But enough of that.
Suffice it to say, when I got back to New York I had more fun talking in Brooklyn accents’n I ever had in me life and especially when I got back down South, whoosh, what a miracle are different languages and what an amazing Tower of Babel this world is. Like, imagine going to Moscow or Tokyo or Prague and listening to all that.
That people actually understand what their tongues are babbling. And that eyes do shine to understand, and that responses are made which indicate a soul in all this matter and mess of tongues and teeth, mouths, cities of stone, rain, heat, cold, the whole wooden mess all the way from Neanderthaler grunts to Martian-probe moans of intelligent scientists, nay, all the way from the Johnny Hart ZANG of anteater tongues to the dolorous “la notte, ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta” of Signore Dante in his understood shroud of robe ascending finally to Heaven in the arms of Beatrice.
Speaking of which I went back to see the gorgeous young blonde in La Gentilhommière and she piteously calls me “Jacques” and I have to explain to her my name is “Jean” and so she sobs her “Jean,” grins, and leaves with a handsome young boy and I’m left there hanging on the bar stool pestering everybody with my poor loneliness which goes unnoticed in the crashing busy night, in the smash of the cash register, the racket of washing glasses. I want to tell them that we dont all want to become ants contributing to the social body, but individualists each one counting one by one, but no, try to tell that to the in-and-outers rushing in and out the humming world night as the world turns on one axis. The secret storm has become a public tempest.
But Jean-Pierre Lemaire the Young Breton poet is tending the bar, sad and handsome as none but French youths can be, and very sympathetic with my silly position as a visiting drunkard alone in Paris, shows me a good poem about a hotel room in Brittany by the sea but after that shows me a meaningless surrealist-type poem about chicken bones on some girl’s tongue (“Take it back to Cocteau!” I feel like yelling in English) but I don’t want to hurt him, and he’s been nice but’s afraid to talk to me because he’s on duty and crowds of people are at the outdoor tables waiting for their drinks, young lovers head to head, I’d-a done better staying home and painting the “Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine” after Girolamo Romanino but I’m so enslaved to yak and tongue, paint bores me, and it takes a lifetime to learn how to paint.
16.
I MEET MONSIEUR CASTLEJALOUX IN A BAR ACROSS the street from church of St. Louis de France and tell him about the library—He invites me to the National Archives the next day and will see what he can do—Guys are playing billiards in the back room and I’m watching real close because lately down South I’ve begun to shoot some real good pool especially when I’m drunk, which is another good reason to give up drinking, but they pay absolutely no attention to me as I keep saying “Bon!” (like an Englishman with handlebar mustache and no front teeth yelling “Good Shot!” in a clubroom)—Billiards with no pockets however not my meat—I like pockets, holes, I like straightahead bank shots that are utterly impossible except with high inside-or-outside English, just a slice, hard, the ball clocks in and the cue-ball leaps up, one time it leaped up, rolled around the edges of the table and bounced back on the green and the game was over, as it was the eight-ball slotted in—(A shot referred to by my Southern pool partner Cliff Anderson as a “Jesus Christ shot”)—Naturally, being in Paris I wanta play some pool with the local talent and test Wits Transatlantique but they’re not interested—As I say, I go to the National Archives on a curious street called Rue de les Francs Bourgeois (you might say, “street of the outspoken middleclass,”) surely a street you once saw old Balzac’s floppy coat go flapping down on an urgent afternoon to his printer’s galleys, or like the cobblestoned streets of Vienna when once Mozart did walk with floppy pants one afternoon on the way to his librettist, coughing) —
I’m directed into the main office of the Archives where Mr. Casteljaloux wears today a melancholier look than the one he wore yesterday on his clean handsome ruddy blue eyed middleaged face—It tugs at my heart to hear him say that since he saw me yesterday, his mother’s fallen seriously ill and he has to go to her now, his secretary will take care of everything.
She is, as I say, that ravishingly beautiful, unforgettably raunchily edible Breton girl with sea-green eyes, blueblack hair, little teeth with the slight front separation that, had she met a dentist who proposed to straighten them out, every man in the world shoulda strapped him to the neck of the wooden horse of Troy to let him have one look at captive Helen ’ere Paris beleaguered his treacherous and lecherous Gaulois Gullet.
Wearing a white knit sweater, golden bracelets and things, and perceiving me with her sea eyes, I ayed and almost saluted but only admitted to myself that such a woman were wronks and wars and not for me the peaceful shepherd mit de cognac—I’d a Eunuch been, to play with such proclivities and declivities two weeks—
I suddenly longed to go to England as she began to rattle off that there were only manuscripts in the National Archives and a lot of them had been burned in the Nazi bombing and besides they had no records there of “les affaires Colonielles” (Colonial matters).
“Colonielles!” I yelled in a real rage glaring at her.
“Dont you have a list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army in 1756?” I went on, getting to the point at least, but so mad at her for her Irish haughtiness (yes Irish, because all Bretons came from Ireland one way or the other before Gaul was called Gaul and Caesar saw a Druid tree stump and before Saxons showed up and before and after Pictish Scotland and so on), but no, she gives me that seagreen look and Ah, now I see her—
“My ancestor was an officer of the Crown, his name I just told you, and the year, he came from Brittany, he was a Baron they tell me, I’m the first of the family to return to France to look for the records.” But then I realized I was being haughtier, nay, not haughtier than she was but simpler than a street beggar to even talk like that or even try to find any records, making true or false, since as a Breton she probably knew it could only be found in Brittany as there had been a little war called La Vendée between Catholic Brittany and Republican Atheist Paris too horrible to mention a stone’s throw from Napoleon’s tomb—
The main fact was, she’d heard M. Casteljaloux tell her all about me, my name, my quest, and it struck her as a silly thing to do, tho noble, noble in the sense of hopeless noble try, because Johnny Magee around the corner as anybody knows can, with any luck, find in Ireland that he’s the descendant of the Morholt’s King and so what? Johnny Anderson, Johnny Goldstein, Johnny Anybody, Lin Chin, Ti Pak, Ron Poodlewhorferer, Anybody.
And for me, an American, to handle manuscripts there, if any relating to my problem, what difference did it make?
I dont remember how I got out of there but the lady was not pleased and neither was I—But what I didnt know about Brittany at the time was that Quimper, in spite of its being the ancient capital of Cornouialles and the residence of its kings or hereditary counts and latterly the capital of the department of Finistère and all that, was nevertheless of all dumb bigcity things considered a hickplace by the popular wits of Paris, because of its distance from the capital, so that as you might say to a New York Negro “If you dont do right I’m gonna send you back to Arkansas,” Voltaire and Condorcet would laugh and say “If you dont understand aright we’ll send you out to Quimper ha ha ha.”—Connecting that with Quebec and the famous dumb Canucks she musta laughed in her teeth.
I went, on somebody’s tip, to the Bibliothèque Mazarine near Quai St. Michel and nothing happened there either except the old lady librarian winked at me, gave me her name (Madame Oury), and