Memento Maurice

Although I spent relatively little time in the company of the French novelist Maurice Roche (1925-1997) – an aggregate of months over a period of a dozen years or so – our friendship was among the most decisive in my life. This memoir was written in part for a festschrift in his honor shortly before his death, then added to sometime after it as further bits and pieces of our past intersections resurfaced.

1.
Maurice Roche brings me breakfast in bed: orange juice, bread, coffee on a tray. It is the fall of 1984 and we are in his old apartment on rue Berthollet, the little guest room in the back. I’m spending a week at his home, on a trip to Paris from New York. By now, it’s been almost ten years that we’ve known each other, that we’ve been friends – literary collaborators as well, for I’m also the American translator of his novels. And indeed, we spend a fair portion of our time going over my English version of his book Compact, which is due to be published in a few months (actually, this won’t happen for another four years, and then by a different publisher – but that’s another drama).

This isn’t the first time I’ve stayed in this room, having slept here seven years before, one night when I’d just arrived in Paris from the US, and when a misunderstanding about keys suddenly left me without a roof. After several fruitless calls, I ended up telephoning Maurice Roche, whom I didn’t yet know very well but who took me in without hesitation. The room, then, has always had good associations for me. But on this particular morning, at his generous and unexpected gesture of coming in with breakfast, I feel as if we’ve passed into a new phase of our friendship; I feel as if I’ve become – I say this without fear of sounding ridiculous – almost like his son.

2.
His worry over the American publication of Compact: “Don’t forget, I’ve been fussy and anxious since the day I was born!”

3.
His transatlantic phone calls on New Year’s Day, the pleasure of hearing his voice mixed with concern for his phone bill – for Maurice on the telephone is rarely a five-minute affair.

Earlier, he would complain that his American friends “never wrote, never called.” I swore to myself then and there never to become one of those guilty Americans, for whom I suddenly found myself serving as a sheepish ambassador, not to say a scapegoat.

4.
Our first meeting, January 1975. I’m seventeen years old, on an academic year abroad in Paris. At the university in Nanterre where I’m taking courses, and where he has been invited by Professor B., Maurice Roche has just given a lecture on his novels, and notably his latest one, CodeX. I read the book several days earlier, understanding what I could, discovering that unprecedented form of writing that strikes me as at once fascinating and more than a little dangerous. As I skip from unknown cultural reference to impossible pun, from ideogrammatic (and idiosyncratic) diagram to multilingual layering – not to mention a palimpsest of musical notations, rebuses, chemical formulas, and portmanteau words worthy of Finnegans Wake – my first thought, as a good Anglophone, is that only a raving lunatic would try to translate such a hodgepodge. I’ve never translated anything myself, but of this I’m certain.

The class at Nanterre over, B. offers to drop me in town, since he has to take his friend Maurice back anyway. We head for Paris, I in the back seat, pretending to follow the others’ conversation while suffering stabs of terror (A living writer, here, in the same car as me! ). Before reaching the Paris city limits, we stop at a small bar on the periphery: Maurice with his whiskey, I and my tea, B. gone off to make a phone call. Sitting just opposite this oh-my-god-an-actual-novelist-in-the-flesh, scrambling for something moderately interesting to say to him (he who, truth to tell, seems perfectly content to commune in peace with his tumbler), I find nothing better than, “Golly, Mr. Roche, it would really be interesting to translate your novel into English!” The head snaps up, the eyes latch onto mine, shining: without knowing exactly what I was aiming for, I’ve hit the bullseye. “Great idea!” he shoots back. “Why don’t you do it?”

