom, but a WC - the difference is, that a WC
contains only two vaguely toilet-looking pieces of furniture and one roll
of prickly brown toilet paper. One of the 'things' is actually a toilet;
the other, I found to my great embarrassment, is not. It is that
peculiarly European invention called a bidet. It has two taps and
a plug like a sink, but it is low, porcelain, and shaped like a shallow
toilet. One inserts the plug, turns on the taps, and washes one's bottom
in it! My mistake is a classic among les étrangers, I'm told. The
toilet itself is located directly under a water tank suspended near the
ceiling and connected to the toilet by a long pipe-stem. To flush, you pull
a chain hanging from the tank, and water rushes down. Formidable!
-
Walking with Midwest in the evening I remember streets of tall narrow
houses, Siamese one-unto-another, with tiny, cobbled, iron-fenced-in front
yards, all with maybe a few geranium plants in pots. Then there was an orange-rose
sunset seen sudden between the tall houses, over the dim cobbles and cut
off by a turn in the street.
Next day in the morning I stood waiting for a bus beside an extremely
dirty, ragged boy who was reading Norman Vincent Peale's article in the
English Reader's Digest. I said "Do you like Norman Vincent
Peale?" and he said, "Oh, you're American." And that was
how I met John-the-Dirty who was just about to find a ride back to the United
States on Icelandic after six months of hitchhiking - nicknamed 'the animal,'
he was an animal of sorts - wildly long-haired, bristling beard in all directions,
toes protruding from sneakers, odor, high good spirits, so many good
times to talk about that he couldn't leave me a word-space even when he
wanted to be polite; effusive, friendly, colloquial, oddly accented in a
sort of Boston cockney, unforgettable. And lonesome. So when I told him
my hotel was cheap he came there too (and the concierge, a black-eyed and
big-eyed Italian, gave me a "verre de vin rouge comme commis."
(You'll have to learn French, family-o, because to translate or paraphrase
ruins the lovely rollll of that French) and shared his supper of
rye bread, processed cheese, and red wine.
That evening - Tuesday - he walked with me across the Pont Albert to
the Ancienne Citadele, the medieval part of Luxembourg which is surrounded
by small rivers and high walls. We rested our elbows on the ancient walls
and looked across the river at the many bridges, the old, old viaducts,
the high turreted roofs, the lights in the dusty color of another sunset.
I love the AGE of Europe. In the morning we finished John's bread and cheese
(and for milk, I resourcefully dissolved an envelope of powdered cream from
the airplane in warm water) and he gave me all sorts of useful advice and
junk he wouldn't need now that he's going home - his youth hostel manual,
a cord, soap, toilet paper (it isn't supplied - "This is a pedestrian
gift but you'll be glad for it" he said) and a sliver-sized can opener.
And with that - off to the train.
French trains! Not long cars with many seats, but a long car with many
compartments separated from a narrow corridor by sliding doors like this:
[sketch]. And who should sit down in my compartement but two handsome French
soldats on their way to Switzerland, one of them an instituteur or public
school teacher reading a book of poetry. [missing pages]
[undated postcard]
En train à Strasbourg
I'm going to send you a postcard from every country I visit.
Spent Monday and Tuesday in Luxembourg at the cheap Hotel Italia. Met
a Bostonian (very ugly) named John and went to see some of the very old
and beautiful towers and walls and bridges of the ancient city of Luxembourg.
In this city everyone speaks three and a half languages - French, High German,
Luxemburgers (a Dutch-sounding dialect enough like Low German to understand)
and a little English. I try to speak French most of the time but switch
into English when I have trouble. I'm writing a long account for you but
can't get it ALL on a postcard - thrilled to be here. (We just crossed into
France.)
[airgramme]
- 8 rue des Hirondelles, Neuhof, Strasbourg
- Sunday, 17 October 1965
The above is my address. And a beautiful address it is. You'll have to
learn to pronounce it: ew-eet rew days eer-rawn-del-uh. And it means number
eight, Street of the Swallows.
Neuhof is on the outskirts of Strasbourg, a small village in itself,
with fields of (I think) parsnips, several small épiceries (grocery
shops), several cafés and débits de vin (bars where wine and
bière are sold), small houses with large gardens, cobbled streets,
a small Catholic church with a steeple.
My room is on the second floor of the house of Madame
Degen with the rooms of two other students, Nicole and a boy from the Cameroons.
Downstairs live Madame Degen, le monsieur (her husband I suppose), her mother,
and her daughter Lili who is about seventeen I'd say. For 120 francs a month
I am living in paradise (translate francs into dollars by dividing by 5).
Madame Degen, like Mrs Wold, likes to "have things nice." Her
house is beautiful. In the hallway and the stairs, the wood is polished
so that all her beautiful plants are reflected in it. And my room! Two windows:
one looks northward onto a neighbouring garden with grass, flowers, four
tall spruce trees, and a beautiful half-timbered tile-roofed garage with
grape vines growing over it. My east window is a set of French doors opening
onto a long iron balcony over the street!!! Both have exquisite lace curtains.
