Threshold Read online

  As the train approached my stop, I noticed the unusual typography of the book being read by the young black guy sitting next to me. It looked very much like a book of aphorisms, and when I leaned over to check the title I was delighted to see that it was Cioran’s De l’inconvénient d’être né. Zoé, the friend in whose flat I would be staying, had told me that Cioran was not really taken seriously in France: his extreme pessimism and insistence on the wretchedness of life, humanity and everything else were considered a bit of a posture. ‘If that was really how he saw things, why didn’t he just kill himself?’ she asked in paraphrasis of the widespread French attitude.

  The guy with the Cioran book was reading it bareback, as I thought of it, meaning without a pen in his hand. My own copy of The Trouble With Being Born back in Dublin was very heavily underlined, perhaps the most heavily underlined of all my books. I had read it numerous times, on each occasion happening to use a different-coloured pen to highlight the passages I considered particularly remarkable. The problem was, the whole book seemed particularly remarkable: the prose (in Richard Howard’s wonderful translation) was so consistently striking, its mode of attack so viscerally elegant, that, after the third or fourth reading, almost the entirety of the book had been underlined. These rampant, multicoloured underlinings (which gave the impression of graffitied subway walls, like those we were now hurtling past) negated the very purpose of underlining in the first place. When a given text is uniformly excellent, it is futile to make out the strong passages because one will end up, as I had done, underlining the entire thing.

  I disembarked at Corentin Cariou, just inside the north-eastern rim of the Boulevard Périphérique, which marks off central Paris from its surrounding suburbs. Directly outside the station was the building where Zoé was renting a sixth-floor flat. I let myself in and, exhausted, went straight to bed. When I woke a couple of hours later, I read the note Zoé had left explaining how to get to the theatre on the far side of the city where she was directing one of her plays (she was already there, rehearsing what would be the final performance in the run). Dazed from my nap, I wandered the quiet streets near the canal to find a bistro where I could eat steak tartare. As I walked, I asked myself what the difference was between a bistro, a brasserie and indeed a restaurant. This part of the nineteenth arrondissement was home to a sizeable Jewish community, and soldiers had been deployed here after the killing of four people in a Jewish supermarket during the terror attacks. The soldiers I saw, with their machine guns and cocked pistols – when jihadists come, they come fast – looked to me like kids. They say that as you age, policemen seem to get younger all the time. The same was evidently true of soldiers; I wondered if it might be so with jihadists.

  After my steak tartare, still groggy from sleeping through the afternoon, I boarded the Métro. Embar-rassed at having missed my flight that morning, I was determined not to arrive late for Zoé’s play. To make sure of being on time, I peered intently at her note, reading over and over the name of the final Métro stop, checking it against the listed stations on the map above my head. When we reached the stop, I disembarked and followed the directions to the venue. Having done so, I found I was standing not outside a theatre but on a weed-strewn traffic island between two screamingly busy motorways. All I could see was edge-of-the-city wasteland, massive hotels and business parks. I called Zoé.

  Having gone over the directions she had written, she said ‘Are you sure you got out at the right station?’

  Of course I was sure! Had I not checked it a dozen times? Of course I was sure. I glanced down at the piece of paper. Zoé waited silently on the other end. Finally, in a quiet and sheepish voice, I told her I would be there in twenty minutes.

  When I finally made it, very late, to the theatre, I glanced at my ticket to see what the play was called: L’Homme est la seule erreur de la création – Man is Creation’s Only Mistake. In the darkened hall I took my seat amidst tuts of disapproval, feeling like a man capable only of making mistakes. I reached out and apologetically squeezed Zoé’s hand – we had the kind of friendship in which these gestures would not be misinterpreted – then settled down to watch the play. It was a decidedly avant-garde production, and my French was too weak to grasp much of the slang-heavy dialogue. I had no idea what was going on. A talking coffee table spoke into a handheld camera, its image projected on to a screen on the other side of the stage. The Hindu god Vishnu appeared, or maybe it was just a boy painted blue. Lovers had arguments while perched atop a bed that wheeled around the set like a raft on a choppy sea. Attractive actors took off their shirts, pulled down their trousers or lay on couches, howling and vomiting.