All the rest of the way I expect him to forget what must have been a mere courtesy on his part. But no: I find myself being invited to his and his wife’s apartment that same evening, for the little dinner party he’s giving for a few close friends. When we arrive, I discover that these friends include Roland Barthes, who is then at the height of his prominence and whom I’ve idolized for months, the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy, and others whose names I no longer recall, but who have all made their reputations in French literary circles. And here we are, gathered in the small living room, eating fried chicken from the plates in our laps and (the writer’s favorite pastime, it seems) trading literary gossip, which I listen to like a reporter from another planet. Maurice flits around the room in good form, a manic, endearing, slightly overwhelming host. To make my head spin even faster, it’s he who, drawing me aside from time to time, reminds me of my earlier offer, makes me vow to start the very next day ( “You promise, right? you’re going to translate CodeX” ). Later that night, as I’m taking my leave, we make a date to look over the first pages of this translation that, born in a moment of panic, has ended up gaining substance.

I remember the sensation of floating as I walk down the street afterward in the company of several of Maurice’s friends, and not merely from the wine. It’s late, and the only sound on the sidewalks is the noise of our footsteps and of our conversation echoing off the dark building facades. I’m wearing a hat, a black, wide-brimmed affair that I’d borrowed from a friend a few days earlier and that makes me look unbearably silly. No matter: in this hat, in these streets, in this conversation with people older and more accomplished than I think I could ever be, I feel important. I feel important answering their questions. I feel important declining the invitation to go have a nightcap, for fear of missing the last metro, which in fact I barely catch. (At the time, I was living in the southern suburbs, in a house that was an hour’s walk from the city limits if one missed the last public transport at 12:45 – as I discovered after one late-night miscalculation).

Until this evening, I’ve been dispiritedly pondering my upcoming university career and the choice of a “safe” occupation, perhaps law, despite the persistent temptation of the literary life. This stricture comes from who knows where – from me, no doubt – but is no less potent for all that. Tonight, however, leaving Maurice’s home, I know with sudden clarity that what I want to do, what I am determined to do, is write, and safety be damned. It’s true that one evening of sociable banter is hardly a career, and the euphoria of it fades after a few days. But at the same time, like tendrils, it also holds me for the rest of my life: the unfamiliar and exhilarating feeling that I could stand in the same room and hold my own with these people, who have seen their names and their words many times in print. That I am entitled to pursue a vocation of my choosing. This was, and remains, Maurice Roche’s gift to me.

Maurice and I see each other fairly often in my remaining six months in France. The translation of CodeX gets done, after a fashion. In reality, it’s an untranslatable book, and the version I produced is not very convincing. But that isn’t the point.

5.
The first time he invites me, alone, to dinner at his apartment, shortly after our meeting. Since I’m seventeen and (despite what Rimbaud said) very serious, and since I don’t yet know the marvelous informality of Maurice Roche and Violante Do Canto’s home, I show up in a grey suit, with matching shirt and tie, holding a half-dozen red roses that I present to a nonplused Violante. Maurice gets angry – “This isn’t the sixteenth arrondissement!” – and he’s right. From then on, when I go to see him, it’s in jeans, and without flowers.

6.
Maurice Roche, a fifty-year-old child, jumping as if possessed around the dinner table, sitting down, bounding up to snare a book, getting up again to change the channel, the wine, the record, the cassette, talking, gesticulating, while Violante yells at him to sit down and eat, already.

7.
His exotic background, evoked frequently in his writings and conversation: his heritage an unlikely mix of Auvergnat, Sephardic, Cheyenne, and Irish; the fact that he was born on November 2, the “Day of the Dead” in France, above a funeral parlor called The Immortal, which he claimed accounted for his fascination with mortality and the blackness of his humor. As one critic later wrote, “Every year, he blew out the candles on his birthday cake before going to the cemetery to lay wreaths on the graves of his ancestors. From this repeated ritual, the child developed an aversion to pastry and a taste for the macabre” (Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel, 1960-1982 [Paris, 1995], 263-64). An exotic professional background as well, which saw him pursue careers as a reporter, critic, sports commentator, and race-car driver before turning to writing – not to mention his training in medicine and, his primary love, in musicology. Maurice’s dream, in coming to Paris as a young man, was to be a composer, and when I knew him he still spoke reverently of his two great masters, Berg and Schoenberg, whose works were often on the turntable, and of his kindred spirit Monteverdi, inventor of the opera. He spoke less of the scores he had written for the theater, which had never met with much success, or of the many radio commentaries, record liner notes, concert reviews, and other pieces he had once churned out to make a living. Still, it is impossible to read his fiction, even for a harmonic illiterate like myself, without recognizing the musical structures underlying it, the abiding love and, somewhere in the background, bitter regret of a man finding himself, by force of circumstance, using words to convey what in his head must still have sounded like a symphony.