The walls are papered in light green and the ceiling is white. It's furnished
with an elegance that astounds me - a long bed with a high carved headboard
(embroidered sheet, a pillow as big as a body, a gold satin bedspread-quilt,
and a feather comforter which sits on the bedspread like a benevolent rectangular
cloud.
The Cameroons boy just got back from church - he is small, froggish,
ugly, dis-spirited and his name is Pierre. Nicole is also small, rather
spiritless, and somewhat ugly. Lili is ugly too, but livelier. And Madame?
Well yes, ugly too, but very good and friendly - large, red-faced, with
a gold tooth and her hair done up somehow. Le monsier is nice-looking and
rather quiet. I saw him yesterday, walking in the rain with his beret and
wooden shoes on.
And breakfasts! For 1 franc or less per day, one wakes up to find, on
the stair landing, a tray with a pitcher of milk, a pot of black coffee,
a large coffee cup turned upside down over three lumps of sugar, and a napkin-covered
plat with a croissant and two slabs of raisin bread. One heats the pot of
coffee over a small burner that the madame leaves in the room, adds the
milk, and voila! Two cups of beautiful café-au-lait. This is the
traditional continental breakfast, le petit déjeuner.
I have a friend, Férdinand (Fayrrdeen-awn] who has been my mentor
for the past few days. His patience with my French is formidable.
Besides helping me buy a bicycle, he and I have worked out a system for
eating cheaply, a system which is on the very edge of being inspired. He
has a student card which enables him to eat in certain student restaurants
for a franc and a half. What we do is walk in together and find a table.
Then he goes to the cafeteria lineup, shows his card, and comes back to
the table with a tray full of food. While he eats the soup, I eat the main
course. Then he goes back to the lineup for seconds of the main course and
some more bread. Then we share the dessert and drink elaborate toasts (water)
to 'our system'.
After our supper last night we went on to the Cité Universitaire
which is a kind of student's union, and watched television. Most of it is
still too fast for me, but I get most of the ideas if not the words, with
the help of explanations from Férdinand. Everything here is a terrific
hurdle, even such simple things as taking a bus and asking directions, and
everything - every word overheard - is an education.
The buses, by the way, are tout différent. You get in at the back,
and pay your fare according to the distance you're going, to a man in a
small cage. Yesterday, as I paid the fare, the man pressed my hand warmly
and winked - all sorts of things happen. And yesterday morning, just as
I was boarding a bus, the ticket taker leaped from the bus, dodged the traffic
across the street, grabbed a bunch of roses from a stand, thrust some money
at the fleuriste and ran back to the bus, all while the bus stopped briefly
to pick up passengers.
The French vocabulary most useful seems to be the sentences for "What
is it?" and "How do you say ...?" Those and "oui"
and "merci" seem to be the essentials.
I've seen Peter. I asked the housing centre if he'd registered there
- he hadn't - and then found his address at the foreign student registration
centre. (Got lost on the way there, and a kind man in a beret took my arm
and went all the way with me to make sure I got there - since my confused
French had convinced him it was impossible for me to understand directions.)
Le Monsieur Dyck wasn't home so I went into his room and snooped in his
stuff - he has a corncob pipe and he's extremely tidy - and as I was sitting
and waiting a good-looking Frenchman came in looking for him. Not long after,
Himself arrived looking actually handsome after the food and company of
his Cunard Line trip across the ocean. (The French have a very copy-able
custom of greeting and taking leave of people by kissing them on both cheeks
- which he did. He said that when his friend the Frenchman and the housing
bureau told him there was a dame looking for him, he had decided to pretend
great wrath because everywhere he went, there I was, but he hadn't had the
heart to carry out his plot. It was good to see him and so good to speak
English again that we've vowed never to speak French to each other. He is
still looking for a room because the hotel where he is staying is too expensive
though magnificent. He seems happy to be here, and he's more his usual expansive
self than he was last June. He was in Paris for a while, and has been here
a week longer than I.
I arrived last Tuesday, early afternoon, on the train from Luxembourg,
left my bags at the station, and walked directly to the university. Was
completely confused there, by the ununderstandable French directions for
registering posted on the bulletin boards, and walked to the Auberge de
Jeunesse, the youth hostel. Gravel roads, high heels, the heavy bag, tired
feet from so much walking, and two kilometers to go! A truck driver finally
stopped and - in French - offered me a ride which I was glad to accept.
But - after a block or three I noticed the numbers along the street, and
in a very small voice said "Je pense que nous l'avons passé."
At which he stopped and explained apologetically that he couldn't turn around
and I would have to walk back. Getting back was even further than walking
there would have been in the first place, especially because I missed the
sign and walked three blocks past - then three blocks back - and then
I found that the hostel was set far back from the road. Finally I arrived,
to find the hostel full of young shrill Germans. But I got a room - 3F per
night - and there was even hot water in the showers. It seems that the Strasbourg
hostel is both the largest and the nicest in France, and it was very good.
