The New Confessions (40 page)

Apoplexy is the only adequate response to that final paragraph, which has to be the most contemptible and shameful epitaph ever bestowed on one of the great geniuses of modern history. I reproduce it merely as a small sample of what Jean Jacques had—and has had—to endure from the small-minded throughout his tormented life and beyond. I will not dignify Dr. Milby-Low’s evil innuendos, many inaccuracies and omissions by further comment. The rough shape of Jean Jacques’s difficult, unique life is there—we will illumine it further, later. In the meantime only two observations need to be made.

1. Be sure of this: nothing Milby-Low recounts here is missing from Rousseau’s
Confessions
, as you might be forgiven for thinking from the note of smug revelation that she sometimes employs. Rousseau himself was and is the source of all slander directed against him by pedants and prudes. It is all down in fearless candor in that magnificent book and the companion volumes—
Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques
and the
Rêveries
. No misdemeanor escapes him, from the great to the inconsequential: from abandoning his children to pissing secretly in a cantankerous neighbor’s simmering soup pot when she wasn’t looking. Rousseau is judged by Jean Jacques, not the Milby-Lows of this world.

2. Is it not curious that a life dogged with misfortune, riven with acrimony, disappointment and bitterness, is somehow perceived by the rest of mankind to be the unhappy sufferer’s own doing? True, there are
people who are “their own worst enemy,” who pursue a helter-skelter ride to self-destruction. But at the same time, why can’t it be admitted that a man or woman can be cursed with filthy luck, can be denied opportunities available to others, can be surrounded by false friends and cozening flatterers? Why not? There is nothing in the scheme of things to say that this will never be the case—that it is always a result of one’s own misdirected Will. There is no guarantee of good fortune, no assurance that your allies will always be staunch, that unfairness and indifference will not always prevail. So why in these cases (Jean Jacques’s case) does the world howl paranoic, lunatic, misanthrope, ingrate, egomaniac?

I will tell you why. Because it makes people feel better, more secure. They can live, grudgingly, with a
charmed
life—there’s hope for us all, then—but a
cursed
life makes everyone uneasy. If they can lay all the blame on the victim, it makes Fate seem to be somehow under control—we play as big a part in our own downfall. We are somehow agents, responsible. Chance, the random and haphazard, the contingent, do not really dictate the way the world turns.

We began filming
The Confessions: Part I
in July 1927, a month later than we planned.
Part I
was to cover Rousseau’s life from his birth in 1712 up to 1740, when reluctantly and with heavy heart he decides to leave his beloved
Maman
, his lover and benefactress, with his rival, the detestable Witzenreid, and to seek his fortune elsewhere.
Part II
was to deal with his rise to fame and terminate with the scandal of
Émile
and flight to Switzerland.
Part III
—I had barely thought this out, I admit—was to deal with his last years: cold exile in England, the bitter quarrel with Hume, the return to Paris and the serene botanizing of his last years. Thus, broadly, was the great scheme I had conceived.
Part I
was ready to film, most of
Part II
was drafted and
Part III
, I felt sure, would almost write itself when we reached that stage three years hence. I felt intoxicated, full of vigor and enthusiasm, on the brink of a great adventure.

Meanwhile, Doon and I … Nothing happened that night after the
meeting. We finished our coffees and kirsch and I walked her home. She allowed me to kiss her on the cheek at the door of her apartment. “I think you’ll like Madame de Warens,” I said.

“I hope so,” she said, sincerely.

