Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep Read online

  They obtained respectable results. They built on their success. They picked up, from here and from there, snippets of sociology, psychology, statistics; they acquired the vocabulary and the signs, the mannerisms that make the right impression: for Sylvie, a particular way of putting on and taking off her glasses, a particular way of taking notes, of thumbing through a report, a particular way of speaking, of inserting in her conversations with employers and in a barely interrogative tone of voice turns of phrase like "indeed . . " "I guess maybe . . " "up to a point . . " "what I'm wondering is . . .", a particular way of quoting at appropriate points the names of C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, or - even better — Lazarsfeld, Cantril or Herbert Hyman, of whose works they had read not three pages.

  They proved very adept at acquiring these indispensable basic items of professional equipment, and, scarcely one year after their first involvement in motivation research, they were entrusted with the highly responsible task of a "content analysis": it was one rung only below the role of project supervisor, which was always performed by an office-based executive, the highest, thus the best-paid and consequently the most prestigious position in the whole hierarchy. Over the following years they almost never slipped from these heights.

  And so for four years and maybe more they explored and interviewed and analysed. Why are pure-suction vacuum cleaners selling so poorly? What do people of modest Origin think of chicory? Do you like ready-made mashed potato, and if so, why? Because it's light? Because it's creamy? Because it's easy to make - just open it up and there you are? Do people really reckon baby carriages are expensive? Aren't you always prepared to fork out a bit extra for the good of the kids? Which way will French women vote? Do people like cheese in squeezy tubes? Are you for or against public transport? What do you notice first when you eat yoghurt? - the colour? the texture? the taste? natural odour? Do you read a lot, a little, not at all? Do you eat out? Would you, Madam, like to rent your room to a Black? What do people think, honestly, of old age pensions? What does the younger generation think? What do executives think? What does the woman of thirty think? What do you think of holidays? Where do you spend your holidays? Do you like frozen food? How much do you think a lighter like this one costs, eh? What do you look for in a mattress? Describe a man who likes pasta. What do you think of your washing machine? Are you satisfied with it? Doesn't it make too many suds? Does it wash properly? Does it tear the clothes? Does it dry? Would you rather have a washing machine that dries as well? And safety in coal mines, is it alright or not good enough, in your view, sir? (Make the target speak; ask him to give personal examples: things he has seen; has he been injured himself? How did it happen? And your son, sir, will he be a miner like his father? So what will he be, then?)

  There was washing, drying, ironing. Gas, electricity and the telephone. Children. Clothes and underclothes. Mustard. Packet soups, tinned soups. Hair: how to wash it, how to dry it, how to make it hold a wave, how to make it shine. Students, fingernails, cough syrup, typewriters, fertilisers, tractors, leisure pursuits, presents, stationery, linen, politics, motorways, alcoholic drinks, mineral water, cheeses, jams, lamps and curtains, insurance and gardening. Nil humani alienum . . . Nothing that was human was outside their scope.

  For the first time they earned some money. They did not like their work; could they have liked it? But they did not dislike it a great deal either. They felt they were learning a lot from it. Year after year it changed them completely.

  These were their great days of conquest. They had nothing; they were discovering the riches of the world.

  For years they had been absolutely anonymous. They dressed like students, that is to say badly. Sylvie had a single skirt, ugly jumpers, a pair of cord trousers, a duffle-coat; Jérôme had a mucky parka, an off-the-peg suit, one pitiful necktie. They leapt ecstatically into fashionable English clothes. They discovered knitwear, silk blouses, shirts by Doucet, cotton voile ties, silk scarves, tweed, lambs wool, cashmere, vicuna, leather and jersey wool, flax and, finally, the great staircase of footwear leading from Churches to Westons, from Westons to Buntings and from Buntings to Lobbs.

  Their dream was a trip to London. They would have split their time between the National Gallery, Savile Row and a particular pub in Church Street which had stuck with feeling in Jérôme's memory. But they were not yet rich enough to kit themselves out from top to toe in London. In Paris, the first money gaily earned by the sweat of their brows, Sylvie spent on shopping: a knitted silk bodice from Cornuel, an imported lambswool twinset, a straight, formal skirt, extremely soft plaited leather shoes, and a big silk headscarf with a peacock-and-foliage pattern. Jérôme, for his part, though he was still fond of shuffling around from time to time in clogs, unshaven, wearing an old collarless shirt and denim trousers, went in for total contrasts and discovered the joys of lazy mornings: taking a bath, shaving very close, sprinkling eau-de-toilette, slipping on over still damp skin a shirt of unimpeachable whiteness, tying a woollen or silken necktie. He bought three of these, at Old England, together with a tweed jacket, some marked-down shirts and a pair of shoes he thought he would not be embarrassed to wear.