I stayed there for three nights and yesterday (bags strapped onto the back
of the bicycle, pedaling in the rain) moved here. At the hostel I met Angèle
from Belgium who is at the university here too, and three brothers from
London who are working part time to make enough money to study at the university.
Going to university here is very cheap - there is no tuition fee, only a
student's union fee of 60F or 12 dollars for things like a student card
and medical insurance.
At student restaurants, meals for 30¢ each. Rooms are fairly cheap
and many girls get free lodging in exchange for four or five hours of housework.
Many boys have jobs. So you can go to university with no debts and no scholarships
although many students seem to have bourses of some kind.
Madame was just up to show me how to light my stove and to tell me not
to throw things into the toilet and to reassure me that I can come in when
I like ("Pas de lois ici") and have friends up, even masculine,
"as long as they don't stay the night." She's Protestant in an
area that is mainly Catholic, and is glad to have another in the house.
She's unbelievably good to me - and I was expecting to live friendless in
a garret.
Would you please send this on to the Dycks in New York. I want to send
them a long letter but postage to the States is more expensive than to Canada
so I'll have to wait until I get my money from the Fed Govt loans.
(I got a letter from Norman in Lebanon - he's begun to study after a
month of traveling and a, quote, "passionate attachment to Rome".)
Mother wonders whether I'm eating - it's alright Mother - between dinners
with Peter and 'the system' with Férdinand and tomatoes (12¢
for a kilo), grapes (20¢ for a kilo), and bread that are so cheap in
the market, survival is easy. And Madame Degen's munificent petit déjeuners!
PS especially to Uncle Harvey and Auntie Anne - the flight to Luxembourg
was very uneventful - no breakdowns over the Atlantic as you predicted Uncle!
But coming down over the green fields and tweed-colored woods in Luxembourg,
seeing Europe coming closer and closer, the small villages, all the pointed
roofs of Luxembourg itself, the church steeples, the networks of crooked
roads, was probably the most thrilling thing I've ever done.
PS in general - the reason French bread has such thick crusts is that
it is carried strapped on the bicycles, unwrapped, and has to withstand
all sorts of weathering.
PS It's amazing to discover that Europe actually exists.
19 octobre
I am having a love affair with the landlady. Yesterday I came home to
find that she'd lit the fire and given me a pot of flowers. Today I found
that she'd aired the room - and just now she was up with "un petit
déssert," some rice pudding with raisins and brandy in it, "pour
vous." She is a landlady whose peace and goodwill are limitless. I
leave her billets-doux on the breakfast tray when I leave in the morning,
to say thank you.
Speaking of love affairs, Peter seems in much better spirits although
he hasn't found a room yet and needs to unpack his suitcases, both spiritual
and material. He knows reams of pretty girls from the U of Toronto group
who crossed on the boat with him and he goes about looking very worldly
and debonair. He was here to see me on Sunday afternoon: at seven o'clock
we both became very hungry, so we went out into the rue des Hirondelles
to find a restaurant still open. The first we went to was full of excited
dogs and people watching television, and they served only beer and wine.
So we had to retreat among the stares of both people and dogs.
At the other end of the street was a corner restaurant which was, in
contrast ("It must be the food that drives 'em away" Peter whispered)
completely empty except for the patronne leaning on the counter with two
red elbows. Peter fished out a franc, for which we got six selections on
the jukebox; French, English and German. One - the choicest of our choices
- was "Ein Indianer aus Winnipeg"! While we were punching jukebox
buttons, the patronne brought two plates of what Peter evidently ordered,
a carafe of white wine, and a pile of bread (one doesn't eat it with butter
here!). The order was one marinated (raw) herring on a pile of marinated
(raw) onion rings; we assured each other that it was delicious between our
clenched teeth.
[undated journal]
My malady is more a lack than a pain - I lack the joy which has been
the one good strong aspect of my personality, on which all my strength and
goodness are based. Without it I am unable to reach out, unable to give,
unable even to cherish for myself. I miss the arrogance of that joy and
its ability to cherish most of all. With that joy of life my motivation
to write is lost as well. One cannot write out of apathy for only more apathy
is created. (Is that why I disliked Age of Reason and why I love
Olivia?)
Without that joy there is a desperation - find it again: keep it, hold
it! - that makes me want to go through all the gestures of joyfulness, follow
all the old paths backwards, write and write, run down streets at night,
long for it with the agony of Chateaubriand. Last year I told Olivia "Sometimes
it goes away but it always comes back." Does it? Is it something organic
that ceases to be secreted after adolescence?
Sadness to me seems some very shameful weakness of character which must
not be confessed for it ruins friendships and destroys loves. Don't need
anything, anyone, for your need is a frightening sore that drives away those
you need.
And Peter - I've needed him a little because I have no friends here yet.