  Afterwards there was a party to celebrate the culmination of the run. Zoé’s parents, Marie-Claire and Hassan, had come down from Normandy to see the play. Stupefied with fatigue, the result of the insomnia that had been assailing me in recent weeks, I chatted with them in French that was not so much broken as completely shattered. To endure situations like this, I had formulated an emergency plan: whenever the appropriate French words eluded me, I would simply speak Italian instead. The similarities between the two languages were such that my interlocutor would generally have at least a vague idea of what I was talking about, or so I hoped. As I was now discovering, though, my Italian, once so fluent, was itself betraying signs of severe deterioration. It occurred to me that, by learning French, I was in fact burying my Italian – just as, by learning Italian, I had buried the Spanish I had spoken with equal fluency at an earlier time in my life. My French not yet being very good, I found myself in a situation whereby the new language – French – had succeeded in significantly erasing its precursor – Italian – without having properly installed itself in its place. Exiled from Italian, not yet at home in French, I was stranded in a linguistic no-man’s-land, like some partisan hiding out in the hills around the French–Italian border. I restricted myself to nodding and saying ‘Oui’ or, if it seemed more appropriate, ‘Non’.

  Zoé told me that the theatre’s director, a grey-bearded spirit-of-’68 type, was upstairs in his office, taking ‘lots of cocaine’ with some of the actors and production staff. Keeping up the non-conversation with Marie-Claire and Hassan, I found myself gazing longingly towards the stairs, tempted to excuse myself and pay a visit to the unfolding drug binge, but knowing it wouldn’t do if Zoé’s parents discovered me to be a coke snorter. When they finally left, I hurried upstairs, knocked on the door of the office, and was invited to take a place at the round wooden table, where everyone was talking animatedly about Michel Houellebecq. (‘One morning we’ll turn on our televisions and see him on his knees, getting beheaded in a basement somewhere.’) A tray full of neatly cut lines was being passed around. It was a wholly civilised affair, as if we were back in the days of Freud or in Victorian England, when cocaine was a fashionable and legal after-dinner pick-me-up among the chattering classes. The office was strewn with magazines, books and posters for plays and films. Mellow jazz issued from speakers buried under the clutter. Richard, the ageing theatre director, made sure I got a couple of lines into me, but quickly gave up on the limited conversation I was able to offer in favour of more stimulating dialogue.

  Zoé and I took a taxi sometime after four, watching the meter in grim fascination all the way home.

  The following afternoon, after some reviving coffee and croissants, we took the Métro to the Rue de l’Odéon, to see the apartment where the Romanian upstart Emil Cioran had transformed himself into the great French writer E. M. Cioran. On the way, I told Zoé about Cioran’s strange relationship with Simone Boué. Afraid to tell her rural-dwelling parents that she was living out of wedlock with a man, and a Romanian at that, Boué kept their relationship a secret for many years, claiming that she was living with a friend, and hiding Cioran whenever her family came to visit. Zoé’s own parents, I knew, had lived out almost exactly the same scenario: Marie-Claire could not bring herself to tell her father that she was living with an Algerian, one who ha
d, indeed, spent his first years in France in an internment camp. For a time the couple considered eloping, but Hassan decided he could not ask Marie-Claire to abandon her family for him. The dilemma was solved by way of an unexpected visit from Marie-Claire’s father. After his initial anger, the father eventually accepted that his daughter was in love, and gave them his blessing.

  At 21 Rue de l’Odéon, we stood on the footpath and gazed up at the row of garret-level windows, wondering which one was Cioran’s, and whether we could get up there to see inside. A year earlier, I had come here and done exactly the same thing with my then girlfriend. Was I destined to return annually to the flat of a deceased Romanian nihilist and reflect upon yet another failed relationship? There were a lot of them, failed relationships, like burned-out tanks on the battlefield of my life.

  In the summer, Zoé and I had visited Gdansk and Frankfurt together, to see the houses where Arthur Schopenhauer had lived in his childhood and his maturity respectively. There too we had been frustrated in our desire to enter the houses – in Gdansk it had been unclear if we were at the right house at all. Nonetheless, I’d found it exciting to see the same streets and buildings that the young Schopenhauer had possibly seen, and those that the older Schopenhauer certainly had.