  Then - and this was one of the important days of their lives - they came across the Flea Market. Splendid, long-collared, button-down Arrow and Van Heusen shirts, at that time unfindable in Paris shops but which American comedy films were making increasingly popular (at least for that marginal set of people who delight in American comedies) were to be found there in untidy heaps, alongside allegedly indestructible trench coats, skirts, blouses, silk dresses, hide jackets and soft leather moccasins. They went every fortnight, on Saturday mornings, for a year or more, to rummage through tea-chests, display stalls, stacks, boxes, upturned umbrellas, amongst crowds of teenagers with long sideburns, Algerian watch-pedlars and American tourists who emerged from the glass eyes, shiny top hats and hobby-horses of the Vernaison market and wandered in a state of mild bewilderment around the Malik market, pondering on the strange fate of things, laid out alongside used nails, second-hand mattresses, machines of which only the casing remained, and spare parts, things which were but the slightly imperfect surplus stock of America's most celebrated shirtmakers. And they would bring back all kinds of clothes wrapped in newspaper, trinkets, umbrellas, old pots, satchels, records.

  They were changing, becoming other people. It wasn't so much because of their (nonetheless genuine) need to differentiate themselves from the people it was their job to interview, to impress without overwhelming them. Nor was it because they met a lot of people, because they were taking their leave, for ever, or so they thought, from what had been their milieu. But money — and this point cannot but be an obvious one - creates new needs. They would have been surprised to realise, if they had thought about it for a moment - but in those years they didn't think — to what extent their views of their own bodies had altered, and, beyond that, their vision of everything that affected them, of everything that mattered, of everything that was in the process of becoming their world.

  Everything was new. Their sensibilities, their tastes and their position propelled them towards things they had never known. They paid attention to the way others dressed; they noticed the furniture, the knick-knacks and the ties displayed in shop windows; they mused on estate agents' advertisements. They felt as if they understood things they had never bothered about before: it had come to matter to them whether a neighbourhood or a street was sad or jolly, quiet or noisy, deserted or lively. Nothing, ever, had equipped them for such new concerns. They discovered them enthusiastically, with a kind of freshness, and were bemused by having spent so long in ignorance. They felt no surprise, or almost none, at the fact that they thought about almost nothing else.

  The paths they were following, the values they were gradually adopting, their outlook, their desires and their ambitions, it must be said, did indeed sometimes all feel desperately empty. They knew nothing that was not precarious or puzzling. Yet this was their life, it was the source of uns
uspected experiences elating beyond intoxication, it was something hugely, intensely open. Sometimes they thought that the lives they would lead would be as magical, as flexible, as whimsical as American comedy films or title sequences by Saul Bass; and miraculous, luminous visions of pristine snow-covered fields crossed by lines of ski-tracks, of blue seas, sun, verdant hills, of logs crackling in stone hearths, of spectacular motorways, of pullmans and palatial hotels caressed them, as if they were promises.

  They gave up their room and student canteens. Just next to the Jardin des Plantes, opposite the Paris Mosque, at 7, Rue de Quatrefages, they found a little two-roomed flat to rent, giving on to a pretty courtyard garden. They wanted carpets, tables, armchairs, sofas.

  Those were the years when they wandered endlessly around Paris. They would stop at every antique dealer's. They would go in to department stores and stay for hours on end, marvelling and already scared but not daring to admit it to themselves, not daring to face squarely that particular type of despicable voracity which was to become their fate, their raison d'être, their watchword, for they were still marvelling at and almost drowning under the scale of their own needs, of the riches laid out before them, of the abundance on offer.

  They discovered the smart little restaurants near Gobelins, Ternes, Saint-Sulpice, the empty bars where, on weekend trips away from Paris you can enjoy whispering, long walks in the woods, in autumn, at Rambouillet, Vaux and Compiègne, the almost perfect pleasure proffered in every place to the ear, to the eye and to the palate.

  And so, step by step, as they took their place in the real world in a rather deeper way than in the past when, as the children of middle-class families of no substance and then as undifferentiated students without individual form, they had had but a superficial and skimpy view of the world, that is how they began to grasp what it meant to be a person of standing.

  This concluding revelation, which, strictly speaking, was not a revelation at all but the culmination of the long-drawn-out process of their social and psychological maturing, and of which they would not have been able to describe the steps without a great deal of difficulty, put the final touch on their metamorphosis.

  IV

  Life, for them, and their circle of friends, was often a whirlwind.

  There was a whole crowd of them, they made a fine bunch. They knew each other well; taking a lot from each other, they had common habits, common tastes and shared memories. They had their own vocabulary, their own marks, their special ideas. Too sophisticated to be perfectly similar to each other, but probably not sophisticated enough to avoid imitating each other more or less consciously, they spent a large part of their lives swapping things. They felt irritated by that often enough; but even more often they found it amusing.

