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The Existential Englishman by Michael Peppiatt - review: trying too hard to make a mess in the City of Light

Michael Peppiatt is the author of Francis Bacon in Your Blood, an excellent book about the deeply conflicted artist. Bacon spent a lot of time drinking and partying, and then created visions of hell. Peppiatt observed him for years, mostly in London and Paris.

Now he has given us a book about his own deeply conflicted life when he lived in Paris. He arrives in the mid-1960s. He’s English with some French ancestry. He’s an art critic but he also wants to be a novelist — an artist, in other words. He’s quite respectable but he wants to join the riots of 1968. He has a girlfriend called Anne but he’s desperately in love with a woman called Danielle. He wants his affair to be secret but then maybe he doesn’t: “I feel like an incompetent spy who is bound to be caught out, who deep down even wants to be caught out.”

All of this is great, by the way. But what, you wonder, is Peppiatt seeking? Conducting his secret affair with Danielle, a writer who hangs out with Samuel Beckett, he tells us: “As we make love we are falling into darkness, falling further and further into an endless, deeply compelling black hole of despair.” The thing that obsesses him about this woman, he says, is “her overpowering, almost annihilating impact on me”.

Before I say anything else about Peppiatt’s affairs with women, let me just say that Paris, this ancient city that has become “a fantasy world of pleasure and permissiveness”, obsesses him just as much. He moves around — to this address and that, to the Left Bank and the Marais. He visits the famous cafés and restaurants — the Deux Magots, La Coupole and so on.

He looks for Giacometti, but Giacometti has just died. He sees Sartre, Beckett, Bacon, Sonia Orwell. He has an affair with Orwell, he tells us, who herself was drawn to Paris, and who offered him anal sex: “‘But everybody does it like that in Paris’, Sonia said conclusively, leaving me both mystified and inadequate.”

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Peppiatt starts off as a writer for an English-language edition of Réalités magazine, and later writes for Le Monde, as well as various other publications. There’s a lovely passage on the niceties of translation — how different languages can amount to different ways of thinking. But is he thinking in English or French? Is he a critic or an artist? He visits a sculptor called Etienne-Martin and the messy studio seems to give him a revelation: being an artist is a lot to do with your “inner mess”.

So what we’re left with is a man who is drawn to art and who also seeks the status of outsiderdom: he moves to a city that feels like home, but not quite; he has an impossible affair. He is on a quest to find his own inner mess. Later, reminiscing about all of this, he finds it, and writes this book. If you’re interested in art, or writing, or Paris, it will ring bells in your head. I loved it.

The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists by Michael Peppiatt (Bloomsbury, £25)