Books in the city

I love ports, I collect them like poets collect rivers or some women collect shoes, but they have to be working ports, none of those docks redeveloped into shopping malls for me. I want cargo ships, dirty water slapping on wood pylons, the smell of tar. Papeete, where I was lucky enough to have a stopover this week on my way back from a California Christmas, has always been one of my favourites. I love its gorgeous inhabitants, its slightly shabby air, the sidestreets with the dimly lit haberdashery shops run by incredibly old Chinese couples and bars exuding French pop ballads, the rusting iron work of the waterfront balconies, the market with its tables of pies and rows of pig heads in plastic sacks, bedecked with tinsel now for the holidays.

Whenever I go to another country, I always buy a local paper to read over my first coffee. This can drive people who are with me crazy, for instance if the newspaper is in Greek and they have to listen to my enthusiastic etymological detective work. On this trip, I stopped in Papeete both coming and going, so on my return leg, having already read up on the fisherman who got bitten in the face by a shark and the Tahitian boy who won the French National Under 10 Chess Championship, I went out hunting larger prey. And reader, I found it. La Maison de la Presse, with its natty storefront advertising Tabac-Cigars, Curios-Photos and so on down to the intriguing Press-Wines.

Inside, behind the calendars and souvenir cigarette lighters, were two stands of very dusty books. Incredibly, it was a Papeete version of the Take 5 promotion we have going at the library over the holidays, where you check out a bundle of 5 books and see what surprises you get. In La Maison de la Presse the books were all tied together in pairs with string. In Take 5, we like to tempt readers with a theme, like “Great love stories”. I couldn’t tell what strategy lay behind these bundles. I noted Gide’s “Les Caves du Vaticane” tied to “Post Mortem” by Patricia Cornwell, “Treasure Island” tied to a Victoria Holt novel; and “Voyage au bout de la nuit”, Celine’s dark masterpiece, tied up with “Rendezvous a New York” by someone named Veronica Bald (if I read my scrawl correctly), a “danseuse francaise”  who according to the back cover, had made the bad choice to take risks "that had nothing to do with the professional". Celine loved a couple of dancers; in fact, "Voyage to the end of the night"  is dedicated to one. Was this intelligent design?

I asked the French shopkeeper sweeping the footpath outside if I could take a picture of the books. “What books?” he said. It was like the “What hunch?” moment in Young Frankenstein.Those interesting books over there, I said, pointing. “Oh no no no” he said, clicking his tongue.  “Go to Vaima (the big shopping centre in Papeete, where I have never set foot) if you want to take pictures of books”. I thought, what am I not getting?

A few things, I guess, here and there. “Did you go to a porn shop in Papeete?” asked my husband looking at my just downloaded photos that evening. I went to look over his shoulder. It was a photo I’d taken of the back room of another dusty little tabac-curios shop further up the street, where two blond female mannequins trapped in plastic boxes were stacked one on top of the other. I snapped it because it looked so surreal, a parable for token wives or sports girlfriends. In the foreground, unnoticed by me at the time, loomed a cardboard box bearing the words “Exciting love cushion” complete with bright red illustration. And all I had been looking for was a pack of tissues to deal with the congestion the vicious airplane air conditioning had brought on. The best part is that I had thought, isn't it lucky I remembered the word "mouchoirs" so I don't have to mime it. Who knows what I might have been offered. Anyway the mouchoirs were great, folded origami-like in tiny cubic packs. "I love travelling" I thought, and I bought two.


 

Hamish Keith will be at Central Library tomorrow evening to present his memoir Native Wit.  I really enjoyed reading this book. As you would expect, it’s got great style that carries you right along; and as you would also expect, it’s full of wonderful stories. The one I’m about to share comes from when he was in art school in Christchurch. It follows a paean to the old Penguin paperbacks which touches on the literary crush, and involves instead the artistic crush:

“My first artistic passion was for Amedeo Modigliani. Not a great leap forward from the leggy nymphs of Petty and Vargas, but at least his nudes had pubic hair. I suspect that I was as much attracted by the little I could glean about his life as I was by his painting. He seemed to have much more fun than Gulley Jimson and was entirely more sexy. Had my sleep-out had the Mecca Dairy mirror, I might well have tried out a few Modigliani routines and adopted his arms-akimbo stance as my own. I rather fancied I did look just a little bit like him. (If I had had his corduroy suit I could have really pissed my father off.) I adopted the one aphorism of Modigliani I had read as my own:  une vie brève mais intense (a short but intense life). What a wanker!”

Just before the Library’s bargain book sale last month I was trying to find some books that I could donate to the sale to make room on our shelves for the books piled all over our window seat, where by now only the cat can fit, and only if curled up. I spotted an old, hardcover biography of Modigliani which I hadn’t looked at for years, and I thought I might have found one – already a great success rate for me. But as soon as I opened it I knew it would never go. All I had to do was reread the death scene, the two death scenes, actually, because his lover and model Jeanne Hebuterne threw herself out of a window the next morning at dawn, nine months pregnant.

Jeanne Modigliani, their first child, is the author of the book, which from a look at the dates might have been published just after Hamish Keith had had to make do with gleaning the odd aphorism. He would have known so much more, like the fact that if for him “une vie brève mais intense” was a laudable stand against monotony, for Modigliani dying young had always been the only possible outcome; he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was only sixteen. This is not to say that his lifestyle (a friend drops in near the end to find him and Jeanne in bed, surrounded by empty wine bottles and open sardine tins) helped, but maybe this is where the intensity comes in. Jeanne the daughter recalls how her grandparents always mentioned Modigliani's drug use, rather than his drinking, she thinks because they rather admired Baudelaire.

So last night upon reading the passage in Native wit I got the book back down and there as a frontispiece is the photo in the corduroy suit! What a suit it is. It brings to mind the dress Scarlett O’Hara makes out of her green velvet curtains.  Three piece, thick, the ribs gleaming, worn over a light coloured neck tie and a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar. The chair leg rests on a piece of rubbish, the hand dangles a cigarette. The gaze is lovely dark and deep.

I’m hoping tomorrow evening to get a chance to show the book to Hamish: yes, the library has a copy, just as old and yellowed as mine, down in our marvellous basement stack.  It’s called “Modigliani: man and myth”.

Hamish Keith on “Hamish Keith: man and myth” is tomorrow evening at Central Library.  Come at 5:30 PM for a glass of wine thanks to Glengarry Wines; the talk starts at 6:00. For more information, see our What’s on pages.