By Stuart Mitchner

In Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Paris is a “cradle” in which “each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris” — which could also be said of cities everywhere, including Cairo and Damascus, Istanbul, Aleppo, and Baghdad. In Paris, Miller adds, “Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places … where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here.”

Given what happened in the 10th and 11th arrondisements last week, it might be best to tactfully qualify that last statement as typical over-the-top Henry Miller, nothing halfway, no cautionary limits, “everything merry and bright,” damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Except that, as anyone who saw the dead live again in Midnight in Paris knows, Miller is making an aesthetic point, an indelible point. It may be that no city on earth so magnificently represents the human capacity for embellished denial. Against the grim facts of that horrible Friday, one could shout a litany of defiance wholly composed of the street and place names of the City of Light, Right Bank, Left Bank, and all around the town, including the targeted cafes on the boulevard Beaumarchais, where the indefatigable Henry Miller first encountered a streetwalker named Germaine (“There was a touch of spring in the air, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to burst from the man-holes”) and no. 50 boulevard Voltaire, where stands the 150-year-old oriental fairytale that was named for an Offenbach operetta called Ba-Ta-Clan, which is set in Ché-i-no-or amid pagodas and kiosks in the gardens of the palace of the Emperor Fè-ni-han.

The Portals of Where

In her memoir M Train, Patti Smith speaks of “the portals of where.” Gaze through the portals of the internet and you’ll find a video of a 2009 performance at the Bataclan by the same California band that was playing the night of the attacks, the audience pressed against a stage criss-crossed with beams of red light that at times light up the elaborately sculpted ceiling, people crowding close, surging forward, arms raised, waving, hands pumping the air — the familiar caricature of rock concert ecstasy six years before Friday’s massacre.

Like many others, I’d never heard of the Eagles of Death Metal, had no idea that the name was a whimsical hybrid of the Eagles and extreme heavy metal (see the primer about the band on yahoo.com). But I had no problem recognizing the strikingly youthful face of Lou Reed in another online portal looking in on the Bataclan in 1972 where the rock legend is softly singing, breathing, intimately intoning, “when the blood begins to flow … when I’m closing in on death,” words that have obvious coincidental resonance today. Looking as “young and bold” at 30 as one of the schoolgirls in Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue,” Reed is miming the rush in “Heroin,” pushing the tempo into overdrive while John Cale plays dirge-like Velvet-style accompaniment on electric viola and Nico sits gazing, in a trance. There’s no sign of an audience until the clapping and cheering that follows each song. After Lou Reed inscribes the film noir fabric of the scene by exhaling a perfectly cinematic stream of cigarette smoke, John Cale sings “Ghost Story” from his memorable 1970 solo album, Vintage Violence (“It’ll haunt you for the rest of your life”).

The Chosen City

Playing that gig in so fanciful and historic a locale, Lou Reed was surely aware that his hero Rimbaud could have been haunting the same neighborhood a hundred years before. Open the online portal to www.mag4.net and it’s May 1871, the time of the Paris Commune when the Bataclan was six years old and Rimbaud had been in and out of town from Charleville long enough to write “Parisian Orgy,” where in the glory of his adolescent arrogance he swallows the tortured city whole and spews it in the reader’s face: “O cowards, there she is! Pile out into the stations!/The sun with its fiery lungs blew clear/The boulevards that one evening the Barbarians filled./Here is the holy City, seated in the West!” Then, calling to us across the years: “Come! We’ll stave off the return of the fires/Here are the quays, here are the boulevards,” here the houses lit by “the red flashes of bombs” as the outrageous youth goes on to tell us to look, to listen, to be mad, comical, wild-eyed, to eat and drink and swallow and search and steal and drool and dance and work, and open our nostrils “to superb nauseas,” until poet, Paris and reader become one, and the poet cries “Your Beauty is Marvelous!” Now Paris is the “chosen City,” where “work boils” and “death groans” and “the gaslights in frenzy/Flare balefully upwards to the wan blue skies!”

More Parisian Denial

The last time I saw Paris, if you don’t count being stuck for a day in the Jacques Tati nightmare of DeGaulle, my wife and I were staying in a garden pensione on the rue Cardinal-Lemoine across the street from #71 where James Joyce lived from June to September 1922 and #74 where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway spent all of 1922 and much of 1923 (then there’s Paul Verlaine, who lived in the building around the corner on rue Descartes). Run by the comely Madame Fortin, the pensione was a real find, hidden away behind a high, wide wooden gate. The cost was unthinkably fair. But that was in the early 1970s, when Lou Reed and John Cale were playing at the Bataclan.

Every morning we’d have breakfast at Cafe Chope on the Place Contrescarpe, at the top of rue Mouffetard, a street referred to in Hemingway’s Movable Feast, and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. People in the French capital, like people in New York, often give the impression of channeling characters in a book or a film. On more than one morning at Cafe Chope, which is near the site of a tavern frequented by Rabelais and just a whisper away from the pensione that inspired the one in Balzac’s Pere Goriot, we were entertained by a dancing, double-jointed, bearded man in a caved-in cowboy hat brandishing a pistol and a tin bowl, “holding up” everyone within range of his antics.

If we missed out on the Velvets at the Bataclan, it was only because in those years our Paris was movies, movies, movies, a city where every street seemed to have its cinema, some named after stars, from Garbo to Bogart to Jerry Lewis. We averaged three to four films a day, which meant many rides on the Metro or the No. 63 bus across the city to the Trocadero and Cinémathèque francaise, where the river of film never stopped flowing. Day and night we were drawn to the Musée du Cinéma and to see what? American films from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. It seemed perverse, if not downright crazy, to escape from the U.S.A. to spend our time seeing Hollywood rarities in Paris (one of which was Frank Capra’s American Madness, in fact), but being there added an afterglow. As Henry Miller would say, Hollywood is never more Hollywood than in Paris.

Our last time in the City of Light began with a viewing of Chaplin’s City Lights in the Cinéma Denfert (since renamed Cinéma Chaplin), a cramped venue on Place Denfert-Rochereau, where the sculpture of the lion was being restored and there were carnival booths, with a Punch and Judy show in progress. It was a cozy, step-down-into-it theater you entered through a tiny balcony that seemed to nudge a screen resembling the sail of a dismantled ship. The effect was as if the screen were alive with light, the image moving on the air, the visual equivalent of an aeolian harp accompanying the closing moment — Chaplin’s stirring, heart-laid-bare smile, the flower girl’s look of astonished disbelief, two phantom presences at once so moved and so moving, that a moment filmed in California in 1931 came to life 40 years later in Paris, where “Everyone has lived some time or other,” and “Nobody dies,” and where, from 1926 to 1969, the theatre Bataclan was a cinema.

Note: Although the online translation of Rimbaud’s poem is by Oliver Bernard, from the Penguin edition of the Collected Poems, my preferred source is Wallace Fowlie’s Complete Works of Rimbaud, with selected letters. I’ve also been reading Eric Hazen’s The Invention of Paris (Verso 2011); time-traveling through the photography of Charles Marville (National Gallery of Art/Univ. of Chicago Press 2014); and, of course, rereading passages from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934). The photograph of the Bataclan is from the wikipedia entry, which also includes a circa 1900 photograph of the building complete with its original pagoda roof. Apparently the term comes from the expression “tout le bataclan (the whole caboodle).”