  Almost all of them belonged to advertising circles. Some, however, were still pursuing, or trying to pursue, some kind of degree course or other. Most often they had met in the flashy or pseudo-functional setting of an agency boss's office. They would listen side by side, aggressively pencilling on their blotters their petty suggestions and their grisly jokes; their shared contempt for those fat cats, those profiteers, for those eye-wash merchants, was sometimes their first meeting ground. But most often they felt at first as if they had been sentenced to spending five or six days together in dreary small-town hotels. At each meal taken they would invite friendship to share their table. But lunches were hasty and business-like, dinners dreadfully slow, unless something ignited that miraculous spark which would brighten their mournful, travelling salesmen's faces, make this evening in the provinces a memorable occasion, and turn a very ordinary pâté put on the bill as an extra by some crooked hotelier into a succulent treat. Only then could they forget their tape-recorders, abandon the over-guarded tones of senior psychologists. They would linger at the dinner table. They would talk about themselves and about things in general, about nothing in particular, about their tastes and their ambitions. They would scour the town to find the one really comfortable bar it simply had to have, and, until a very late hour, in front of whiskies, brandies, gins and tonic, they would conjure up, with an almost ritualised carefree abandon, the stories of their love-affairs, their desires, their travels, the things they wouldn't do, the things they adored passionately, without being surprised about - on the contrary, being almost delighted by — the likeness of their different histories, the sameness of their points of view.

  Sometimes these nascent sympathies gave birth only to distant acquaintance, telephone calls at lengthening intervals. Sometimes, too, though rather less often in fact, whether by chance or by mutual desire, they set in train, slowly or less slowly, a potential friendship which would develop in stages. In that way, over the years, they had slowly knit together.

  They were, all of them, easily identifiable. They had money, not too much, but enough to fall only intermittently — because of some crazy purchase, perhaps superfluous, perhaps necessary, they really wouldn't have been able to say which - into genuine debt. Their flats, flatlets, lofts, two-roomed conversions in dilapidated houses, in selected neighbourhoods — Palais-Royal, Contrescarpe, Saint-Germain, Luxembourg, Montparnasse-were very similar: the same dirt-encrusted sofas, the same allegedly rustic tables, the same heaps of books and records, old glassware and old jars used, indiscriminately, for flowers, pencils, small change, cigarettes, sweets and paper-clips. They dressed roughly in the same fashion, that is to say with that middling tastefulness which, for men as for women, is what is so right about Madame Express and, by repercussion, about her husband also. What is more, they owed a great deal to that ideal couple in the women's pages of their favourite weekly magazine.

  L'Express was without doubt the one weekly magazine to which they paid heed. They didn't actually like it very much, but they bought it or, at the least, borrowed it from each other, read it regularly and often, they confessed, even kept back-numbers. As a matter of fact, they disagreed very frequently with the political line taken by L'Express (on one occasion, they had penned in righteous indignation a slim pamphlet against "The Style of the Lieutenant-Editor") and for news analysis they preferred Le Monde by far, which they subscribed to faithfully to a man, or even the positions adopted by Libération, which they tended to consider a decent sort of newspaper. But L'Express, and that magazine alone, matched their art of living; each week, they would find in its pages — and it did not matter whether they could view them justifiably as misrepresented or distorted - the really current issues in their daily lives. Not infrequently they took offence. For in all honesty the style, heavily marked by false modesty, the implied meanings, the veiled contempt, the ill-digested envy, the shallow crazes, the kicks in the shins, the knowing winks, together with the great advertising parade which made up L'Express in its entirety - its end and not its means, its most necessary aspect — as well as those little details which mean everything, those bargain items which were supposed to be really fun, those businessmen who understood the real issues, those specialists who knew what they were talking about and made sure you knew it too, those bold thinkers, pipe-suckers all, who were dragging the world into the twentieth century; in short, that panel of responsible directors who foregathered each week around a table or in a forum and whose po-faced smiles made you think they were still clasping in their right hands the golden key to the managers' toilets - all that could not fail to make them think (as they repeated the not very good pun with which their pamphlet had begun) that though it was not obvious that L'Express was a left-wing paper, it was as clear as daylight that it was a sinister one. That wasn't right either, as they well knew, but it reassured them.

  They didn't hide from the fact that they were made for L'Express. No doubt they needed their freedom, their intelligence, their high spirits and their youth to be, at all times and in all places, properly represented. They allowed L'Express to take them under its wing, because it was the simplest thing to do, because their contempt for it kept their consciences clear. And the harshness of their judgment was equ
alled only by the extent of their submission to it: they thumbed through the magazine muttering curses, they would crumple it up and throw it away. They would go on for hours, sometimes, in high dudgeon at its outrageousness. But they read it, indisputably, and they took it all in.