I'm standing Férdinand up today: later I'll have to work out in French
the phrases to tell him how painful it is to be with him because I am restricted
to stuttering imbecilities when I need comradely eloquence! And because
my joylessness has left me very needy, very vulnerable, without my basic
independence and resiliency to débrouiller.
As for Peter - the first rule in his care and keeping is never need
him, let him need you. Result: I sway between avoiding him and seeking
him out. Noticeably?
There are moments of encouragement. He kisses goodnight warmly and thoroughly,
well. But not often!
Oberkirch, Saturday 23 Oct
[journal]
Now the stream of mostly ugly German tourists has begun. Can I tell them
to step out of my sunlight and leave me to solitary meditation in my Diogenes
sleeping bag? "Natur Mensch!" I'm contrasting Eric [?] with these
blowing hairy men - he's a man. The women shriek a great deal and
are even uglier than the men. I love the German countryside but these people
...
[letter]
I'm sitting crosslegged on the wall of an old chateau-fortress, eating
bread and cheese with cold fingers. My sleeping bag and poncho are drying
from the dew in a very feeble early-morning sun, and my feet are drying
after an expedition down through the gatehouse, over the drawbridge, and
around to the ivy-hung door of the outer walls - to steal a few bunches
of still-green grapes for breakfast.
Yesterday morning, Friday, after an arid class and after trying with
no success to squeeze a little human companionship out of Peter, and drifting
a little as the current of my mind kept pushing me off the pebbly shores
of reality onto metaphysical gulf-streams much beyond my depth, I went home
very sad and lost - and decided, in desperation, to bootstrap myself out
of this clinging desolation, to pack my bicycle and follow the first good
road I found into Germany for the weekend. So I bought a cheap bottle of
red wine, and some camembert, packed the rucksack and tied it onto the back
of the bicycle with bread strapped on top, and told Madame Degen "Je
pars pour l'Allemagne. Je ne reviendrai que peut-être demain, peut-être
dimanche, peut-être lundi. Donc, pas de petit déjeuner demain!"
"Vous n'allez pas seule?" she said with a visible effort at
minding her own business. "Oui." (That "oui" a little
sadly.)
Past the canal boats in their canals, waiting to go down the Rhine to
Switzerland or up the canal to Paris, the long arched bridge over the Rhine
(wide and pleasant with trees on both sides). The German town of Kehl on
the other side, and a handsome custom officer who said "Sie sprechen
aber gut Deutch!" when I gave him my passport.
A narrow road out of Kehl, skirting turnip fields and half-timbered German
village houses where the large trucks going by barely had room to pass me
(I was carried along in the aftercurrent of those going my direction and
swamped by the wake of those passing from the front).
Soon, a forested hilly country with the village of Nussbach at the bottom
of a slow apple-tree-planted curve. Just outside the town, a roadside crucifixion
with the inscription "Aus Dankbarkeit für den glucklichen Verlauf
der Ruhrepidemie im Jahr 1*73 errichtet." A small church with the inside
whitewashed except for a wonderful handcrafted and painted ceiling.
Blue hills, sun fading in the fog, gardens with kerchiefed women and
men in blue denim burying huge piles of turnips (I saw a field belonging
to a convent being cultivated by two nuns and an ox), apple trees nearly
bare but studded with small hard apples, a long slow descent into a wide
valley filled with vineyards and a village - Oberkirch! By accident, I'd
come to the Kinderchor town. Best of all, across the valley nearly at the
summit of a steep vine-covered hill, were the ruins of an old castle. By
now I was thirty kilometers from Strasbourg and it was late afternoon. So
- up the hill to the castle, barefoot, sweating with the effort of dragging
the heavily loaded bicycle nearly a half mile uphill, stared at by many
eyes in the farmhouses beside the road, thrilled by my resolution to live
in the castle for the rest of the weekend. [The castle was the fortress
of Schauenberg.]
Finally the top of the hill and the memorable picture of my bicycle with
the packsack and loaf of bread tied onto it leaning against the ancient
stone gate hung with centuries' growth of ivy, framed by a Gothic arch built
in 1170! A running exploration: two corner towers still standing five stories
high but without a roof, one long narrow roofed crypt, a covered gatehouse
in excellent repair with an ancient fleur-de-lis carved into the entrance
doorway, an underground room with a wooden door that can still swing shut,
a circle stairway carved in stone, which once led to a now-vanished room
above the crypt, and a wide stone wall with narrow arrow slots built into
it enclosing about as much area as half of Sexsmith High's gym.
