Michael Peppiatt’s memoir is subtitled Paris Among the Artists, but it could be called A Portrait of the Art Critic As an Older Man. Peppiatt, who is best known for his biography and memoirs of his friend Francis Bacon, has spent the greater part of his working life in Paris, and this book is a love letter to the city, although not an uncritical one. He writes in the preface that he will explore “my lifelong attachment to this bewitching, temperamental, exasperating city and the deep love-hate relationship that binds me to it”. Yet he is ultimately a romantic, and the scent that rises from these pages is a heady aroma of Gauloises and red wine. Peppiatt, as a young man, was rather fond of the bottle; this book, at its best, has a similarly intoxicating quality, if one allows for the inevitable moments of self-absorption.
Peppiatt was brought up to be bilingual, because his father believed that he stood a better chance of getting on in the world if he spoke French. His faith was rewarded when his son obtained a job at the culture magazine Réalités in 1964, from where he headed to the English-language version of Le Monde and then to Art International, which he both published and edited. He accomplished this, as well as writing numerous books about art, with an air of cultured insouciance. Yet, as he notes, “the luxuries, the grandeurs, have no meaning without the drudgery and misères of the daily round”. It must be said that Peppiatt’s luxuries and grandeurs are rather more grand than the rest of us might expect. When he writes about drinking champagne at the Paris Ritz, or being led on grand bacchanals by famous chums, it is hard not to feel that Peppiatt has led an unusually gilded existence.
This is a memoir in which names are not so much dropped as flung at the reader; it contains sentences such as “I also started going out on the town again with Francis Bacon.” (As in his other books, Bacon is a recurrent, often disruptive presence.) There is a vaguely Pooterish quality to some of Peppiatt’s adventures with the great and good. He fails to meet Giacometti, who lives in the studio next door to his lodgings and for whom Bacon has given him a letter of introduction, because the great sculptor is selfishly dying of stomach cancer in Switzerland. He meets Marlene Dietrich at dinner, but she drunkenly moans that her husband has forbidden her to eat hot dogs. Sonia Orwell dismisses him as an “obscure young man”. James Baldwin’s face is “full of suffering”, despite or perhaps because of Peppiatt collaring him for half an hour. He fails to speak to Samuel Beckett, despite sitting next to him, and is irked that a passing American (“complete with backpack”) is able to engage in a “brief, courteous” exchange .
Peppiatt has an aesthete’s love of life, and there are vivid descriptions of food, drink and romance here that both enrapture and inspire. This enjoyable book works best as an account of a lifelong love affair with the Parisian streets, of the ability to escape the madding crowd and lose oneself in a backyard cafe. In the epilogue, when he recounts how his wife and he have returned once again to live in Paris after two decades in London, there is a movingly elegiac quality to his description of how he is no longer a flâneur and boulevardier, but is content to be an observer instead. The Existential Englishman offers elegant proof that Michael Peppiatt’s powers of observation remain undimmed and acute.
• The Existential Englishman by Michael Peppiatt is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To order a copy for £18.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
