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Excerpt It is toward the end of the century, at a modish Parisian wedding party. The daughter of one prominent philosophe—as the French still call a miscellaneous essayist with an opinion about everything; we call them "journalists," ruining the effect—is marrying the son of another. The reception is held in a cabaret club on the rue Princesse. It is a happy occasion.
Everyone making a toast says the same thing. "I thought of you not as my child, but as my friend." "I remember the day at thirteen when we had lunch together, and I saw with joy that I could count on you as a friend, an advisor, a bringer of wisdom." "Tonight no longer a child—but for me you have never been a child. You have been my equal." Just the opposite, of course, of what we Americans would say. "When I see you tonight it's with a pang that I remember the little girl/boy who..." We are heartsore that children must change. Parisians admit without shame that they are glad to see them get grown up. We want to have our children around forever at dinner; they see someone who may one day be invited for lunch, and whose company they will enjoy. (And wanting them around perpetually for dinner, they insist, is really a sublimated American way of having them to lunch.) One by one, people rise, and unironically toast the child's ascension to a seat at somebody else's table. People in Paris are more like people than they are like Parisians—they eat and sleep and suffer and scratch themselves just like people in Perth Amboy. (We used to say they ate better, but now that Perth Amboy probably has its own New American Grille, even this may not be true.) Nonetheless it's the secondary, made-up parts—the difference in a toast, an inflection—that interest us and move us. The tiny differences are the important differences, and they are real—more real now, perhaps, than they have ever been, at a moment when the entire world seems to belong to the American imperium. Paris is the one big, rich, modern city where life is organized differently than it is elsewhere—Goscinny & Uderzo's vision of Astérix, the small Gaul confronting the Empire, has turned out to be prophetic. This puts the Romans (i.e., Americans) in an ambiguous, awkward, but still significant place. We go to photography and reporting first of all for news, and there is not much news to give from Paris. No new civilization rises here, and though American writers and photographers are duly lectured to find the pockets that look new or different, the surprise most often lies in their sameness. Rap is as much a part of the imperium as McDonald's, and both have become part of Paris. What the light of Paris now gives us is the possibility of comparison, the view of a civilization that, though sharing a base with the American capitalist one, has a different surface. And the light on the surface matters there. Peter Turnley works within a French tradition of seeing that he has made into an American manner of comparison. His idols—and one of the nice things still possible in Paris is that your idols can become your friends; the circles of public relations have not yet closed around artists, and few are more than a phone call away—are Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau and Boubat. Turnley works within the same living room, but he is on the other side of the looking glass. Two great differences, one to do with age and one with pleasure, fill his pictures, as they fill the Paris streets. The first great difference is the one already mentioned—the preference in Paris, puzzling to an American, for adulthood over adolescence. There are very few Americans—and very little American culture—not haunted by youth and the idea of the superior happiness of teenage life, by memories of happiness found and lost (or happiness just lost, and now too late to recover). Americans like to remain seventeen for as long as they possibly can, they grant enormous credit to whatever seventeen-year-olds believe, and they have built a culture around the needs—and, some might say, reflecting the wisdoms—of adolescents. This is because Americans are generally very happy when they are young: teenagers have sex, freedom, drugs, music, some money, and not very much schoolwork. Things tighten only a little in college, there is a summer off, and then suddenly they are plunged into a brutal, insecure work world. There are few shocks as great for an American at twenty-two as the first day of work, when arbitrary power and rampant insecurity invade a largely carefree Eden. This is why careworn Americans listen again and again, unto death, to the music they heard when they were teenagers. It explains a sight so ludicrous to Parisians: middle-age Americans strolling in the city in sneakers and shorts or jeans, dressed like the children they wish they were. They are not immature; they've just been knocked cold by the realities of grown-up life that their culture hides even from itself. In France, on the other hand, it is the very young who seem anxious and adult and careworn. You see this in the long, pale, equine faces of French schoolchildren, that respectful fear of the universe in their eyes. Their day is so long: I see them emerge from school at four in the afternoon, clutching at a pain aux raisins held out by a parent, starved for a little sweetness. They are taught as children the thing that Americans learn only in age, and that is the unappeasable power of arbitrary authority. (When my three-year-old, who has known only Paris as a home, was given a whistle by a friend over the summer on an American beach he said, "Good. Let's play that we're in a park. I'll be the surveillant—you pretend to do something naughty, and I'll whistle for you to stop.") It is adult life in Paris on the other hand that seems, on the whole, to be the place of release, full of pleasure and license. Paris is a place where the forty-five-year-olds are having all the fun. It is after you have graduated from school, passed your Bac, passed through one of the haute Ecoles, moved out, gotten your job, and settled into your career that the wine and sex and money and security begin. (I am speaking here, of course, of the luckier bourgeois, but then Paris is still a bourgeois city.) I see the same look on the face of a forty-year-old Parisian having a two-hour lunch on the rue de Sèvres that I see in New York only on the face of an eighteen-year-old adrift in Tower Records. The bistros and brasseries that pleasure-seeking Parisians frequent usually remind me of what used to be called a "high school hang-out." They lack the anxiety and social ambition that cloud every New York restaurant. People have come to be amused, to take pleasure, and anything that comes between the client and his pleasure—ambition, show, social competitiveness, and even, it must be said, an ambition to cook in a new or more original way—is, well, just a little absurd. In Paris, it is possible to see faces that are aged without seeming worn. (There are a lot of them in this book.) The cliché of the lecherous octogenarian is ever present, and far from false; but more interesting (and more evident in Turnley's pictures) is the sexy fifty-year-old woman. My own not yet middle-age wife was thrilled to find herself looking a little gaunt, a little weathered in the sober black-and-white photo on her carte de séjour. "I look like a French author," she said with glee, "as though I'd just written a cryptic novel, L'Amour inconnu or something, published by Gallimard." ... |
PARISIANS: 160 duotone photographs • 168 pages • 11-3/8 x 11-3/8" • Cloth (Hardcover) • ISBN 0-7892-0650-1 • U.S. $50.00 • Add to Shopping Cart
