best way to mark the anniversary of Synge’s death. Instead I stay in and browse again in the plays. It still pleases me to think The Well of the Saints was one of Beckett’s favourite plays, that he may have been reading it in his last days. A few weeks ago José Férez K., who spent an afternoon in Paris smoking and drinking coffee with Beckett in the sixties after he’d directed End Game in England, told me that he sometimes goes and puts a cigarette on the grave. I like this simple act of remembrance. He also told me about his friend William Burroughs fronting up in Paris a bit the worse for wear, having written to Beckett to say he’d like to see him. Burroughs and a companion were ushered into the apartment, where Beckett was standing in profile in a twilight window. He never spoke to them, never said a word. But Burroughs’ request had been granted - he did get to see Beckett. When the rain stops I get to see the grave: no cigarettes - a single red rose and three guitar plectrums. Maybe someone is confusing him with Jim Morrison … Even sodden tobacco seems more appealing.
March 30:
Most of the French people who know of Synge pronounce his name ‘Singe’. I’ve come to like it: his work does still burn and always will. The more I think about it the more strongly I feel there should be some memorial to him here, and I go looking for one of the houses he gave as an address in between 1898 and 1902. The original building is gone and No 90 Rue d’Assas is now part of a big apartment block, functional and ugly, in what must have been a beautiful street a century ago. The building is diagonally opposite the Porte Assas entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens and up the street is the extraordinary red-brick building that houses the Institute of Arts and Architecture of the University of Paris. I stand looking at the eight storeys of apartments: smoked glass balconies, big windows, a few plants and bits of trees, occasional metal shutters and striped awnings. There’s a basement car park with an apartment for rent just over the entrance. It could be anywhere, any city. The apartment block adjoins the equally drab Law and Economics Faculty of the University Pantheon-Assas. There’s a squat glass and concrete affair selling drab books for these students – hard to make a bookshop ugly but this one succeeds.
So much of Paris intact and the one building you look for gone.
I reckon seven of the original buildings must have been knocked to make way for this progress. The first intact exterior is number 100, the Musée Zadkine, named for a Russian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine, who moved to Montparnasse in 1909. (‘Come to see my crazy pad on Rue d’Assas and you’ll see how a man’s life can be changed by a pigeon loft, by a tree.’) There’s a plaque remembering him and his lover, Valentine Prax, a painter. I long for a plaque, a few words to acknowledge Synge’s time in Paris. But not on this building. He deserves a better place to be remembered in a city he loved.
April 15
Rain again, then a clearance into sunlight and warmth. In the evening I finally locate 5 Rue Corneille, the address of the Hotel Corneille where Yeats and Synge met in 1896. I expect to find another modern block or something worse. Instead I find the building intact: no longer a hotel but intact. You’d walk by without another glance, another old Paris facade with its lives going on behind. Old rooms converted to apartments, maybe not so changed from the old hotel days. It’s directly across the street from the side of the Odéon, almost certainly the street where the homeless couple were sleeping ten years ago. In 1896 Hotel Corneille must have been a simple boarding house: it was known as a place for the relatively less well-off traveller, a long way from Arthur Griffith’s image of ‘the decadent cynicism that passes current in the Latin Quartier.’ Joyce stayed here when he first came to Paris in late 1902.
Number 3 Rue
March 30:
Most of the French people who know of Synge pronounce his name ‘Singe’. I’ve come to like it: his work does still burn and always will. The more I think about it the more strongly I feel there should be some memorial to him here, and I go looking for one of the houses he gave as an address in between 1898 and 1902. The original building is gone and No 90 Rue d’Assas is now part of a big apartment block, functional and ugly, in what must have been a beautiful street a century ago. The building is diagonally opposite the Porte Assas entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens and up the street is the extraordinary red-brick building that houses the Institute of Arts and Architecture of the University of Paris. I stand looking at the eight storeys of apartments: smoked glass balconies, big windows, a few plants and bits of trees, occasional metal shutters and striped awnings. There’s a basement car park with an apartment for rent just over the entrance. It could be anywhere, any city. The apartment block adjoins the equally drab Law and Economics Faculty of the University Pantheon-Assas. There’s a squat glass and concrete affair selling drab books for these students – hard to make a bookshop ugly but this one succeeds.
So much of Paris intact and the one building you look for gone.
I reckon seven of the original buildings must have been knocked to make way for this progress. The first intact exterior is number 100, the Musée Zadkine, named for a Russian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine, who moved to Montparnasse in 1909. (‘Come to see my crazy pad on Rue d’Assas and you’ll see how a man’s life can be changed by a pigeon loft, by a tree.’) There’s a plaque remembering him and his lover, Valentine Prax, a painter. I long for a plaque, a few words to acknowledge Synge’s time in Paris. But not on this building. He deserves a better place to be remembered in a city he loved.
April 15
Rain again, then a clearance into sunlight and warmth. In the evening I finally locate 5 Rue Corneille, the address of the Hotel Corneille where Yeats and Synge met in 1896. I expect to find another modern block or something worse. Instead I find the building intact: no longer a hotel but intact. You’d walk by without another glance, another old Paris facade with its lives going on behind. Old rooms converted to apartments, maybe not so changed from the old hotel days. It’s directly across the street from the side of the Odéon, almost certainly the street where the homeless couple were sleeping ten years ago. In 1896 Hotel Corneille must have been a simple boarding house: it was known as a place for the relatively less well-off traveller, a long way from Arthur Griffith’s image of ‘the decadent cynicism that passes current in the Latin Quartier.’ Joyce stayed here when he first came to Paris in late 1902.
Number 3 Rue
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