Then supper sitting on the west wall watching the sun dissolve away in
a bank of fog across the valley; bread torn into chunks, smeared with the
soft camembert, with the very rough unpleasant wine - which nevertheless
put me nearly to sleep. Bed was a pile of dried leaves in a corner of the
walls. But not much sleep: the struggle to keep warm and many half-thoughts,
half-dreams kept me awake through countless tollings of the Oberkirch cathedral
bell. Dark massive walls all around, stars through the branches of a beech
tree overhead, surely a pocket of warm air somewhere, Olivia, Joyce Detweiler,
Charles, Danny, Frank, Mother ... I dreamed a dark young man was climbing
the corner wall with a knife unsheathed in his hand, and when I had struggled
with him and taken the knife away from him, I saw it was Paul. And when
I looked around, the castle was full of people camping out - and there was
Mother: I tried to tell her what strange dreams I had been having ... Don,
Rasheed, Father, Susie ... Simone de Beauvoir ... dry leaves creeping into
the sleeping bag ... Peter, Janeen ... a cold haunch; and finally morning
- even colder, and wet.
But the sun cut through the fog finally and began to pick out red tile
roofs in the village and the many-colored trees on the hillside behind the
castle to the east. A warm corner among the moss on the east walls, grapes
for breakfast and the smoke and stirrings of the farmyard below to watch.
Men going out to the vineyards with baskets on their shoulders, another
man digging a pit and filling it with turnips which he covered with straw
and then buried. A child ran all the way down the hill swinging a pail and
calling to a dog which was already far ahead of her. Not ten minutes later,
the dog came back up the hill with a bent old woman, following the exact
path the child had taken down - it startled me (what Balfour Gallivan would
call a "metaphysical shudder") and I was relieved when the child
finally came back half an hour later, running all the way uphill as well
as down.
Spent the rest of Saturday morning talking to the farmers, and the afternoon
talking to German tourists and writing journal, wrapped in the sleeping
bag, lying on the broad west wall in a patch of sun. Slept much better that
night.
Sunday morning was grey, cold and wet so I packed up as soon as it was
light and went flying downhill into Sunday morning Oberkirch, a motley apparition
in dirty yellow hooded sweatshirt and bluejeans, shoeless and whistling!
On the road it was cold, and the fog condensed on my hair was running down
my face, so I stopped at a Gasthof, in Nussbach again, where I sat by the
stove and a bus driver (very Teutonic looking, blond) bought me a Glüwein
and told me that I was in luck - today was St Wendel's day (Saint Wendel
is the patron of horses and riders) and there would be a parade in the afternoon.
The Gasthof was large and warm, the coffee was good, the Glüwein was
excellent, Hans the bus driver and his two attractive friends were lively
company, so I changed my clothes (the suit you made is admired a great deal,
Mother) and like Hans and his friends, sat beside the fire until time for
the parade. The Gashof was nearly full of people from the surrounding area
who had come to Nussbach for the afternoon, and whole families or just a
father with several daughters came in and sat down, the father with a beer
and the daughters or small boys with a real American Coke.
As dinner came nearer, the Gasthof family had more business than they
have for the rest of the year, I'm sure - everyone nattering some German
dialect I didn't understand at all. Hans very apologetically bought me dinner,
Schnitzel und Noodeln. He said he meant no harm by it but "Ich habe
gesehen, das Sie nicht viel Geld haben." And as we ripped into our
excellent Schnitzeln mit Noodeln, the three men, who all drive tour buses
all over Europe with chartered tourist buses, started telling stories.
Hans told this one: "Ich sass mal in ein Zug, wissen Sie, und nach
eine Weile kommt ein älterer Mann herein und setzt sich gegenuber hin.
Auf ein mal sagt er, ganz freundlich, 'Junger Mann, setzen Sie mir bitte
das linke Bein auf die Bank.' So dachte ich, was ist dies? Aber ich setzte
sein linkes Bein auf die Bank. Wir fahren ein Bischen weiter. Plötzlig
sagt er wieder, 'Junger Mann, setzen Sie mir bitte auch das rechte Bein
auf die Bank.' Ich hab's getan, aber dan redet ich im an: 'Nun, was haben
Sie einfach?' Und er sagt mir, ganz frech, 'Vereien.'"
In the afternoon the parade with horses and riders in costume, many of
them really beautiful horses with flowers in their bridles. Then drove on
home the next twenty kilometers to Strasbourg and had a bath.
You are about to ask, "But what about school - don't you ever go?"
It is true that the last two days have been so amazing, so summer that I
spent the one sitting on the Goethe statue steps talking to Peter and the
other driving through the forests and small towns of Alsace with Frédie
Conrad about whom I'll tell you when I have more room.
But - many of the courses are very good and I have lots of French literature
to read - I also want to take Spanish in night courses and join the university
choir to learn French songs. On the 4th the pianist Artur Rubenstein will
be here and I hope to go. There is also an opera house here, and a Comédie,
and many movie theatres.
Had some 'new wine' in a pub last night with two English girls and Peter:
it's a very queer looking cloudy greenish brew that tastes like sour grape
juice.
In the country on Thursday, saw the farmers bringing their grapes to
the presses in huge vats; would like to work at picking grapes for a while
- my room is full of flowers, roses, anemones, and colored leaves.
Father would go mad if he saw the Strasbourg streets because in most
of them, not a single house is built square.
