Often, perhaps too often (some deemed such predisposition a “malignancy”) I’d turn to Kafka, the conjurer, Kafka, “the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament,” for booster shots of spleen and cynicism, the serum that inures dreamers against groundless hope, idealists against pointless fancies. I meandered casually and without haste in his miasmic labyrinths, ready to lose my way, to become ensnared in his inscrutable plots, to merge into them. Kafka would bequeath a lifelong reflex and a healthy lack of forbearance for the meanness, the absurdity, the despotism of officialdom, the odious banality of bureaucracy, the effrontery and intolerance of the ignorant, the shallow intellect and miserly preoccupations of the petty bourgeois, the boorishness and vulgarity of the rabble, the sham majesty of the privileged.
Hardened by experience and an ebbing regard for all authority, this amalgam of aversions would be reinforced by Nietzsche’s warnings against mindless dictates. What I chose to distill from his florid orations is that I was now obligated to dismember the tentacles of stupidity, dogma and prejudice (Maimonides called them “degenerate practices and senseless beliefs”). Oh, how I struggled with Nietzsche. But I read on and reread Ecce Homo and Twilight of the Gods and I dissected and agonized over every word, every twist of phrase, every last convoluted paragraph until his awesome genius erupted and lit up some heretofore dormant synapse inside my brain.
From Spinoza, my father’s favorite philosopher (Henri Bergson came in a close second) I learned to reject doctrines that don’t make room for speculation or doubt, to call a lie any truth that owes its sole existence to blind faith. Shackled to unbending creeds, afflicted with intellectual villainy, his contemporaries shunned and rebuked him. Excommunicated by Jews, vilified by Christians, he was a heretic and a rebel. His was an enviable malediction, I mused, and I remember vowing to emulate him in some way. It would take a more mature perusal of his work to recognize that I lacked both his formidable intellect and his couth. I would have to settle for a Spinozan willingness to invite hostility.
Men struggle and fight. They’re so busy fooling themselves so they might endure what is unbearable that they’d rather live with lies than truth. In attempting to rationalize mirages, they dupe others along the way.
Voltaire, the freethinker whose moral code hinged on tolerance and generosity was also required reading at school. Hostile to all metaphysics, Voltaire warns against the perils of immoderation and groundless idealism with sardonic ferocity. A believer in natural religion, he condemns the social effects of “revealed” doctrine, calling it “pernicious,” thus earning him the unwavering hostility of the Church. There can be no higher endorsement of one’s relevance in a world of staggering hypocrisy, I thought, than to attract such antipathy. Convinced that it is more useful to be hated than ignored, I fantasized that my writings would one day be listed, along those of other irreligious libertines, in some Index of prohibited reading. Reserved for higher intellects than mine, such distinction would elude me. I would take comfort in the knowledge that a tight-lipped but all-knowing Big Brother was keeping me in its sights.
Orwell's view of freedom -- “the right to tell people what they don't want to know” appealed to me intuitively. But it was the stirring humanism of Hugo and Zola, their attention to the unlearned lessons of history, that steeled my resolve to “tell people,” to startle the smug and the compliant, to challenge the established order, to prophesy chaos and decay as a hedge against their inevitability. Hugo and Zola, more than any others I knew, celebrated the enormous power of passionate, hard-hitting reporting, the poetry of polemic, the elegance of words honed to sing and sting and move men to great deeds, and occasionally drive them to infamy, shame and remorse. He whose only loyalty is to the truth, I would eventually learn, has very few friends. I would long revel in the vainglorious illusion that being friendless is a small price to pay for defending the truth -- smaller yet for exposing it. Alienation, jobs lost or denied, opportunities forfeited and, later, threats from some very irate readers, did little to tame the inner rage.
These hindrances only taught me to modulate the rhetoric, not to suppress it. As for “truth,” I would quickly learn that it is the strongest and most persuasive of two conflicting doctrines, and that the urge by some to exhume it is habitually frustrated by the reflex of others to keep it entombed.
*
All my mentors were there at my beck and call, lovingly shelved in alphabetical order, ready to impart fresh insights, to titillate, amuse and exhort, astound and stir at every turn of the page. They kept me company when homework was done or postponed, or as I waited for the girls to climb to my old drafty garret. It was in the sagacity of books, in their wit and nonconformity that I trusted most. And it was in their company that I withdrew long after the girls had gone home and lust, for now appeased, yielded to more cerebral cravings and to the greater dividends of sleep, alone at last, in my very narrow bed.
*
I’d rearranged the room, pushing the bed against the skylight so I could look at my beautiful Paris, like from an aerie, while I made love to maidens with violet-scented lips, sprigs of muguet -- lily of the valley -- adorning their tangled tresses, as antimony clouds sailed across lavender skies.
Freckle-faced and deliciously depraved, sixteen-year-old Ginette, the concierge's daughter, had taught me things only a freshly deflowered nymphet will dare. Free of shame or pretense, spurred by precocious carnality, she’d granted me every vice, indulged every caprice. We’d performed elaborate acrobatics to the accompaniment of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, contriving to climax simultaneously as the Bacchanale’s joyous tumult rose to a rapturous crescendo. Blissfully exhausted, we’d then settle back against a large down pillow and read from Apollinaire’s erotic novellas, The Adventures of a Young Rakehell and The Debauched Hospodar, parodies of the sizzling French novels circulated in secret in Victorian England. I’d borrowed the books from my godfather, Ernö, a distinguished anesthesiologist who routinely entertained fellow surgeons with his readings of kinky sex during major surgery. Ginette was particularly fond of the well-endowed Romanian nobleman, Prince Mony Vibescu, whose insatiable urges had taken him from the Paris bordellos to the bath-houses of the Orient in a never-ending quest for the supreme orgasm. Aroused, we would start all over again.
Once a month or so, with Ginette gone for weekend visits to her mémée in Auvergne, it was a fellow student, Isabelle -- “la belle” -- blue-blooded and demure, the niece of a high-ranking member of the Chambre des Députés, who looked in on me. Refined, exuding a breeding found only in old money tirelessly replenished, Isabelle had deemed Ravel’s ballet too long and so we’d settled for Debussy’s ten-minute transcendental Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. Ten minutes was all Isabelle could grant me anyway. My recitations of the most grotesque passages of De Sade’s Justine and Juliette, followed by the gyrations and undulations I exacted as she rode astride me at the edge of the bed, often made her nauseous. She once vomited all over me. I never quite felt the same about her patrician little derrière after that. I continued to see her now and then because she came all the way from courtly Le Vésinet to the plebeian escarpments of Montmartre just to get laid, and such servility in a highborn, I felt, could only be rewarded with vile, crude fornication. Years later, driven by a similar incentive -- the promise (or the illusion) of great sex -- I found myself crossing the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the breadth of the United States. It was then that I remembered Isabelle and that I mentally sought atonement for my cruelty. Inevitably, I also understood that the cost of such expeditions far, far exceeds the returns.
Sex gives us angel wings. Then it dumps us back to earth where, thank heaven, we can take a shower.
I eventually lost both Ginette and Isabelle, the result of an indiscretion with a third p'tite amie, Elyse, whom I’d picked up at a kiosk on Place Blanche as I rummaged for my favorite old comics, Les Pieds Nickelés and Bibi Fricotin.
Love creates and destroys liaisons by vocation and breaks hearts by whimsy.
Elyse liked the accordion. I did too, but over fish and chips and cold fermented cider in a cozy bistro at dusk on the banks of the Marne, not as an attendant to fucking.