My Novel & The Darker Side of Things

One thing I hadn't anticipated is that writing would feel so out of reach. Oh, I'm keeping up my daily blog, which is a pleasure, but no fiction. I've tried once or twice without inspiration. There are a number of reasons for this: the biggest being that I don't see my book in the same light as I did before I arrived. I'm at a very particular place with my novel. I recognize it; it's a difficult juncture where change is brewing.

I'm feeling dissatisfied with most of what I've got on paper. Given my response to Paris, it feels trite, and it feels almost impossible for me to get beyond the way it's trite without becoming much more fluent in French and life in Paris. Something I seriously doubt I can accomplish in the short time I have. So much of what happens around me goes on without my being able to grasp or interpret it. None of this changes the gratitude I have for being here. I am extremely grateful and most of me believes I will pass through this stage and move on to other emotions.

My emotions seem born of my "energetic" relationship to Paris. Before coming, especially as my journey drew close, I experienced a lot of general anxiety and fear. I supposed most of it was related to flying and/or facing a foreign language. I'm sure that was part of it, but not all.... Something else dogs me here. I don't know exactly what it is, but if I were to confess to my belief in past lives, I would say I've had some rough times being French, living in this culture.

It comes over me in unexpected ways that I can barely describe, but it's related to the more difficult and/or frightening experiences that occasionally pop up as I move through my daily life—like the men I wrote about who might have been thieves. That's not my ordinary fare. Mostly I go about my life without feeling either conspicuous or targeted, but those few times where it has come up have felt potent. It seems to me I've come here from privileged country-life, like one of the aristocrats whose lifestyle I seem so capable of romanticizing. I don't know. My images of myself in Paris are mostly from the 19th century—why else would I attempt the story I'm writing?

One of the images I have of myself in Paris is from a later period, however—more turn of the century. I see myself as an opium addict who lived a short and desperate life. I don't know if that comes from too many movies or is indeed some kind of memory. I don't have a lot of information about it, but I think it's what feeds the physical energy that moves through me when I think I might be in danger. I've encountered what might be the underbelly of Paris three times since arriving and each time it seemed my body responded before my mind. That's certainly the way it felt when I stopped dead in my tracks with the men who might have been pickpockets. I only understood what I was doing in the aftermath of the event, not in the doing. My body took the lead.

The same was true the day I was taking pictures and apparently raised the ire of some local prostitutes. I did check my story out later with one of our guides and he validated the fact that I was in an area where prostitutes are active. So it probably was exactly what it seemed to be. That day too, it was my body that responded. I went cold and electric with physical fear—that's what caused me to turn around and walk away. My mind was busy telling me I was over-reacting, being silly. In fact, that's still what it's doing. In both cases I listened to my body with a kind of immediacy which does not always mark my behavior. I didn't consider whether my body's response made sense or not, I just responded to it.

The third incident, which I've not mentioned before, came from a woman who looked like a street gypsy of the ilk I've also seen in Rome. She made a lunge toward my purse while I sat in a café. It seemed absurd to me that she did, but my purse was not in my lap. It was beside me in the next chair. I was sitting outside on the street. Lots of people, a busy café when she arrived with a couple of children in tow. Their appearance caused a stir, even the waiters seemed to react. I was watching the scene intently, trying to figure out what was happening when I saw her body arc in the direction of my table. She was perhaps six feet away. Again, my reflexes seemed highly tuned. I had my purse in my possession so quickly that she stopped her movement in midair. We had eye contact and it seemed clear to me that she had hoped to beat me to the draw.

My point in all this is not that Paris is dark and dangerous. It's a big city. I know that. What's surprising to me is my ability to respond. I don't know exactly where it's coming from, but it feels like old information. It feels like experience. It feels related to living here before, related to the comment I made about the 1830s being the "Paris of my day." I've always believed travel brings out those kind of memories, that there's something in the "land" itself that serves, saves, and stimulates memory. In fact, when I travel, that's what I'm looking for; that's what feeds my writing. At some level, I don't care if my beliefs are correct, I simply care about the experiences that are engendered because of them, and the interpretation that can turn them to fiction.

For the most part, Paris has felt the most real and familiar in those dark moments. Oddly, those are also the moments when I've felt the most functional. In any one of the those moments, had I bumbled the way I often do, the outcome might have been different. But depression and despair accompany my savvy. It's as if I've survived (or not survived) this kind of reality more than once. And pain: I have to fight to keep my sense of reality straight. What's current, what's past tense. I don't think my memories are easy... or necessarily pleasant.

All this impacts my novel because it leaves me wondering if I'm writing the "right" story, following the "right" character. This has especially surfaced as I've explored the life of the painter, Géricault. I'm inexplicably invested in the woman who bore his illegitimate child, his aunt by marriage, Alexandrine Modeste Caruel (née de Saint-Martin). I feel her everywhere as I walk around, especially in this neighborhood where I live and where she, herself, must have walked. Like I said in an earlier post, Géricault's studio is just down the street on Rue des Martyrs. Alexandra lived up the hill in Montmartre at the time of their affair and came to Géricault's studio to model. It's her walk here that seems to haunt me.

From what little I've found in English about her, it seems she lived a very lonely life after their affair, and especially after Géricault died. Her son, who was taken from her, was six years old when his father died and I don't know if she ever met him. I've been thinking about bringing that whole element into my novel, but clearly, it's not the story I've been telling.

That's why I'm not writing actual pages of my novel. Last night I came across yet another French woman writer from the same period, Delphine de Girardin is her name. She was born in 1804, the same year that Louise Farrenc, Tori's mother was born. Delphine was a successful author and part of the establishment. She held salons attended by Delacroix, Balzac, and Victor Hugo.

She was following in the footsteps of her mother, Marie Francoise Sophie Gay, also an author and a salon hostess, an admirer of Madame de Stael, who made no appearance in my previous novel, but was mentioned.

Madame de Stael was one of the few women who cowed Lord Byron. Interestingly, Madame Gay was also an accomplished musician and composed a number of songs, both the music and the lyrics, and an opera libretti "which met with considerable success."

It's quite possible there's an overlap here. That all these women, including Louise Farrenc, traveled in similar circles. My biggest problem with all of this information is that there's so little, at least that I've thus far found, in English. Hence the circle I chase myself in: I must know French better to go forward with any depth and certainty. So, more questions than answers at the moment.