Peter seems to be happier, he's still looking for a room, he knows crowds
of American girls, but I'm a little disappointed in him: our 'friendship'
has progressed in leaps to the place where he can tell me all his troubles,
but not any further to the place where he's interested in mine!
Interruption: for the past three hours Pierre, who has turned out to
be a honey and not really ugly after all, has been reading one of my plays
(required reading) aloud to me, as a favour. Everyone is very good. I'm
a little lonely but very happy.
Wednesday, October 27
[journal]
A painting downtown, which I must have, 120 francs! It is a long picture
of a girl seen from behind, with flowing cobwebby hair and a Botticelli
gown that bares the almost comic lines of her bottom - all this in an intense
pink - by someone called Fini, a modern. It is me, today and on my best
days; I love it.
Today, sat for hours, talking in torrents, with Peter on the steps of
the Goethe memorial. Sun, exhilaration, the two steeples of St Paul's among
the yellow trees.
Coming home, riding through the small garden plots near the empty field,
with a wild sunset, blue streetlights, and a jet airplane, a line-drawn
moon and my bicycle floating.
I am amazed by my life. (Is this why, unlike Peter and Frank, I do not
suffer from my lack of absolutes?) Watching it happen, placing it around
me like furniture in a room, and gathering pictures like the Fini young
girl for it (pictures that explain, illustrate, decorate, my life) are thrilling
- and the combination of chance and 'purpose,' chance sometimes as terrifying
as Joyce Detweiler's death and purpose sometimes as confounding as my defection
from Christianity, gave it suspense. (Tom Hathaway: "I couldn't ever
commit suicide, I'm too curious, life is too strange" - and I cherish
you Tom).
It is égoisme to place so much importance on the evolvement of
my own life and even to base my metaphysics on joy; but without this core
of égoisme the ability to cherish is lost, and with it all 'goodness',
love, charity and professional usefulness.
[airgramme]
31 Octobre, Sunday
This follows at the heels of the letter I mailed you this morning and
is more a continuation than an entity.
No one knows about Hallow'en here; instead we have Toussaint tomorrow:
celebrated by both Catholics and Protestants it is the day of the dead.
Everyone goes to the cemeteries where the family dead are buried with flowers
for the graves. Outside the cemetery itself, the flower hawkers and chestnut
sellers make a killing: the atmosphere is that of a fair rather than a day
of mourning. But the old women dressed all in black mumble their grief to
themselves and carry a clump of purple plastic orchids to their family's
grave (often bodies are superimposed on each other in the same grave, here;
land is so expensive). There is a band for the Monday morning service for
the dead. Evidently Toussaint is not meant to be only a day of mourning,
but a day of celebration of the saints which the individual dead believed
in.
[journal]
Tuesday after Toussaint, 2 novembre
Ferdinand: his bare clean room full of jazz records, his sweet vermouth,
his butter bread for lunch, the old courtyard outside his windows and the
clouds scuttling (Oh Frank!) across the sky above the ragged tiles. Ferdinand
with the holes in his clothes, Ferdinand with his burning burning black
eyes and his curling black beard, with his mouth - Ferdinand and 'blues'
and Luigi Tenco tearing our hearts out of our bodies.
The beautiful tu of the French language: "Je veux être
tres honnête à toi, tres bonne à toi. Je peux t'aimer
un peu - pas tout à fait, mais un peu. C'est assez?" "Sincèrement,
tu m'aimes?" As honest and good as a child - Ferdinand. "J'ai
peur. J'ai peur de t'aimer trop." "Quelle sorte d'entente pouvons-nous
avoir? Nous resterons toujours des étrangers?" "Tu est
la? C'est toi?" "Je suis un homme, je suis pauvre, je suis un
être faible. J'ai peur de te faire mal."
Ferdinand - the directness of his need and the directness of his enjoyments
(cognac, jazz, bread and jam, warmth), his way of walking away down the
street.
I feel myself watching this new thing in my life, careful that it remain
in control, but aware of a terrible youth in its desire for goodness and
a terrible age in its compromises.
-
Sunday, at the Haut-Bas ruins near Saverne with Frédi Conrad:
the piece of bark he found and put on the wall: stuffed with grass and with
eyes and teeth of white pebbles it was "unser kleiner Krocodile"
and typical of his way of, also, creating his life around himself from the
often-meagerness of his surroundings.
-
Tuesday night: "Et tu apporteras ta chemise?"
[airgramme]
Saturday 6 November
My topic today, liebe Zuhörer, is a typical day in the life of an
absent minded Canadienne beset on all sides by the French language, French
culture, French drivers, French spite and French kindness, French fog, French
damp chill and the bitter frustration of French bureaucracy.
7 a.m. wake up at this first feeble crack of dawn and creep out to the
hallway to see if Madame has brought up my breakfast yet, but she hasn't.