  Zoé had been a good sport in Germany, accompanying me to these (for me) heightened, ultramundane places, and doing her best to console me when the novella I tried to write, narrated by the succession of poodles that were Schopenhauer’s only companions in his embittered later years, came to nothing. She was being a good sport here in Paris too. In truth, though, none of it meant a great deal to her. She was as passionate about literature as I was, but she never felt the urge to seek out the sites where the great writers whose books she loved had lived and worked, nor felt any great frisson whenever she happened upon them.

  ‘For me, it’s all in the work,’ she said, picking up an old conversational thread as we stood there in the street, looking up at Cioran’s former home. ‘The only way I get the same excitement is if I read about certain streets in a novel by Zola or Huysmans or whoever, and then I find myself in that same street. Then the world does feel a bit magical. But the effect emanates from the work, not from the life of the author. It’s only the literature that is magical. The authors are just the vessels. Even their lives are not that interesting to me. I mean, I never really read biographies.’

  She was silent for a moment as I took a couple of photos on my phone.

  ‘You’re more of a Catholic than you imagine,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean this: you coming out here to look at Cioran’s apartment, visiting Kafka’s house or whatever. It’s not so different from what you told me about your mother, how she queued up for three hours to look at the relics of St Anthony or whoever it was when they came to Dublin. You’ve just switched mythologies.’

  I took a couple more photographs, glancing up and down the street.

  ‘Taylor Swift culture,’ Zoé said vaguely, though I probably misheard her.

  The building where Cioran had lived also housed the offices of the publishing house Flammarion. I took a few photos of those too, feeling like a member of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell on a reconnaissance mission. The offices had been evacuated on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack out of a fear that, as the publisher of Michel Houellebecq, Flammarion might be a target. In what was presumably an astonishing coincidence, Houellebecq’s novel Soumission, which imagines a near-future France under Islamic rule, was published on that same day, while the author’s caricature adorned the front page of the then current issue of the magazine. Houellebecq himself left the city under armed escort that afternoon.

  We walked across the road and into the Luxembourg Gardens, where for many years Cioran took his daily walk. The sky was pleasingly grey and it was the kind of cold I loved: an invigorating cold on just the right side of severity. All my visits to Paris had taken place in wintertime: for me, Paris existed under permanently grey skies, and always should. The idea of the city in spring or summer did not appeal to me. One of the reasons I loved Paris was that I associated it with grey skies, just as I associated San Francisco with constant blue skies, which in turn I associated with depressed spirits. A couple of years earlier, while spending a few months in San Francisco – where I endured the shattering mushroom trip in Buena Vista Park – I had come to the realisation that I could never live for very long outside of Europe, because nowhere else was grey to the same degree or in the same comforting way.

  It was already late afternoon and soon it would be dark. We made our way out of the gardens and to the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Cioran was buried. Soon the cemetery would be closing for the evening. We took a map from the kiosk at the gates, which showed the locations of the cemetery’s famous inhabitants. Montparnasse was evidently a fashionable place to be buried for a certain type of French intellectual, even if they weren’t French. Susan Sontag was buried here; Samuel Beckett too. We stepped between the rows of headstones and found Cioran’s diminutive grave. It was tempting to read the stone’s modesty as a classic Cioranesque provocation, scornfully dismissive of even death itself. Simone Boué was buried alongside him: she had been found drowned on the beach at Dieppe, in Normandy, two years after Cioran’s death; it was unclear whether her death had been accidental or not. On the day we visited, someone had placed a Romanian tricolour over Cioran’s grave. The tricolour was held in place by what initially appeared to be two pieces of shit, one on either side. On closer inspection, the shit turned out to be broken-off segments from a rusted metal wreath. Even if they had been pieces of shit, it is debatable which insult would have been graver to the memory of Cioran – the shit or the flag. After all, here lay a man who had left Romania as soon as he came of age, settled in Paris after some years of roaming and there exerted a great deal of energy purging himself of the stigmata of his birthplace, including its language, which he rarely deigned to speak even when among Romanian expats. Cioran felt humiliated by the fact of being Romanian. In his early, notoriously fascistic book The Transfiguration of Romania (which was written in Romanian), and in letters to friends, the twenty-three-year-old Cioran called for three quarters of the nation’s population to be exterminated, and for all Romanians to be dragged into police cells and beaten to a pulp. Perhaps that, he fumed, would rouse his compatriots from their congenital mediocrity and goad them towards a higher destiny.

