The Merry Month of May (16 page)

“Orgy!” Sam said, looking at him contemptuously. “Orgy! Orgy!”

“It’s the truth!” Weintraub whispered to me, grinning. I went back up the room to Harry, and the bar.

Ah, that bar.

Was there ever such a bar existed anywhere, in such an apartment?

I guess Harry’s bar needs a whole paragraph to itself. It got to be famous in Paris. It was a wooden Renaissance pulpit, made over. What the French call a
chaire,
one of those pulpits which hang up on a column in the church, with a circular staircase mounting to it. In Harry’s apartment it stood on the floor. He had hunted two years for it, to find it. It cost him a lot; and it cost him almost as much to have his
ébéniste
fix it up for him. The
ébéniste
repaired it, gave it a new, raised floor of ancient wood, and fitted it with two bar shelves of the same, for bottles. It was a five-sided object, with one side open at the back for the drink server (or priest) to enter. The other four sides were of wood panels, with peaked arches carved across their tops, below which dim worn figures carved in very low relief and vague with age could be presumed to be doing something religious. It jutted out from the far end wall of the room like the nose of a PT boat cresting a wave.

Harry had once seen one in an antique shop in St.-Germain, thought it would make a great bar, only to find it had been sold the day before, and then had waited two years to find another. It was the showpiece of the entire collection of things. It was also one of Harry’s most prized possessions.

“After all,” he liked to say, and said it often, especially when in his cups, “what are the
real
fucking churches of today, in mid twentieth century? Where is the one fucking place where a modern city man can go if he wants a dim, quiet place to commune with himself?

“Where nobody will fucking bother him. Or make him feel guilty. Or tell him what he ought to do or believe. Or try to change his philosophy or ideology or faith. Where in short he can be by himself in quiet contemplation and suck spiritual nourishment from the liquid Communion in his hand and clarify his head. Where! BARS! That’s where! And that’s the only where!”

Ah, that bar.

Behind it Harry had had the entire end wall covered with a pleated, silver-beige velvet curtain, to accentuate it. No paintings hung there. And against this drapery, on the one side leaned a beautifully made sixteenth-century German executioner’s sword; and on the other, head down, leaned a horribly crudely made, brutally hammered, steel thirteenth-century executioner’s axe with a brass studded, unlathed and unturned pole handle.

“The three greatest things mankind has given to the world!” Harry liked to say, waving at the three of them.

He meant, I gathered from questions I asked him after the first time I heard him say it, by the third “thing” not so much the exquisite sword itself as its clear evidence when compared to the axe, of man’s vast and divine increase in mechanical dexterity, within which Harry hastened to include both the Industrial Revolution and our own Technological Revolution as well.

As if all this were not sacrilegious enough to suit him, or perhaps one could even say funny enough, humorous enough, Harry had completed the whole tableau with a clutch of five bar stools which were not bar stools at all but in reality those hardest to find and most expensive for their size Louis Treize items of all: the prie-Dieu prayer stools. There is a story that the first time Buñuel ever came to the place, he peered at Harry’s bar and its accouterments and then seized the two-handed German sword and tried to cleave Harry from shoulder to waist as he carried a tray of glasses in from the kitchen, crying, “You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! My mother used to pray on a prayer stool just like that!” And rushed from the house. Later, of course, he sent an apology.

In fact, “Harry’s Bar” (everyone made the obvious pun on Harry MacElhone’s New York Bar on the rue Daunou) had picked up quite a singular history all its own in its seven years of existence. Certain dedicated Catholics, though known to be hard drinkers themselves, had walked out of the house after seeing it. Several times there had been drunken near-fistfights over it right there in the living room. It had been dedicated by James Baldwin the first night Harry unveiled it, with a hellfire sermon on the evils of drink.

Ah, that bar.

