This is a model memoir, and Peter Lennon is a fine memoirist. A journalist of the often overrated old school, Lennon was a waif from a backward land (Ireland) who sought excitement and novelty in Paris. Over ten years, he found it — that and a sometimes bitter experience.
To begin, Lennon hailed from the Eire of Catholic Ireland days, a comic and repressive society which largely failed to excite him. Later his thoughts turned more patricidal, and his documentary Rocky Road to Dublin, which appears a little in this book, demonstrates an Ireland at once successful and failed — with a culture not even fit to survive into the mid-twentieth century; repressive and yet fragile, revolutionary but also reactionary. Not the sort of place to keep a man of Lennon’s hopes and talents around. And Ireland full of pious love for revolutionaries, but uncertain, now the revolution had come and gone, what to do with its remains.
Paris was the antithesis. At first it was big and foreign and exciting. It was the world condensed. Later it was a place where Lennon was less the outsider — where he found friends, a wife, family, and work. And it was a place where history happened.
Lennon’s rather self-deprecating in a way which endears. At first he worried incessantly about not knowing any French. Mere chapters later he’s talking to everyone quite happily. He never mentions becoming fluent, as that might seem like boasting, or bore.
He notes the nature of his career in a matter-of-fact and unadorned way. First he wrote nonsense for the Irish papers, then he hit it big at the Guardian. But the book does not dwell on the agonising labour of those years, nor on the gems of his own cuttings which someone more tedious may well have larded the manuscript up with. It notes his work, tells a few stories of expeditions to Cannes and so on, and moves on. It’s almost understated, and good for it.
Paris gets more of the treatment. There is some social history — we see the prissy suburbs cope with sending their children, unnecessarily, to die in Algeria. We are aware of harassed poor retired couples who host itinerant foreigners in their bedsits — and businesslike brothels in the parts of town that even respectable families, it seems, inhabit. We hear, in horrific but not overdone detail, about the brutalisation of Algerians in Paris, the torture, the mistreatment, the hypocrisy. Lennon describes his own process of learning of Algerians thrown into the Seine by police to drown in the 1961 massacre, and how he can never quite elicit the correct reaction from Parisian society at large to this news.
And we hear about much violence against students — at first it shocks Lennon, then it becomes commonplace, and then, after especially horror at a demonstration, it once again appals him in a new way.
Lennon’s relating these moments of great drama, like a meeting with the Algerian terrorists of the FLN, is treated with the same precise lightness as other moments of less import. His style is clear and sharp, something you get hammered into you on deadline, and the better for it.
Some of the book is political, with the towering figures of the time represented. We have the prefect of police, both a figure of hate and a strangely compassionate man, ill-chosen for his job. We have the high politics of De Gaulle’s movement through appointment and election, referendum and constitutional reconstruction — the very beginning of the republic we still see. We have the turncoat radical of Andre Malraux and the celebrities of various kinds who saw themselves politically. Lennon pops into an art gallery in pursuit of a free drink, and is surrounded by the great and the good. He drops in on Shakespeare and Company to hear tales, from those who knew him, of Joyce.
But more than this, it is a book about cafes and bars, and chance conversations. Lennon met and was convivial with such people as Hitchcock and Dali and Eugène Ionesco in the course of his day job. But his friendship with Samuel Beckett, he never cannibalised that for the paper. Instead, we have the slightly saccharine but nonetheless entirely sincere sense that Lennon idolised Beckett not as a name or as a success but as a friend, and spent time with him because of the truth of Beckett’s character and the unshowy reality of their companionship. It’s quite charming.
Beckett is not grim and moody, and his tastes are not obscure. He uses pat Irish phrases both because they serve the purpose, and to sus out his new transplant-from-Dublin friend. The two of them, with their other friends, treat some bars, including one called the Falstaff, like their living rooms. They have a little café society of their own.
This is a world where, if you saw Sartre at the other table, you left him be — because presumably he had his own small crowd and wanted the peace. Lennon saw Sartre many times across the room at the Falstaff, but never spoke to him once.
There’s gentility in this way of living, a relaxation which might, on the page, be tiresome and lethargic. But combined with stories from the film sets of Jacques Tati and Godard in which Lennon does his duty and gets under the skin of each, it seems as though he was a journalist after all, and was prepared at times to get on with the job.
This is a short book nicely told. It’s not a great social history, nor is it purely recreative in the slightly vulgar nostalgia of showbiz and politics foreign travel memoirs of its type. Lennon’s book, even when it gets a little pompous about his own film, and preachy at the end as the titanic happenings of 1968 occur — and we are meant to agree they were great and noble things — is modest and quite quiet in ways which show his underlying honesty.
He wasn’t recreating a better time for the folks at home. He was describing some years of his life, and he did so rather well, to my taste.