  Where could they have found a truer image of their tastes and yearnings? Were they not young? Were they not wealthy, up to a point? L'Express held out to them all the signs of comfortable living: thick bathrobes, brilliant unravellings of murky truths, fashionable beaches, exotic cookery, useful tips, intelligent news analysis, the secrets of the gods, places out in the sticks where you could pick up property for almost nothing, the names of the different carillon bells, new ideas, smart outfits, frozen food, elegant accessories, the scandals of polite society, up-to-the-minute advice.

  They would dream, half aloud, of chesterfield settees.

  L'Express would dream with them. They would spend a large part of their holidays doing the country-house auctions; there, at bargain prices, they acquired pewter, straw-bottomed chairs, glasses that asked to be drunk from, horn-handled knives, shiny bowls which they made into precious ashtrays. All these things, they knew, had been, or would be mentioned in the L'Express.

  Their actual purchasing practice, however, was quite significantly different from the shopping habits put forward by L'Express. They were not yet quite "settled down" and, although their "executive" status was broadly acknowledged, they did not enjoy the job security or the bonus payments or the salary enhancements of permanent staff under contract. L'Express suggested, in that case, by way of pleasant but inexpensive boutiques (the boss is a pal, he'll give you a drink and an open sandwich whilst you're making up your mind), little businesses where fashion had required, in order to create an appropriate impression, a thoroughgoing improvement of all previous fixtures and fittings: whitewashed walls were indispensable, dark brown carpeting a necessity, which could be replaced only by a mosaic of antiquated floor tiles of different kinds; exposed beams were obligatory, and little internal staircases, real fireplaces with a fire burning, rustic or (even better) Provençal furniture were highly recommended. These conversions which were spreading across Paris and affecting, indiscriminately, bookshops, art galleries, haberdashers', novelty and furniture stores, and even grocers' shops (it was not uncommon to see some formerly down-at-heel corner-shop grocer turn into a Cheese Consultant complete with a blue apron giving him a very expert air, and his shop acquire roof-beams and straw decking . . . ), such conversions, therefore, brought more or less legitimately in their wake a rise in prices such that the purchase of a raw-wool, hand-printed dress, of a cashmere twinset woven by a blind Orkney crofter (exclusive genuine vegetable-dyed hand-spun hand-woven) or of a sumptuous jersey wool and leather jacket ( for weekend wear, for hunting, for driving) proved permanently impossible. They would eye the wares of antique-dealers closely, but to furnish their flat they actually relied on country sales or the less-publicised auctions at Drouot (and even there they went less often than they would have liked); similarly, all of them only enlarged their stock of clothes by assiduous excursions to the Flea Market or, twice a year, to jumble sales organised by English ladies in aid of the Saint George's English Church's charitable works, where there were plenty of diplomats' cast-offs, in perfectly acceptable condition of course. Often they felt awkward about it: they would have to push their way through a milling crowd and rummage through piles of ghastly stuff - the taste of the English is not all it's cracked up to be - before unearthing a splendid tie, no doubt too frivolous for an Embassy under-secretary, or a shirt that had once been exquisite, or a skirt that would just need taking up. But, of course, it was that or nothing: the incommensurability, perceptible in every domain, between the quality of their taste in clothing (nothing was too fine for them) and the amount of money they normally had available was an obvious, if ultimately secondary, sign of their material situation. They were not the only ones; rather than shop at the sales, which happened everywhere, three times a year, they preferred to buy second-hand. In the world that was theirs it was almost a regulation always to wish for more than you could have. It was not they who had decreed it; it was a social law, a fact of life, which advertising in general, magazines, window displays, the street scene and even, in a certain sense, all those productions which in common parlance constitute cultural life, expressed most authentically. That was why they were wrong to feel, on some occasions, that they were losing their dignity. For minor mortifications - having to ask the price of something, hesitantly; having to think twice; trying to haggle; window-shopping, not daring to go in; wanting; appearing mean and petty - are also what keep business going. They were proud of having got something cheap, of having spent nothing on it, hardly a penny. They were even prouder (but the pleasure of paying too much for something has its own price, which is always a bit too high) to have paid a great deal, the highest possible price, on an impulse, without questioning, almost in blind excitement, for something that could not fail to be the finest, uniquely fine, perfect. These moments of shame and pride both had the same function, brought identical disappointments, identical inner rages. And they grasped - since all around them, everywhere, everything made them grasp, since slogans, posters, neon-lit signs and floodlit shop windows drummed it into their heads from morning to night — that they were for ever one rung down on the ladder, always one rung too low; even though they were fortunate enough not to be, not by a long chalk, at the bottom of the pile.