Harry instituted a set of ground rules regarding it. The drunken political, social, racial, philosophical and artistic discussions got so hot and heavy around that bar that finally no one could get a word in edgeways, and if he did, could not hear himself, let alone the others. So one night Harry drew up rules. We had a lovely pulpit, why not use it? Therefore, in any future discussions, anyone who wished could “
Invoke the Pulpit
” by simply saying so. The invoker would then be allowed to mount behind the bar and for a measured five minutes could have his say, all alone, while the room remained silent. This would be followed by an optional five-minute question period, at the discretion of speaker and audience. There were cries of applause and of “I invoke the pulpit!” from all over the room, and the ground rules remained. Harry had them printed and framed and hung them up behind the bar on the silver-beige drape.

As I have said, it is with more than just a touch of sadness that I remember it. That apartment, and that bar. I imagine it closed and darkened, with the shining tables and rich fauteuils, antiques and statuettes all gathering dust in the gloom. I imagine it like that, even though I know that Harry has kept on a Portuguese maid to come in and take care of it twice a week. I am a romantic fool.

Ah, that bar.

I suppose that we are a generation of drunks, as Hill’s younger generation are all the time so loudly proclaiming. I have talked with them about it, and about the cowardice, wastage, and lack of responsibility in it. But I fail to see much difference between that and the pot-smoking and LSD-taking of their generation: and the slush-brained pot-heads, acid-heads, dropouts and even junkies that they produce.

If we have failed to much change the world we inherited from
our
parents, and have not given
them,
our offspring, any real moral precepts to go by, they do not understand that the generation of our parents failed even more to change the world
they
inherited, and gave
us
even less by way of any honest moral outlook. And I can’t help but wonder what
their
children will be like, if and when they have them, whether we are drunks or not.

And I suppose we are. I suppose we might go down in history (in this new cataloging of the generations that has become so popular) as “The Drunk Generation”, were it not that we have before us as example the generation of Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Hemingway— The “Lost” Generation—all nervously itching to take the credit, and jealously yelling “We did it first!”, while monitoring us, guiding us, leading us by the hand toward the concept that alcohol is the panacea for all pain and despair, while at the same time claiming the heavy consumption of it to be the quintessence of manliness.

Ah, that bar. I suppose most of all I miss those hot and heavy drunken discussions we used to have around it.

That was the Thursday night. The next night was the night of the Friday of May 10th, and the Great Battle of the rue Gay-Lussac.

I suppose it is silly, even dumb, to talk about that battle now at this late date. But at the time it was very important. It was really the first major turning point of the May Revolution, and from it the whole Revolution proceeded, probably.

Yet, I think the real May Revolution began at some point during the day on that Thursday of May the 9th. Some time during that Thursday the people of Paris went over to the side of the students. And I think they did it, and it began, in gaiety and a sort of hedonistic social irresponsibility, which passed by osmosis from the students to the populace of Paris. People just suddenly did not want to work for the Patronat, the Establishment any more, at least not for a while.

I know many believe it began the next night, the “Black Friday” of May 10th, when the night battle on the rue Gay-Lussac so outraged the French with its police brutality. But I believe they were already on the side of the students, and that there would have been no great night battle if the students had now known this. Certainly it was the students who set the battle up, and forced the police into it.

When more than three hundred people are hospitalized after a night of barricades (and there were many, many more than that, who preferred not to give themselves up to a hospital and be arrested for it)—when that happens, it is bound to be an important event with big impact. We followed it on our transistor radios at the Gallaghers, on both the Europe Number One and Radio Luxembourg stations. As usual, the French Government-owned television and radio said almost nothing about the fact that there was a student uprising.

It began late, after two A.M., and everybody had left the Gallaghers long before that. I had gone out to dinner and come back later because we were all wondering about Hill. Student leaders had been negotiating with M. Roche at the Sorbonne all through the evening, still about their same three demands, and the students themselves used the time to prepare themselves well; they built barricades in depth all over the upper half of the Quartier: rue Gay-Lussac; rue St. Jacques; rue d’Ulm; rue Lhomond; Place Contrescarpe; rue de l’Estrapade. The police, under orders to wait, could only stand at the ends of the streets and watch. Finally, shortly after two A.M., the negotiations broke down and the police were ordered to charge, to clear the streets, and the battle was on. Finally it coalesced itself in two spots, Contrescarpe, and Gay-Lussac.