8.
“At the age of six, Maurice still didn’t know how to read or, of course, write. Frequently ill, he had still never been to school … But if the six-year-old Maurice did not know the alphabet, he was very good at deciphering music. With his father at the factory, his mother at the hospital most of the time, and him too sickly for daycare, they left him for the day in the care of a certain Madame André, an old piano teacher who no longer had many pupils. To keep him occupied, she taught him, as if it were a game, the rudiments of music and a little piano.

“The old woman’s little cat was dying. Maurice played it the Prelude in C-major from Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier. In time to the music, the little cat expired.”

9.
Getting off at the Port-Royal metro stop, on a line (Ligne de Sceaux, before it was transformed into a branch of the RER) that I took only to go to his house; boulevard du Port-Royal, passing by rue Saint-Jacques, the walls of the Val-de-Grâce, sometimes the weekly open-air market, up to the café on the corner of rue Berthollet; his building (number 27), the bus stop in front, the Chinese grocery store across the street where I sometimes went to fetch us some Cutty Sark (“Ah, that must be for Mr. Roche!” – the only one in the neighborhood, apparently, to fancy that particular brand), the Chinese restaurant on rue des Lyonnais where we sometimes had lunch; the entrance door, the elevator that I usually spurned for the stairway snaking around it, the mix of impatience and anxiety at his door (am I intruding? – even when I came by invitation, there was always that fear); past the threshold, the dark hallway with its bookshelves, to the left the living room overlooking the street, with its fireplace, the work table that turned into a dinner table at night, the TV, the hi-fi, leading to Maurice’s bedroom (more books, those he was particularly fond of; his Rabelais); to the right, the kitchen, the guest room, and then the second bedroom – sometimes empty, often with door closed – where Violante wrote the pages of a work about which I knew nothing, except that it was her memoirs. Located to the extreme right of the apartment, this other bedroom was like the alternate pole of the mysterious universe endlessly forming within that seemingly modest space.

The intoxication of breathing a few molecules of the only air that moved.

10.
At the time of our meeting, Maurice Roche has published four books: a monograph on Monteverdi (which to my shame I’ve never read) and three novels: Compact (published in 1966, but written some ten years earlier), the impenetrable Circus (1972), and CodeX (1974), my introduction to his work – these latter three, like many of their sequels, published in the prestigious, and now defunct, “Tel Quel” imprint of Editions du Seuil. After that, he goes on to publish some two dozen more, including Opéra bouffe (1975), which he was writing during our first collaboration, and in which he gives free rein to his penchant for confusing music and words; the haunting Maladie mélodie (1980) – music and illness, two great obsessions; the lavishly illustrated Camar(a)de (1981), its title blending the notions of “friend” and “death”; Je ne vais pas bien, mais il faut que j’y aille (1987), whose punning title translates roughly as “It’s not going well, but go I must” (though it works better in French), and which contains some wonderfully comic and melancholic scenes of a past love affair; Fidèles félidés (1993), his paean to the faithful felines he adored; two late and frankly less successful works, Qui n’a pas vu Dieu n’a rien vu (“If you haven’t seen God you haven’t seen anything,” 1990) and Grande Humoresque opus 27 (1997); his last, a touching and acerbic memoir of his early childhood called Un petit rien-du-tout tout neuf plié dans une feuille de persil (“A brand new little nothing-at-all wrapped in a parsley leaf”); numerous collaborations with artists, including two featuring his own peculiar renderings of death-figures; and many others besides. It’s an impressive list. But for me, he will always remain first and foremost the author of that initial trilogy in C (minor?), the books that back then seemed at once so inviting and strangely threatening, heady and terrifying, their edgy challenge not really masked by the sober, uniform brown-and-white covers of the “Tel Quel” series.