I knew it was too early. So I turn on the stove and get back into bed. Five
minutes later I'm still thinking about breakfast so I get up again and see
if it's there. Like a miracle, it is. Wrapped up snugly in a napkin, there
are four slices of bread (four on a good day, only three on a bad day),
my square of butter, my little jar of jam, and my pot of coffee - I dump
all the milk and sugar into the coffee, put the coffee pot on my little
gas lamp, and go back to bed as the coffee heats and starts to diffuse its
good warm sugar-milk smell into the air.
While it is heating I read Simone de Beauvoir's La force de l'age.
I'm halfway through its 700 pages - by reading it every morning and every
night I get a little friendly conversation with a kindred spirit and a good
deal of French vocabulary. When the coffee is boiling hot I butter my bread
and put on a little hint of jam (careful not to lose the taste of the bread
and butter - then I eat the rest of the jam with a spoon: it's very strong
and boiled brown like Grandma Epp's jams). Then I put the whole tray on
a chair and have breakfast in bed, still reading Simone de Beauvoir and
eating the bread and butter very slowly: it is so good that I don't want
to finish it. When the last crumb is gone I sigh a huge elaborate sigh and
faithfully get out of bed. By now the room is nearly warm enough to inhabit
anyway. Meantime the [wash] water has been heating over the gas stove -
we haven't any hot water except for Saturday.
By 8:30 I'm outside on my bicycle going to school: I can check the time
by the Catholic church tower clock - it is steaming cold and I drive most
of the way with one hand (the French boys drive with great élan,
flinging themselves along with both hands in their pockets and a great cloud
of smoke streaming along behind them - but I'm not that good yet, and unfortunately
don't smoke either).
It takes exactly half an hour to drive to the university from Madame
Degen's, but once, racing a tractor most of the way (it was a brilliant,
beautiful day) I made it in twenty minutes. The route to university follows
first the main streets of Neuhof and Neudorf with small bake shops, two
on every block, bread is basic here, and large funeral flower shops called
Pompes Funèbres. Most of the window displays feature huge crosses
of purple plastic flowers. Then I pass a military academy and wave to the
boys hanging out the windows because they always whistle. Further along
is the most interesting corner on the route, where several blocks of shanties
meet, and where, at any time of day, one can see the migrant labourers -
Italians, Sicilians, all black haired and swarthy with fine bones and masses
of curls - and their families walking or waiting for buses or riding bicycles
with small boys bumping along behind their fathers strapped onto the grocery
carrier. On the next corner after that is the chestnut seller who has his
small cart and roasting oven set up from early morning until late at night.
We always say "bonjour" to each other when he isn't busy with
a customer - he is a pleasant blond young man with staggered teeth.
Around the next bend, I get my first glimpse of the cathedral tower,
dim in the fog, very tall, one of the tallest buildings in France. From
then on the traffic of office girls on bicycles and motor scooters becomes
heavy. For ankle connaisseurs this time of morning is paradisal, and, as
Peter says, the French girls have remarkable ankles.
Over one bridge - past the canal boats still moored or beginning to move
toward the locks - and then another - the quai along the two branches of
the river Ile which knots around the centre of Strasbourg and was the boundary
of the ancient city. Then along the quai past an old red stone church, past
three pretty small pubs, past the black entrance to a laundress's cobbled
courtyard, past a half dozen more pâtisseries, around delivery trucks
parked midstreet delivering fresh vegetables to the grocery shops, and along
another quai where the gendarme stands directing traffic in his hooded cape
and white gloves (the traffic policemen are very graceful). Arrive in class
just before the lecturer does, out of breath and very red-faced from the
wind.
Just as an example of the classes I'll tell you about Vernois' Wednesday
morning class: talking about modern French literature Monsieur Vernois was
trying to explain the theory that by citing examples of various senses -
smell, color, sound - it is possible to evoke one essential characteristic
or meaning that they all have in common. And to explain he used this comparison:
he said, "When I look at this classroom and all of you sitting there
in front of me, I see you all dressed in different colors - red, blue, green,
green again, brown, blue - but, looking at you, I see that you are all here,
come from great distances, trying to understand a difficult idea expressed
in a language that is strange to you, trying to understand something about
man on earth." I was struck, and even moved, because it is seldom that
a professor - or even we ourselves - sees in us what we basically and unchangingly
are, even in France: students not of French but of life. I hope you can
see through the pomposity of this last sentence to what I want to say.
Lectures are all and entirely in French, spoken a bit more slowly and
carefully for the sake of the 'foreigners' but still very substantial French.
I understand nearly everything but embarrass myself with my faux pas when
answering questions: but little by little we're realizing that mistakes
are exactly the right answers for the professor's teaching purposes and
we're becoming bolder. Sometimes other people's mistakes are hilarious -
for instance during a grammar lesson last Thursday, an earnest absent-witted
American gave, as an example of a particular verb construction, the sentence
"J'existe parce que je pense," little realizing that "I think,
therefore I am" was French before it ever was English and that he had
just retranslated Descartes' famous maxim into a French more laborious than
the original. Chuckle by chuckle, the rest of the class caught on to his
intention, and the roar of laughter that followed completely confused poor
Redhead - but I shouldn't laugh, because during the same period I stunned
the class by pronouncing "Dieu est mort," Nietzsche's prolamation.