After that meeting nothing could bring me to return directly home. I went first to Stralauer Allee to have Karl-Heinz confirm my excuse to Sonia, but Georg’s apartment was in darkness. Then for some reason I drove to the Tiergarten and walked down to gaze—superstitiously, I suppose—at the Rousseau-Insel, a small island planted with trees set in the middle of one of the lakes scattered through the enormous park. Karl-Heinz had told me about this island-monument. I had gone to visit it once or twice, more out of a sense of duty than inspiration. This evening it did not hold much of that last quality either. The trees were bare and patches of snow gleamed in the darkness like wind-scattered sheets of newspaper. I watched my breath condense round me, then evaporate, and tried to think seriously about the work that the next few years held for me, but my mind returned—inevitably—to Doon.… The warm weight of her hand in the crook of my elbow. The temporary moustache of whipped cream on her upper lip as she drank her coffee-kirsch. How the quick wet tip of her tongue had wiped it clean. Would she do Mme. de Warens?… I had not thought of her in the role owing to the rift that had developed since
Julie
, but now I wondered what had taken me so long to see that possibility. She would figure only in
Part
I, but it would still mean months of proximity. I exhaled. Was I sure I knew what I was doing, this Christmas night, with my wife and four children waiting, no doubt impatiently, for me to return home? No. Yes. Perhaps.… I turned and walked back to my car.

Throughout the first six months of 1927 I worked strenuously to set the vast machine that would produce
The Confessions
in motion. My key and crucial aim, my basic working maxim, was to reproduce the facts of one man’s life on film with an attention to detail that had never before been witnessed. Just as for me, as reader, Rousseau had presented himself in all candor for examination, so would I now offer to millions of spectators around the world the portrait of a man rendered in such intimacy, fidelity and verisimiltude that they would come to know him as they knew themselves. Nothing would be spared. It would be the story of the life of one extraordinary human being, but one who was heroic in his humanity alone. The individual spirit would have its great immortal document.

I had grandiose plans as to how this should be achieved and I intended to employ every trick and technique available to the modern film maker—and a few more that I had devised myself. I was going to extend the cinematic form to its very limits.

I was fortunate in that Aram had managed to supply the budget that this dream demanded. Such had been the success of
Julie
that large investments had been made in the film by a group of German financiers, Pathé in France and Goldfilm, a cinema chain in the U.S.A. Not a penny was forthcoming from my own country. Aram, meanwhile, had returned from the States with a hatful of investors for Realismus Films, and, most peculiarly, a new identity for himself.

This was really bizarre. I went to see him the first morning he was back in the studio. The door to his office suite was open and a workman was replacing the nameplate. I took no notice and walked in. Lately, Aram had taken to wearing colored shirts but kept his collar white, regardless of what kind of suit he was wearing. Today he was in a heavy brown tweed and red shirt. We shook hands. He told me all the good news: Leo Druce had finished
Frederick the Great
(it was not a first-rate job but it would do; Aram was giving
Joan of Arc
to Egon Gast) and he was ready to take over as producer on
The Confessions
. The money was all there, all one and a half million dollars of it (“But no more, John,” Aram said). Doon Bogan was signed to play Mme. de Warens. We talked on about some more details: the new studios that were being converted from warehouses just outside Spandau, how many weeks we would need to spend filming in Switzerland, and so on. When we finished, I stood up and said.

“Well, Aram, I—”

“Ah, yes, that’s another thing.” He handed me a business card.

I looked at it. “Eadweard A. L. Simmonette,” I read. “Who’s he?”

“Me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve changed my name.”

“But you don’t spell ‘Edward’ like that.”

“Yes, you can. It’s recognized. But I want to be called Eddie. Eddie Simmonette. From now on, please, John. I won’t answer to Aram Lodokian.”

“Aram, Jesus Christ! Are you—”

His face went hard. He was the most even-tempered of men: to see such hurt and fury was disturbing.

“John, don’t let this come between us, I implore you. I am Eddie now. You must never call me Aram.”

I decided to humor him. “All right. Eddie.
Eddie
. But it’s not easy.”

“I’ve told everyone else in the company. All my friends and associates.” He smiled. “You’ll see, in a day or two it’ll seem the most natural thing in the world.”

Was he mad? “But why?”

“I wanted to, for a long time. I had to wait for my father to die, of course. I don’t want to be a Lodokian anymore.” He touched my elbow. “Times are changing, John. Tomorrow’s world is for the Eddie Simmonettes. You’ve never been to America … that’s where I got the idea.”

It made no sense to me, but it was his right, I suppose. So, no more Aram Lodokian. Enter Eddie Simmonette. And the funny thing about it all, Aram/Eddie was right.