11.
In my freshman year in college, in the fall of 1975, I publish the translation of a short text by Maurice Roche (“Canvas”) in the Yale Literary Magazine. Shortly afterward, at a party, another student, his face puffy with self-satisfaction, holds forth on the “decline” of said magazine, stressing in particular the “unreadable” story by a certain Roche in the last issue. Fury at him and his smug philistinism, at the others who laugh with him; but also pride that it’s precisely that text, among all the others, that caught his attention, that produced a real effect.

12.
My pleasure on recognizing his handwriting, his return address on envelopes that reach me at campus. It is several months after our first contacts; I returned to the States in late summer to begin my college career, but I’m obsessed with Paris and dream of returning there as soon as possible. I receive each piece of mail from him – cards decorated with his “signature” shaped like a cat or a skull, with reproduced pages of Compact and CodeX; letters composed in a handwriting at once very French and all his own – like a signal from another world that I had, once, the extraordinary good fortune to know.

In all honesty, and seen from without, these missives contained nothing special: reports on his health (always poor), publishing suggestions, people to contact, notifications of books sent and acknowledgments of others received… But at the same time, as if between the lines, they bore witness to a current of affection and complicity, so that these little signs of intelligence, like so many transatlantic winks, removed me for a moment from the native exile I’d imposed on myself.

13.
March 1976. I dream that I am, with other students, on an airport runway to hear a lecture by Maurice Roche, which is to take place right there on the tarmac, amid the scurrying tractors and departing airplanes. And in fact, Maurice is standing before us, but instead of talking about literature he spends his time imitating the engine noises (brrrrmmmm, bbbrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmm), visibly enchanted with this game – as am I, who wake up laughing.

14.
Sophomore year, January 1977. The Italian Department, where I work part-time as secretary and general help, is hosting an international conference on the fashionable topic of literature and semiotics. Most of the European invitees are writers of moderate prominence, but circulating among them, Zeus and Hera among the demigods, are Philippe Sollers and his then-wife Julia Kristeva. By now I know them to be the founders and reigning deities of the Paris-based Tel Quel movement, but my first encounter with Sollers’s name occurred during Maurice’s lecture in Nanterre two years earlier, when I heard it mentioned repeatedly in questions from the audience. The unfamiliar spelling was tried out several times in the notes I was dutifully taking – “Sollerce (?),” “Solerz (?)” – until a helpful fellow student next to me reached over and corrected it. What puzzled me at the time more than the troublesome orthography was the evident annoyance in the lecturer’s voice each time he had to answer one of those questions, without my being able to determine what was being alluded to, why this topic was of such distaste to Maurice Roche or of such interest to his listeners. Over the months that followed, I learned more about Sollers and Tel Quel, noted that Maurice’s novels were published under the movement’s aegis, and pieced together hints of the two men’s somewhat turbulent friendship (although to this day, I still don’t fully understand what it was they had either for or against each other).

The evening after the Yale conference, which I’ve skipped most of my classes to attend, I am at my post in the Italian Department offices, serving as bartender at the reception. The room is crowded and noisy as the conferees and assorted academics pour in, and it is all that I and my fellow work-study can do to keep the champagne glasses filled before another wave of guests surges forward to wash them away. When Sollers bellies up to the bar, I nonetheless take a moment to say that we have a mutual friend in Maurice Roche, then am mortified to hear him call out across the room, “Hey, Julia, get this! Maurice Roche is claiming he’s our friend!”

Later that night, I find myself back in my dormitory, trying vainly to sober up after too many dregs of the champagne bottle, all too aware of the exam awaiting me the next morning. As a last resort, I go for a walk at three in the morning, hoping the cold night air will clear my head. The streets are dark and oppressive, the wind cutting. The newspaper headlines stacked in bundles report Gary Gilmore’s celebrated taunt to his executioners, “Let’s do this,” which so titillated Norman Mailer. I’m in the depressive counter-swing that follows the giddiness of alcohol and conversation, regretting the sleep I won’t get before the morning exam. But what weighs on me more than anything is Sollers’s vicarious snub against a man an ocean away who, I’m convinced, still believes in the intellectual kinship that has just been sold off so cheaply.

