Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(33)
Like knowledge of the classical world, which comes to us through ruins and books, there are glimpses of this part of ordinary French life of fifty or a hundred years ago in architecture, painting, and writers’ pages. Many such pages can be found in the two thick volumes of a grand album of French brothel days, Maisons Closes, written under the pseudonym Romi. In the 1930s, the author had been sent by a newspaper to investigate brothels nationwide. He visited a vast number and became their historian. In his book, one finds a provincial town on a river in the student days of 1926–27, described by Jean Loubes—14,000 inhabitants and one maison publique with four girls, a quartet, good-natured, not unintelligent, obliging and indiscreet. Through them, one could learn some absorbing things about the town’s best citizens as well as the physical imperfections and desires of their wives. The beer was a bit expensive but good, and from rooms on the second floor as evening fell there was a view of the entire town, its roofs and enterprises, streets and quays. In these rooms, all cares and sadness fell away.
Les bordels, of which Aragon sang. Le Havre—Rue des Gallons, another writer remembers, the smell of women, urine, sour milk, the sea. Nothing, he says, can give an idea of the peace, the feeling of family life in a provincial brothel. One talked, laughed, gossiped, drank, discussed elections, played belote, which was to that world what bridge was to society, and on Sunday everyone went to Mass. When I become old, tired of the noise of Paris, of literary quarrels, news, salons, snobs, poets, and travel, I will bury myself in a provincial brothel . . . equivalent of the chamber of commerce. It carried, I know, along with the listings, advertisements for knee-high boots of supple leather, shoulder-length gloves, schoolgirl uniforms incomplete in certain places and suitable for reenactments of coming home from school. The Guide had no price on it. It was not for sale, though it was easy enough to get a copy.
It’s uncertain when it was published for the last time, 1939 or perhaps 1945. Any need for it ended in 1946, with the law that closed all brothels, not abruptly but with an admirable compassion that permitted a grace period of one month for towns of 5,000 or less, three months for those of up to 20,000, and six months for those larger. It allowed men and women to prepare themselves for the end of what the government now realized to have been a social plague.
I remember when I was twenty, exiled to faded airfields and towns on the Texas border where the most important figures were the bank president and the Coca-Cola bottler, whose daughters, if any, strolled in a world separate from ours. The weekends were endless, with long, burning afternoons. We went across to Mexico, to the restaurants and the cheap bars. There were usually women in back or in a nearby house and always someone to take you to them. I remember, in Mexico City, a girl from Havana with unforgettable white teeth. It was a little like Jean Renoir’s novel or what it might have been if written by someone without the humanity and style.
“Je comprends la vie”—“I understand life”—Madame Ana?s consolingly said to Séverine, the young married woman nervously presenting herself for occasional service in Belle de Jour. That is the phrase that remains. There are some things that demand to take place one way or another; it may be better to face them frankly. It is not love, after all, that is the raison d’être of brothels; it is desire and dreams.
Generally speaking, saints are less interesting than sinners, which is what many of them were to begin with. Life has its turnabouts, but there must be something to act against, a too-easy something, a sensual life. Moderation is admirable, but when evening falls there is the call of the boulevards, the lights, shapely legs. There is Henry Miller on his arrival in Paris, “bewildered” and “poverty-stricken”: “A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.” He compared himself to a ghost at a banquet, but before long he was able to sit down to the table himself.
I never found a copy of the rose-colored Guide. In an odd way, the longer I looked for it, the less I needed to find it; I already knew it quite well. In the end, I decided to let the one destined for me stay hidden on an upper bookshelf or in the attic where it had been for so long. Some things are better imagined than seen, especially in the light of day.
GQ
February 1992
Talk of the Town on Bill Clinton
The indiscretions of famous men are of great interest, though usually they remain footnotes. As has been made clear, however, it was not only the president’s indiscretion but his deplorable attempt to conceal and deny it that was fatal. From this a crime was concocted. I think of the time-tested formula of the father of a friend of mine: in the event of wrongdoing, a manly confession and a pious resolve. It might have been hoped that President Clinton would, when faced with the accusation, immediately come out with the whole truth. If he had been a member of the Grand Old Party—like Nixon, or Reagan, for that matter—he would surely have had the requisite moral fiber.
There are lies that presumably cause one to be descended into hell and lesser, even trivial, ones that cannot be judged as harshly and are often, in fact, a necessity. The president’s quibblings and, in some cases, untruths were meant to keep his private and entirely legal behavior from being revealed. They were to save his reputation and to prevent considerable injury to Mrs. Clinton and their daughter.