Gay-Lussac was apparently far the worse. Fred Singer the TV man finished his nightly reportage and came back from there on his way home, and seeing the lights on in the apartment, came up. He was red-eyed and weeping and his nose was running copiously. “The damned CRS are beating up everybody. Strangers, foreigners, newsmen, photographers. I almost got beat up myself. And for a minute I thought we were going to get our equipment smashed.”

The students had piled up cars parked in the street and set them afire. They were dropping Molotov cocktails down off the roofs of the buildings. The police kept on throwing in more and more tear gas. “I don’t see how they stand it,” Fred said, sniffling. “I didn’t get anywhere near the heart of it, and I couldn’t stand it.” Harry made him a stiff drink.

It was too far away for us to see or hear anything from the windows. But an eerie glow lit up the night sky over Montparnasse, above the Left Bank houses.

We had the two American painters, one of them a woman, with us now. They were afraid to try to get home. There were no barricades near their area yet, but a lot of people were out and there was much activity in the street.

At one point Harry and I decided to go out. We would sally forth up to Montparnasse to watch the battle still raging up and down Gay-Lussac. But then Louisa said that if we went, she was going too.

Louisa’s bright eyes were feverishly bright now, and her long-jawed face was grim with a kind of frenetic righteousness. If we were going out to look and take a chance on getting ourselves hurt, she was absolutely going, too. And if we were going out to get involved, she was going to get involved, also. She had a son out there. She had a son out there, too, she said. Harry took one look at her, and said she absolutely could not go, and that if it meant all that much to her, he would not go either. She subsided. But her face fell and she seemed depressed, and she began to brood, quietly.

As a sort of placating compromise, I offered to telephone a literary friend, an American writer who lived on a small street that crossed rue Gay-Lussac, the rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée, to see how things were. When I got him on the line, he advised us not to come out at all. “Things are really bad up here, Jack,” he said, “I wouldn’t try it.” The agitation and excitement in his voice were apparent on the phone. “I’m not even going out myself. The police are really cracking down tonight. We’ve got half a dozen hurt students in here now my wife and I are trying to give first aid to, and every half hour there are three or four more taking refuge in our court. I don’t see how these kids can stand it out there. Even the police, with masks, can’t go into that tear gas they’ve laid down on Gay-Lussac. And yet these kids stick right in there and won’t leave or retreat.”

“All right, Clem,” I said. “Thanks a lot. I guess we won’t go.” This was obviously something quite different than what I had seen the afternoon before.

We did not hear from Hill that night, nor did we hear from him the next day, Saturday.

In the morning we walked up to Montparnasse and rue Gay-Lussac to view the devastation. Lots of other people were out to look, too. It looked like a war had passed by. Turned-over and burnt-out cars littered the entire street in a series of fought-over barricades. Store windows were broken out, and some storefronts were burned black. The usual glass and debris, twisted metal signs, paving stones, and blackened fire filth were everywhere. Cordons of tough-looking police now held the street, and gave you a rough looking-over before allowing you through. You had to have business there or you could not get through. I gave my writer friend’s name and address, in my best American accent. After a drink with him and his wife, who were high and excited, but exhausted, from their night of Red Cross work, we went back to the Gallaghers’ to find that no word at all had come from Hill while we were gone.

That was the Saturday, you will remember, that M. Pompidou returned posthaste from Afghanistan. Only four hours later, and after more than 36 hours without sleep, the Prime Minister went on TV with a tight but remarkably well-delivered speech giving in to all the student demands. From it he emerged with a considerably enhanced, if slightly ragged-looking, dignity. Certainly it enhanced his popularity. “The great Zorro arrives in the nick of time to save the day,” one Government official was quoted in the paper as saying. It was certainly something Monsieur le Général de Gaulle would never have accepted to do.