Paris memories: guest blog by Phineas Newborn III

I actually went to France when travel books had titles like "France on $5 a Day", staying in some pretty dismal places which have become memorable to me now, the more dismal the more memorable it seems as it's true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I almost died in a hotel somewhere in the 14th arrondisement of Paris, in search I seem to remember of Giacometti's home studio, wanting to be near it. The room was on the third floor of a building in which the light bulbs had burnt out in the corridors. I'd been living on a diet of lemon tarts, red wine, and unfilitered Gauloises cigarettes which I puffed in imitation of great artists. The room was as cold as its high ceiling, but featured a bath tub with claw feet into which a rickety tap poured almost warm smoky water. Days of living like this, walking endlessly around and around Paris, snorkeling in The Metro and coming up from it too quickly, a Gauloise stuck between my lips, until my feet hurt, wore me down to a nub of exhaustion which in turn led me to the place of my near-death--the cheap hotel of high ceilings. I slept in the bathtub many nights, nursing what warmth I could find in the troubled water, deciding by the 4th night to give up the Gauloise as my throat was leaking oil.

From that point my health recovered. I switched from lemon tarts to the more substantial croque monsieur and looked at a lot of art. Samuel Beckett was still alive, and I considered seeking him out, searching for his home on rue Favorites but finding a public library instead. None of the librarians had heard of Samuel Beckett! Perhaps it was my pronunciation? The day before in a charming restaurant I thought I'd ordered a cassoulet of rabbit but was instead served boudin blanc. And I'd practiced the word cassoulet the night before, saying it over and over so as not to be misunderstood...

It was in Paris that I first started feeling old, not a bad feeling at all except I wasn't old then, I was in my early 40's. I remember one morning looking into the hotel mirror. The mirror was cracked in the corners and graced by the film of inumerable Gauloises', but could still produce a reasonable facsimile. Yes, I thought, that's me in the mirror, standing alone in a cold, cheap hotel room in Paris, and thrilled to be there! The mirror I thought was a hole I could keep crawling into as long as I lived.

Mr. Newborn did quite a bit of writing while on his French sojourn, compiling a book composed of memories, dreams, and reflections that he compressed into a series of prose poems. His submission to The Paris Review, a publication he assumed was based in the Paris he so fondly remembered, brought the standard rejection he would grow accustomed to.