15.
The figure of the skull in Maurice Roche’s work, composed of various letters and scattered throughout his texts like mortuary graffiti. Usually typeset, occasionally handwritten, they generally superimpose their pictorial meaning over the words they form: crane (skull of course), cocos (slang for communists), alcool (alcohol), calva (bone). And others, appearing behind the carefully arranged typography of several lines of text, such as the “Catacombs” passage at the end of Compact, or else the spectacular full-page death’s head fashioned from bars of music, the word Peace in various languages, and, in counterpoint, a host of exclamation marks like dropping bombs. Reminders of mortality (his, ours) punctuate his writing at every turn, as if his entire life’s work – if the term can be applied – were one long memento mori.

One of his favorite and most reproduced skulls was the one derived from his own surname, the R distended into a cranium, o and c acting as a blind man’s dark glasses, h and e completing the structure, with, at bottom, something like an M adding a row of grinning teeth. (The ideogram for his first name was somewhat more peaceful, the M forming the head of a sleeping cat, auric the body, and the long, looping e a curled tail.) As he wrote in several of his books, “I saw [the French word can also mean live] death at every instant.”

16.
The blackness in his voice when I answered the phone (Allô, c’est Maurice . . .) to hear him complain in a gravedigger’s growl that he was feeling ill or depressed; at those moments, it seemed that nothing could help him. In contrast, the expansive brightness of tone when he called with good or exciting news (Ouiiiii, c’est Maurice! ); at those moments, nothing could contain him.

17.
In my New York apartment, April 1984, Maurice introduces my then-wife and me to a specialty of his region, fried eggs with vinegar, demonstrated without further ado: after cooking the eggs by the standard method and putting them on a plate, you add more butter to the pan with several spurts of red vinegar, which you let burn slightly until all the liquid has evaporated. It’s the melted butter impregnated with vinegar, salt, and pepper that you then pour onto the eggs, which are eaten, needless to say, with bread. It’s a dish that I’ve made many times since, without managing (despite some perfectly respectable results) to convert my friends.

Some time before this, it was an omelet with mousseron mushrooms that he made me in his kitchen in Paris, stressing how lucky we were to be able to eat real mousserons, picked in the woods around his native Clermont-Ferrand and supposedly found nowhere else. That dish, unfortunately, I have not been able to recreate.

18.
The day of his arrival in New York City, courtesy of the French cultural services. Having been treated like everyone else to the worst possible tales of the Big Apple, the hourly murders, the violence lying in wait for you at every street corner, he’s terrified when I suggest getting Uptown by subway, for him the Mecca of crime. None of my reasonings – faster than the bus, cheaper than a taxi – sway him, and it’s only my assurances as an experienced Manhattanite (“Come on, I’ve been taking the subway for years and never seen a lick of trouble”) that finally persuade him to head down the stairs with me. As if they had been placed there intentionally by a cultural attaché eager to ensure the official invitee’s full satisfaction, no sooner have the subway doors slid shut and we found seats than two gargantuas start arguing between themselves with shouts of MOTHERFUCKER and KICK YOUR ASS, exploding without transition into a tornado of fists and elbows just above our heads. Next to me, Maurice, his skull squeezed between his two hands, which are between his two knees, repeats like a mantra: “I just knew it!… I just knew it!…” Naturally, this is the first and last time that I witness such an incident in the New York subway.

19.
The reek of cat piss in the stairwell of 27 rue Berthollet. Like a beacon, it called to me from the street entrance, guiding me as I climbed the two dark flights of stairs, then diminishing – decrescendo perdendosi – if I went too far. Its musky intensity when the apartment door opened, forever associated with the spectacle of cats tussling from one end of the apartment to the other. The furry confusion of two feline shapes.