The sentence was fine, perfect - but an example of the wrong verb tense.
At lunch time, I join a mauling pushing mass of students in the lineup
at a student restaurant where one of my 27¢ tickets buys me a complete
meal, salad to dessert. The line moves very quickly after the initial incubation
period in the foyer lineup - by the time it reaches the food it is spinning
along at factory conveyor belt speed, and in a precise rhythm, you catch
the tray that is thrown at you, grab as many pieces of bread as you can
from the tin pan, select a dessert and try to avoid the everpresent yougourt
(but if you're out of step you end up with the yougourt because it is last
in the line), snatch a drinking glass, barely manage to keep your tin plate
of main course from falling off the end of the counter, and spurt out of
the end of the line. To get a place at the long tables you often have to
deposit your tray by passing it across the table over someone else's food,
and then rejoin it before someone steals your apple by running along the
back of the bench behind the people already sitting there: "Pardon,
pardon, pardon" still in assembly-line rhythm.
The food is usually affreux, frightful. The bread is dry and you eat
it without butter. You drink water unless you can afford to buy wine, beer,
or milk. Main course consists of a small taste of protein in the form of
eggs or cheap meat or large bland sausages, with lettuce soaked in oil and
vinegar and a huge pile of beans, potatoes, or rice - all very cheap carbohydrates,
lots of calories and a substantial amount of food value at very low price.
I usually enjoy the meals because 1. they're food and 2. I'm usually
in good company, Peter or Férdinand, and if I'm not, there are all
the French students to watch. Most of the girls are quite ugly, but those
who are attractive are stunning. They dress beautifully, mostly in tailored
tweeds with hair ribbons and fragile shoes, and many have their hair done
in classic French style - long, parted in the middle, and tied back with
a bow at the nape of the neck. The boys too are either extremely runty or
beautiful - the typical specimen, and there are many of the latter type,
is tall, thin but well built, long-haired, with a face as beautifully boned
as most of the European movie stars - they have a more finely modeled face
than most Americans and are easy to recognize by this feature. The girls
are distinguished from Americans here by what Peter calls their please-kiss-me
pout which comes of speaking French all the time.
The city of Strasbourg falls into a deep siesta every day from 12 hours
to 14 hours (yes we're on the 24 hour system here): it is strange to see
everything, even the small businesses, wearing the sign "fermé
jusqu'à 14 h" for two hours a day - but most of them stay open
to six or seven too.
During this two hour vacuum I go to the library reading room or sit on
the steps of the Goethe statue or go for a promenade - everything here,
walking, bicycling, or driving, is a promenade - looking at Strasbourg.
(More about that later.) Then I have classes again often until 7 o'clock.
If I didn't eat at the student restaurant at lunch I go there for dinner
and blow my one-per-day allotted meal ticket; or I go to watch the television
news; or I go home and read or talk to Pierre or Nicole; or Peter invites
me for a visit and a few crusts of dry bread saved from the restaurant.
Strasbourg has so many concerts, plays, and good movies that I'm desolée
to have to miss them all - the five francs for a ticket. Last week I missed
Artur Rubenstein!!! (Have you heard anything from the Can Fed Loan people?
They're being incredibly slow. But my good angel continues to provide. Just
when I was down to my last two francs, I discovered that I can get a refund
of 43 francs which par erreur I paid unnecessarily in the confusion of the
first week. If you don't hear from me for a while, though, you'll know I
haven't the postage.)
8 novembre, Monday
I'm reading Figaro at the Aumonie Protestante, this afternoon,
walking down the Route de la Forêt Noire to Eglise Saint-Bernard with
its statue of Jeanne d'Arc (slight, face slim and childish, even in her
armour appearing fragile: but I see Jeanne d'Arc as something not quite
so ephemeral: I think she was tall and large-boned with a face like Joyce
Detweiler young) with its long Gothic lace windows (I try to reconstruct
it in my mind: while I was looking at the buttresses and the support shafts
of the apse I thought that if I'm ever completely isolated I could build,
re-form, castles and cathedrals in my mind.) Then, walking away from the
cathedral with the sun powdered in red along the whole western sky, I came
upon a new university building being constructed in massive curved slabs
of concrete piled one on top of the other in the manner of a pagoda, with
fragile X-forms supporting the whole at the base.
All this, and the fact that Peter finds Giroudoux's Intermezzo
pointless ("I've come to the place where I think any damn fool can
write about death")(and Baudelaire "a spoiled brat who thinks
that he can make himself important by spending the rest of his life talking
about death in terms of stink, shit, pus") makes me realize how little
my judgment is cerebral - in literature as in all art, and for that matter
in relationships of all sorts, my appreciation is nothing more than an expansive
affection. And I'm beginning to like France and to want to understand
it, swallow it whole.
part 2
- raw forming volume 5: september 1965 - september 1966
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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