The first Balzar meeting was held in June 1998, just after the purchase of the small, perfect, century-old Left Bank brasserie by Bucher. The friends of the Balzar organized a group, led by two honorable men. The first, the delegue du personnel, or steward of the waiters, can now emerge from behind the pathetic false mustache he was provided in my first account and appear under his real name, Claude Blanchot. The other leader was Lorenzo Valentin, a startlingly handsome and eloquent young publisher whose offices were across the street from the Balzar. We banded together a collection of regulars, the clientele—mostly writers and publishers and professors from the Sorbonne—to protect the Balzar. The first meeting was a kind of sit-down and dine strike at the Balzar itself. We infiltrated about sixty members inside to protest, and almost everyone judged it a great success.
The evening had gotten a lot of attention in the press and produced a breakfast meeting at the Balzar of our executive committee with M. Bucher himself. He freely gave any number of assurances to protect the staff, the cooking, and the distinct traditions of the place. They were, I thought at the time, both very sincerely made and utterly worthless, since he had no more obligation to keep his promises than he had to come to our apartments and cook us breakfast.
By then it was late July, though, and nothing happens in Paris in late July. (If the king could have kept things calm around the Bastille for another three weeks, France would still be a monarchy.) Right on date, August 1, everyone went one way or another:
Lorenzo to Italy and the rest of the committee to one or another French resort. (All the garcons, as I had learned, rather reluctantly, to call them, went home too, mostly to the small towns in the Massif Central and the South and even Alsace where they came from.) The pattern of internal emigration, as described by Balzac, youth coming to the capital, remains as powerful in France as it was a century ago. You come to Paris to make a reputation, as a writer or a waiter, intending to go home, soon, to run the local paper or to open your own brasserie on the town square, but then you don’t, except in August.
We had the habit of going back to America for two or three weeks in August, to be washed over by the cold waves of American ocean and the warm spit of American opinion and to see our family. First we would go to see Martha’s family in Canada (who said, Canadianly, “Oh, you live in Paris. How stimulating,”) and then to the little shack in Cape Cod where we had first sat out and watched the sunsets and dreamed of going to Paris.
And then back home to Orly, where, bleary-eyed, airsick, after the tightly sealed flight, we would feel our hearts lift as the taxi turned in the early-morning flat white light into the porte d’Orleans, and then up the avenue du General Leclerc, past the place Denfert-Rochereau, where I once lived as a kid (and where I could still see the window where Melissa, the baby of the six kids in my family, had once stood and semaphored to me, across the street, not to forget the long, round bread.) Then past the Belfort Cafe (where, twenty years before, I had once sneaked down for a pain au chocolat and my first café serre) and up the boulevard Raspail, where they were already setting up the marche biologique, and back to our apartment. “This is home,” Luke said once, and our hearts skipped, because we knew it wasn’t, quite, and were glad he thought it was.
The trees would already be shedding, and the streets would be filled with brown leaves, skipping across the empty boulevards. We always missed the fall coming to Paris; coming back after Labor Day is too late. Of the great argued-out differences between New York and Paris, none is more important than the simple difference that Paris is farther north than New York is. The end of August is still mostly high summer in America, at least on the East Coast, with days in the nineties and hazy sun and hardly a hint of autumn in the air. Labor Day hits Americans like a ton of bricks; we’re going back to work so soon? And then, of course, Americans, for all their cult of summer and fussing about summer and idealizing summer have no summer at all to speak of. The two-week paid vacation, now made for the no-collar classes almost no vacation at all by the fax machine and the computer, is a small favor taken from a restless, impatiently toe-tapping employer. In France everyone—Luke’s baby-sitter, the man who sells cheeses, President Chirac, Bernard Arnault, Bernard-Henri Levy—is guaranteed five weeks of vacation by law, and just about everyone takes it. (There would be no point even for an eager beaver, overachieving tycoon to stay on the job since there would be nobody there for him to motivate.) When people say that Paris closes down in August, they don’t mean the pace slackens a little. They mean it closes, like a box.
The funny thing is that the cool weather comes to Paris right around the middle of August, so that by the time everyone comes back for the re-entree, it feels like autumn, and everyone is ready to start life over. People, ordinary people, are actually fed up with their vacations and glad to get back to town. (I once saw one of the inconsolably grumpy women who works at Michel Chemin, the bakery near us, come in on the first day of September and actually grab the other inconsolably grumpy woman who works there and kiss her, fully, on the cheeks.)
As soon as I was back in town, I got a call from Lorenzo, to tell me that things were going very badly at the Balzar. The waiters were nervous; they had felt abused and overtaken by events; their grievance hearing at the tribunal des Prudnommes—the labor court—had been postponed. It seemed that Bucher was about ready to fire everybody, or that at least was the rumor. Tour groups of Americans were being sent in by concierges of large hotels. Our only hope, it seemed, was to mediatiser some more and then to… well, to have another meeting. There was one called that week at Mme. de Lavigne’s apartment over on the quai Anatole-France.
I was the only American there, and this unexceptional fact made me unreasonably self-satisfied—the Tom Paine of the Balzar insurrection (although it seemed to me that I recalled from some sixtyish piece of guerrilla theater that, bad omen, Tom Paine ended up in prison during the Terror and died drunk in New York). While I was away, the great liberal paper Le Monde had come out with another piece outlining our struggle to save the Balzar, by the oddly dyspeptic food writer J.-P. Quelin, the Hilton Kramer of French cuisine. Why should people whose lives are devoted to the study of pleasure be so charmless, so lacking in joy, I have often wondered? The answer is simple, I now thought. They were not drawn to their subject for pleasure; it was the absence of pleasure they felt that made them so tense and talky. This is the Devil’s Theory of what draws critics to themes, and I am sure that it is true. The people who take natural pleasure in pictures, whom you see haunting the Museum of Modern Art at lunch hour, or eating with a copy of Le Monde at the old Balzar, are completed by the pleasure, as most of us are by sex. They feel no more need to discuss it than most of us want to discuss lovemaking; the drowsy commonplaces are, for them, the appropriate speech act, the only appropriate speech act. People who don’t actually enjoy eating are the ones with the attention to look around the room—where are people sitting? Who likes what?—and absorb both the abstract system of snob values and the social comedy of it. The people who actually write well about food—M. F. K. Fisher or Seymour Britchky—are oddly abstemious, austere, even, in a way, anti-sensual, for the same reason that Ruskin, a man who recoiled in horror at his wife’s pubic hair, could write so well about the hidden message of the pointed arch. Not really liking it much is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. This is why embarrassingly, thunderously obvious thoughts—beauty counts, power matters, pictures sell for money—are often presented by critics with such shocked or plaintive intensity. All critics are food fusses, not wanting to try the green stuff, even when the Mother-MOMA tells you it’s good for you, and then announce darkly that it’s poison, any child can see it is. (This is why Tom Wolfe could be both absolutely right and wrong about American art. Not wanting to eat, he alone would notice the odd order of the cutlery on the table.)