Years later, back in New York after staying at his house for several days, on opening my bags I receive that odor that has impregnated my clothes, subsequently dissipating into the foreign smells of the New World in a last farewell.

20.
One of the cats perched on the mantelpiece just behind my shoulder when I dined at his house. Neck stretched to the limit, head projected forward, paw timidly advanced, it stared insistently at my fork, while Maurice, furnishing the supposed voice and obvious thoughts of the creature, said, “And me? What about me?” Still today, I can’t see a cat without expecting it to speak not in meows, but in the feline falsetto of Maurice Roche.

21.
Scattered throughout his works, a number of phrases, some humorous, some profound, some merely clever, but all obsessively repeated like a favorite joke one can’t stop telling, or a cry for help that one is never sure will be heard. Off the top of my head, at random:

“Me, I’m dead, he would say, and that’s my livelihood.”

“I’ve known such hunger in my life that it’s made me lose my appetite.”

“Was it the pain leaving or me getting used to it?”

“They had given away my toys I had so few.”

“One feels more and more cramped as the world expands.”

“If he is visibly blind; if it’s clear as a bell that he’s deaf; if it reeks of the fact that he can’t smell; if his tactile sense touches fingers with numbness; and if, to top it off, he has lost a taste for his native tongue; then we can say things have turned pretty ugly.”

“He finds that he is lost.”

“And if I had only a few moments left to live (then I’d use them to get some sleep).”

“Dead from having shut his eyes on a dream.”

“Dead from having looked life squarely in the face.”

“My love, I always wrote the same thing (will you ever notice?).”

Not to mention the words that recur over and over, concepts, themes, bugaboos, punctuating the text in an insistent refrain: malady in all its facets, death, alcohol, whiskey (a separate category unto itself), memory, money (the lack thereof), music, skeleton, blindness, sleep, night. “You shall be made sleepless even as you are left sightless,” opens Compact, the most night-haunted of all his books. “(How will you tell day from night?)”

22.
A colloquium on Roche’s work at Columbia University, early one Saturday morning, 1985. Maurice, who was slated to participate, has had to cancel by telegram the night before, and now it’s I who sit at the podium in his place. Feeling of ridicule before this audience that has come to see him, especially when the moderator asks me questions in his name as if I were the real thing.

23.
I’ve never acquired a taste for Scotch. When it comes to choosing “the friend who wishes me ill” (as an old anti-drinking campaign put it), that’s rarely the one I prefer. Yet I’ve sometimes emptied an entire bottle with Maurice, and savored every drop.

24.
Our two-way interview, improvised, for a book that was never written. Very late into the night, fueled by whiskey, we pursue these biographical morsels as they occur, tirelessly: his beginnings as a writer, his early careers, his encounters, his friendships, his loves – a self-portrait that is irreplaceable and today, I fear, lost.

Among these memories, a football game with some American soldiers just after the war. Although these soldiers are (as he recalls them) “giants” from the heart of the Midwest – Maurice himself being of rather compact stature – he insists on joining in: the next thing he knows, he’s in the hospital, worried GI’s gathered around his bed.

Or again, a dinner for the sculptor Alexander Calder in the 1950s, a banquet attended by the highest of Paris high society. The conversation sparkles, attitudes gleam, when suddenly the guest of honor releases a magisterial fart that puts an abrupt end to all ambient sound. To the dumfounded person seated beside him, Calder (momentarily brought back to life by his ex-table mate Roche, in an American accent you could cut with a fork) lightheartedly explains: “It’s nothing, Madam, just the soul of a little bean flying off to heaven!”

25.
His self-depiction: “Work and life devoted to the consecration of the macabre, an unattractive physique (half-starved look). All this had earned him the nickname of skeleton-in-the-flesh.”

