and wars and not for me the peaceful shepherd mit de cognac—I’d a Eunuch been, to play with such proclivities and declivities two weeks—
I suddenly longed to go to England as she began to rattle off that there were only manuscripts in the National Archives and a lot of them had been burned in the Nazi bombing and besides they had no records there of “les affaires Colonielles” (Colonial matters).
“Colonielles!” I yelled in a real rage glaring at her.
“Dont you have a list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army in 1756?” I went on, getting to the point at least, but so mad at her for her Irish haughtiness (yes Irish, because all Bretons came from Ireland one way or the other before Gaul was called Gaul and Caesar saw a Druid tree stump and before Saxons showed up and before and after Pictish Scotland and so on), but no, she gives me that seagreen look and Ah, now I see her—
“My ancestor was an officer of the Crown, his name I just told you, and the year, he came from Brittany, he was a Baron they tell me, I’m the first of the family to return to France to look for the records.” But then I realized I was being haughtier, nay, not haughtier than she was but simpler than a street beggar to even talk like that or even try to find any records, making true or false, since as a Breton she probably knew it could only be found in Brittany as there had been a little war called La Vendée between Catholic Brittany and Republican Atheist Paris too horrible to mention a stone’s throw from Napoleon’s tomb—
The main fact was, she’d heard M. Casteljaloux tell her all about me, my name, my quest, and it struck her as a silly thing to do, tho noble, noble in the sense of hopeless noble try, because Johnny Magee around the corner as anybody knows can, with any luck, find in Ireland that he’s the descendant of the Morholt’s King and so what? Johnny Anderson, Johnny Goldstein, Johnny Anybody, Lin Chin, Ti Pak, Ron Poodlewhorferer, Anybody.
And for me, an American, to handle manuscripts there, if any relating to my problem, what difference did it make?
I dont remember how I got out of there but the lady was not pleased and neither was I—But what I didnt know about Brittany at the time was that Quimper, in spite of its being the ancient capital of Cornouialles and the residence of its kings or hereditary counts and latterly the capital of the department of Finistère and all that, was nevertheless of all dumb bigcity things considered a hickplace by the popular wits of Paris, because of its distance from the capital, so that as you might say to a New York Negro “If you dont do right I’m gonna send you back to Arkansas,” Voltaire and Condorcet would laugh and say “If you dont understand aright we’ll send you out to Quimper ha ha ha.”—Connecting that with Quebec and the famous dumb Canucks she musta laughed in her teeth.
I went, on somebody’s tip, to the Bibliothèque Mazarine near Quai St. Michel and nothing happened there either except the old lady librarian winked at me, gave me her name (Madame Oury), and told me to write to her anytime.
All there was to do in Paris was done.
I bought an air ticket to Brest, Brittany.
Went down to the bar to say goodbye to everybody and one of them, Goulet the Breton said, “Be careful, they’ll keep you there!” p.s. As one last straw, before buying the ticket, I went over to my French publishers and announced my name and asked for the boss—The girl either believed that I was one of the authors of the house, which I am to the tune of six novels now, or not, but she coldly said that he was out to lunch—
“Alright then, where’s Michel Mohrt?” (in French) (my editor of sorts there, a Breton from Lannion Bay at Louquarec.)
“He’s out to lunch too.”
But the fact of the matter was, he was in New York that day but she couldnt care less to tell me and with me sitting in front of this imperious secretary who must’ve thought she was very Madame Defarge herself in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” sewing the names of potential guillotine victims into the printer’s cloth, were a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves “Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I’ll prove it with this here manuscript called ‘Silence au Lips’ all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh”—“And in such bad taste, not even one well-defined heroine in domino slacks crucifying chickens for her mother with hammer and nails in a ‘Happening’ in the kitchen” —agh, all I feel like singing is Jimmy Lunceford’s old tune:
“It aint watcha do
It’s the way atcha do it!”
But seeing the sinister atmosphere of “literature” all around me and the broad aint gonna get my publisher to buzz me into his office for an actual business chat, I get up and snarl:
“Aw shit, j’m’en va à l’Angleterre” (Aw shit, I’m goin to England”) but I should really have said:
“Le Petit Prince s’en va à la Petite Bretagne.”
Means: “The Little Prince is going to Little Britain” (or, Brittany.)
17.
OVER AT GARE ST.-LAZARE I BOUGHT AN AIR-INTER ticket one-way to Brest (not heeding Goulet’s advice) and cashed a travellers check of $50 (big deal) and went to my hotel room and spent two hours repacking so everything’d be alright and checking the rug on the floor for any lints I mighta left, and went down all dolled up (shaved etc.) and said goodbye to the evil woman and the nice man her husband who ran the hotel, with my hat on now, the rain hat I intended to wear on the midnight sea rocks, always wore it pulled down over the left eye I guess because that’s the way I wore my pea cap in the Navy—There were no great outcries of please come back but the desk clerk observed me as tho he was like to try me sometime.
Off we go in the cab to Orly airfield, in the rain again, 10 A.M. now, the cab zipping with beautiful speed out past all those signs advertising cognac and the surprising little stone country houses in between with French gardens of flowers and vegetables exquisitely kept, everything green as I imagine it must be in Auld England now.
(Like a nut I figured I could fly from Brest to London, only 150 miles as the crow flies.)
At Orly I check in my small but heavy suitcase at Air-Inter and then wander around till 12 noon boarding call. I drink cognac and beer in the really marvelous cafes they have in that air terminal, nothing so dismal as Idlewild Kennedy with its plush-carpet and cocktail-lounge Everybody-Quiet shot. For the second time I give a franc to the lady who sits in front of the toilets at a table, asking her: “Why do you sit there and why do people give you tips?”
“Because I clean the joint” which I understand right away and appreciate, thinking of my mother back home who has to clean the house while I yell insults at the T.V. from my rockingchair. So I say:
“Un franc pour la Française.”
I coulda said “The Inferno White Owl Sainte Theresia!” and she still wouldna cared. (Wouldn’t have cared, but I shorten things, after that great poet Robert