  I could understand it, this yearning of Cioran’s to cleanse himself of all traces of a despised motherland. Never, even as a child, had I felt proud of my country, or even that I really belonged to it. I had spent most of my adult life in flight from Ireland, yet I always went back, if only because it was there that, if the shit hit the fan, I was able to draw the dole, or stop in at my parents’ place for a bowl of soup, and where I still had a few friends I had not yet become estranged from. I had always imagined I would live in exile but now I knew I didn’t have the stomach for it. People of other nationalities romanticised Ireland but to me it was an uninteresting place, a backwater of banal, misshapen people. It had produced a certain number of interesting writers, but most of those writers had got out of the country.

  Beckett’s grave in Montparnasse was even more modest than Cioran’s – it was aggressively, even flamboyantly, modest. In fact, the grave was so faint it seemed to flicker on the verge of non-being. If the grave were a poem, it would have been one of those that are made up almost entirely of white space, a scattering of stray words on the surface, poised to vanish into its purity like melting snowflakes. I imagined Cioran and Beckett vying to outdo one another with the exaggerated modesty of their graves, competing in nothingness and scorn. They were like two suburban neighbours, this pair of graveyard nihilists – curtain-twitchers anxious not to be outshone by the glamorous misery of the other. I recalled an article I’d read concerning a peer of the Norwegian pessimist Peter Wessel Zapffe, who ‘argued, against Zapffe’s view that life is meaningless, that life
is not even meaningless’.

  I took a photo of the grave; my phone offered me the option of instantly tweeting it, which I declined, reflecting on the unsurpassable vulgarity of that, tweeting from someone’s grave. I began to laugh. I wondered whether Cioran would be on Twitter if he were around now. What were his later, aphoristic books but collections of tweets, proto-tweets, capsules of provocation hurled out at a despised universe, or at least at Cioran’s followers, by which I mean his readers? The aphorism, or rather the collection of aphorisms, was obsolete in the age of Twitter. The aphorism had migrated from the notebook to the laptop and the phone. I contemplated the notion of writing a book of aphorisms myself, and how retrograde that would be, but I liked the idea anyway. And in fact I had started such a book, or at least I had started writing aphorisms, which were simply tweets that, when they came to me, I did not tweet but instead wrote down in my notebook, just like in the old days, the days of Shestov and La Rochefoucauld. One reason why those writers found the aphorism such an amenable literary form, and why I too was drawn to it, is that it is distinctly suited to provocation. Its brevity encourages startling and outrageous insights. But why always seek to provoke, I wondered, standing over Cioran’s grave as Zoé hugged herself against the cold. Simple, I thought: because when you provoke you can experience the glee of being hated, which is a subset of the joy of being loved. But there was more to it than that. The venting of aggression was necessary to prevent one imploding with fury, a constant danger if one were inclined to view the world as ugly, dangerous and swarming with horrible morons. For a time, I had used Twitter as a kind of pressure valve by which I could release my pent-up fury on an unsuspecting public, all the bile and hatred I had accumulated over a lifetime, much as Cioran had done with his books. Back then, I had set myself a sort of Oulipian constraint whereby, on my nightly Twitter forays, I would be as aggressive, offensive and hateful as possible, baldly hostile to the fashionable ideologies of the day and the sanctimonious cunts who trumpeted them, but I would do it in a way that would not cause me to lose followers in droves. This tricky game, which I kept up for a month or two before succumbing to a profound self-loathing, involved sugaring the pill, coating my slander and vituperation with just enough charm or panache that people would stick around for more, perhaps in spite of themselves. The game – for that is what it was – afforded me a not inconsiderable pleasure. How awful could I be? How cruelly could I mock the trendy sentiments and masturbatory indignations that cascaded so risibly down my screen? Could I resist this ocean of bollocks without perishing in convulsions of hatred? This game of mine was totally pointless, from one perspective; but writing, it seemed to me, had always been that way, a dubious and malign thinking-in-public – a game played in deadly earnest, but a game nonetheless.