26.
The books I received from him: an excerpt from Opéra bouffe (still unpublished at the time) in the magazine Ça; two large-format volumes, Cage and As you like it; the book-cassette Testament, which for a long time I counted among my most prized possessions; a collaboration with the American novelist Raymond Federman, published in the United States; his contribution (about alcohol) to an anthology on friendship; the Dutch edition of Opéra bouffe (though I don’t read Dutch); manuscript pages of several future novels; endless copies of Compact in the mass-market edition. And then drawings: a deck of cards in color, a skeleton-clothes hanger sketched on the paper tablecloth of a New York restaurant one day when we lunched together, doodles of cats, skulls, himself, doodles…

One of the first books he gave me was not by him: shortly after our first meeting, when I was just beginning the translation of CodeX, he presented me with the new novel by his friend Harry Mathews (The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium). At the time I knew Mathews only as Maurice Roche’s “other American translator,” who had already published fragments of Compact and Circus, and whom I had imagined, for no good reason, as being as young as myself. The author’s photo on the back cover inspired a real feeling of jealousy, and of despair: Mathews was obviously an adult, a real writer, while I was merely an adolescent, a beginner, a – why not say it? – a fraud. How could I claim any competence whatsoever? Twenty years have passed. Now that, through the hazards of fortune, I’ve become a friend of Mathews as well, the jealousy has subsided. Not the despair.

27.
Sitting on the living room sofa, rue Berthollet, in the company of Maurice Roche and a friend of his whom I don’t know and whose face I don’t like. With unalloyed glee Maurice tells us a joke he recently heard: “My first part is a female sexual organ; my second part is a game piece; and both together make a famous general. It’s not La Motte-Piquet [literally, “mons-picket”]. It’s not Condé [“cunt-dice”]. It’s vagin-jeton [Washington – or, in his pronunciation, “vagina-token”]!” And he tells it again, laughing all the harder.

28.
News picked up from time to time of Maurice, who has left Paris and moved to the south of France, to l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where I’ve never been, and where his house – talk about going back to one’s roots – is apparently opposite the town cemetery. An acquaintance of his, whom I find myself talking to at a publishing reception in Boston (for which I in turn have left New York), comes out with a fragment of his life over there, a life that has become utterly foreign to me. “The sadness at the end of a sojourn,” he once wrote. The sadness of sojourns that have, somewhere along the line, taken divergent paths.

29.
The disappointment in his voice when I have to cancel a planned visit to l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in 1989, while on a short visit to Paris: express train full up because of school vacation week, appointments leaving me no time for the day-long regular train (and given my finances, no question of flying down). Though he denies it, I sense that I’ve offended him, that I’ve caused irreparable damage to our friendship, which nonetheless dates back fifteen years at this point. And in fact, our relations from then on seem to cool. Our letters, the telephone calls, become less frequent, sometimes even imaginary, before ceasing altogether.

30.
His bitterness: at life’s inequities, at the inconstancy of others, at the privilege of others (he never forgot that his father was a factory worker for Michelin), at illness (real or imagined), at the indifference of caretakers (doctors, lovers, government), at his incurably marginal status in the world of letters, at death, especially at death: “Even as a child, I was shocked to learn that I was put here only to disappear, without understanding what that meant – the very fact of knowing that, poof!, I would one day vanish into eternal night scandalized me. It didn’t terrify me in the slightest; it just struck me as absurd – and pointless.”

31.
Maurice tells me funny stories about B., a mutual friend with a rare talent for getting into situations that are at once comic and grotesque. Is it his obvious pleasure in relating these misadventures that makes them so delicious? In any case, I notice that whenever I try to tell them, they never have the same effect (and yet those stories really were funny!).

32.
Standing in the living room of his Paris apartment, imaginary bat at the ready, I try vainly, though at his bidding, to teach Maurice the rules of baseball. I’m not the first to make the attempt, and I know that my predecessors (including, apparently, Georges Perec) have met with equally poor results. Is it because the player’s path is, so to speak, circular (one tries to return to “home plate”) rather than linear, as in most European sports? Or perhaps the problem stems from the fact that one must not “possess” the ball, but avoid it – the principle of baseball being that of guerrilla warfare rather than territorial conquest: you have to venture out of safe haven to get back as quickly as possible with the prize (a point), and if the ball touches you, you’re dead. Whatever the case, I must in turn admit failure: an unfathomable breach blocks this particular scrap of knowledge from being transmitted.