In March I took the family back home for Thompson’s wedding. It was inconvenient, but I had been touched by a personal letter from him asking me to be there. We traveled first class and spent two days in London at Claridge’s. I booked two suites there, one for Sonia and myself, one for Lily and the children. I did the same at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. At our window in the North British I stood silent for ten minutes or so looking out at the familiar view. The castle, the gardens, Princes Street. It was typically gray and wet. The castle loomed black over the damp wind-lashed gardens and the town, its cliffs slick and slimy with rain. I thought back to my last visit six or seven years before when we had been making
Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes
. Here I was now, twenty-eight years old, wealthy, celebrated, large family, servants … I should have felt pleased with myself, smug, full of I-told-you-so superiority. But the longer I stood there looking out at that uncompromising view, the harder self-satisfaction was to achieve. I knew my father would be unimpressed.

We had not seen each other for six years. My eyes were smarting with emotion as he was shown into the suite with Thompson and his bride-to-be. Sonia had our family laid out as if for kit inspection. She was a little nervous too: it was her first encounter with her father-in-law. She had the boys spruce in neat golfing outfits—Norfolk jackets and plus fours—and the girls were propped in the corners of a sofa—cherubs in
lace—Lily sitting between them. My father was as he had always been: formal, polite, reserve encasing him like a relic in a glass cabinet.

“Hello, John,” he said. I shook his cool hand vigorously. “And this’ll be Sonia.… You can let go now, John.”

The reunion was stiff, edgy, the conversation absurdly banal. My father was quite gray now, though he was as thin and upright as ever, impressively fit looking for a man in his mid-sixties.

Thompson had settled into his portliness. It suited him. He was one of those stout men for whom weight loss would be something of an affront, almost indecent. He was rising steadily up the hierachy of the bank and had, I think he told me, just been appointed to the board—hence his decision to get married. I envied him his young eager wife, Heather (who shyly told me how much she had loved
Julie)
. She was pretty in an innocuous, pinkish way. She fussed nervously over the children, glad to have some diversion. Beside her, Sonia could almost have been described as matronly. For a young woman the beam of Sonia’s hips was unduly broad: her torso seemed to rest on it like an antique bust on a pedestal. She wore dark expensive clothes, sensibly cut, which to some extent disguised her bulk, but she had a solid big-arsed presence these days that slim nervous Heather beside her accentuated. Heather was one of those girls, I could see, whose sunny temperament would not dim even when overshadowed by the grimmest clouds of adversity (she very charmingly rebuffed me some years after when I made a crude and shameful pass at her). I stood with my father and brother—we all stirred cups of tea, held at chest height—and watched the women marshal and drill the children. I think it was then that the last dregs of love I held for Sonia seeped away forever. Why? Why do these things ever happen?… I knew I had Doon now.

I glanced at father. His face was quite expressionless.

“Well, Innes,” I said. “Grand to have the family back together.”

I saw him flinch as I used his Christian name. Thompson called him Daddy—ridiculous in a grown man, I thought.

“Curious names you’ve chosen for your boys,” he said with a trace of a smile. The old bastard. “That would be the Shorrold line, I take it?”

The wedding. It was all right—tolerable. Normally I detest weddings. All that false, timely sincerity nauseates me. Donald and Faye Verulam were there, Donald ever more courteous and patrician, Faye aging with tact and charm. I was safe with Faye now, quite relaxed. Various burly Dale cousins showed up and I was surprised to see that old Sir Hector was still alive. If anything he was in slightly better condition than I
remembered him from 1919, when I used to push him round the garden at Drumlarish House. He was swigging sherry and trying to eat crumbling wedding cake when I approached him.

“Grandfather!” I shouted. “It’s me, John James!”

He was appallingly badly shaved and cake crumbs had caught in the bristles. His moist eyes swiveled uncontrollably.

“Johnny. How are you, laddie?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Got a job yet?”

“Yes, yes.” I told myself to stop repeating my answers. I felt an immense sadness descend abruptly on me as I looked at this collapsed old man in his bath chair.

“Great day,” he said.

“It is, it is.”