Years later, a publishing colleague in New York sighs, apropos of nothing: “What are we going to do with those Europeans if they can’t even understand baseball?”

33.
If I had to pick an actor to portray him, at least in his later years, I’d cast Serge Merlin, who plays the elderly painter Raymond Dufayel (the “glass man”) in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Maurice himself would probably be horrified by the choice, no doubt preferring someone younger, sexier – the hints of coquetry in his author photos didn’t escape me. But in face, build, mannerisms, and even the timbre of the voice, the moment the “glass man” appeared on screen, my first thought was “Maurice Roche.”

34.
B., Maurice, another critic, and I huddle around a tape recorder, teasing out a four-way conversation intended for a magazine issue on the theme of “literary decadence.” Though we spend several hours at it, our efforts to gather usable material are constantly undercut by Maurice’s grumbling interruptions: he can’t understand why they approached him for this issue – he’s more modern than the moderns! If it’s decadence they want, why don’t they ask that awful So-and-So, etc.

35.
The shirts Maurice Roche wore (often striped, man-tailored), the bifocals flipped up on his scalp, the receding hairline, the penetrating, nearsighted stare, especially when reading (glasses off, which always surprised me), the short white raincoat, the cigarettes (menthol) that he had to give up for a while, the whiskey that his medication forbade him at one point.

36.
The way these memories slowly crumble, resist.

37.
The last time I saw him, in Paris, early spring 1987, on a cold, rainy Sunday evening. I have but a short time to spend at rue Berthollet, being in town for only a few days, on a business trip, and having stayed too long at an earlier meeting; arriving at his apartment, I’m already in danger of showing up very late for an important dinner. Maurice is with a young friend who addresses him as “Mr. Roche.” The conversation lags, everyone seems very tired; we have been, the friend and I, each ready to leave for a while, yet no one moves. When I finally exit his building, I’m in a state of dissatisfaction and anxiety.

Some time after that, he moves out of Paris. A planned visit to his new home in the south falls through, then we make a date to see each other one afternoon in 1989 or 90, taking advantage of the fact that a book signing for him and a short trip for me have landed us in the capital at the same time. I arrive at his publisher’s before the signing is due to end, but am told that he has just left. Though I search all around the place Saint-Sulpice, in all the neighborhood cafés, I don’t manage to find him.

Postscript:
July 1997. A mutual friend calls to ask if I’ve heard (I haven’t) that Maurice Roche recently passed away. He mentions it casually, almost as if in jest: “He complained he was dying for so long that he finally got his wish” – something to that effect. From the newspaper clippings he sends, I learn that Maurice succumbed to a pulmonary infection on July 19, a few months shy of his seventy-second birthday. Le Monde sums him up as having had “a mocking and nervous mind … the hoarse, cracking voice of a man who had smoked heavily and hadn’t made do with water or milk to quench his thirst. As for his laugh, it was dark and anxious, his humor rather lugubrious and jarring, albeit sometimes jovial.”

I had more or less lost touch with Maurice in the late 1980s, when I moved from New York to Boston. Our last sustained contact was a flurry of letters about the English translation of Compact, which finally saw the light of day to his great pleasure and relief (though, typically, he had complaints about the cover design). Since then, an occasional note back and forth, books and special issues of magazines received from time to time, rarely. And then, in 1996, several phone calls out of the blue, dispersing the intervening years like dust. We catch up. We reconnect. I rediscover his wonderful capacity for affection and concern, his sense of humor off the page. We make plans to see each other the next time I’m in France, when I’ll finally make the trip down to L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Next chance I get. Promise.

But next chances rarely come.

Mark Polizzotti

(First published in Biography and Source Studies, vol. 8, ed. Frederick R. Karl)

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