Hello, I Love You! Jim Haynes, the American Dreamer in Edinburgh and Paris
I
January 6, 2021. The news from Paris: Jim Haynes is dead at the age of eighty-seven; “after a long illness,” as the obituarists customarily say. Jim Haynes was born in the small town of Haynesville, Louisiana, halfway between Baton Rouge and Little Rock, Arkansas, but he identified as “a citizen of the world,” at one stage collaborating in the production and management of something called a World Passport, which he claimed to be admissible at selected frontiers when presented by an individual unable or unwilling to obtain an official document. Much more than for most individuals—those not in the grip of mental illness—Jim’s world was a place of his own invention. It was his self-designed principality, and he was its principal, with, as it turned out, his own passport.
I have never met anyone so well placed to rule with such benevolent authority. On the bookshelves in Jim’s studio in Paris, I once came across a copy of Weathering, the selected poems of the Scottish writer Alastair Reid, with an inscription by the author. It said, “To Jim: who feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, shelters the needy . . .” He could have been the leader of a cult, a benign one, if such a thing were conceivable. All rulers are prey to the hidden workings of their own egos, and Jim was no exception, but few exercise power in such a consistently generous and genial manner. If Jim’s principality had had a national motto, it would have been this, handed down by his father: “When you do something nice for somebody, forget it immediately. When someone does something nice for you, never forget it.”
The constitution of the principality was an unwritten one, but its spirit was entirely liberal and arrived at by instinct over reason. The rules, such as they existed, were designed according to Jim’s belief that order of the desirable sort emerges from creative disorder. Do what you feel—that kind of thing—while remaining alert to the feelings of others. There were laws of a certain kind, unlikely to be applied forcefully. Jim detested violence, disliked rudeness and discord in most realms, from the international stage to the local friendly café. He avoided illegal drugs, seldom if ever touched alcohol, would not have countenanced tobacco—permissible for others in this ever-liberal realm, but outside, please—and eventually forsook coffee. He had passionate attachments to peanut butter and chocolate, but a heart condition in later life led the ruler to rule against his sweet tooth, too. “My drug is people,” he would say in his banal and kindly way.
He disliked ties—not least domestic ones—though he was tightly tied to his own routines, both while at home and abroad. He loved books, as the overflowing shelves in his Paris studio attested, and their authors could pass for the unelected lords and nobles of his court, but he had little or nothing of interest to say about their contents. He had a historic reputation as a theatrical impresario and once lent his name as editor to a book of short plays for Penguin, but if he ever made a critical comment worth listening to about a play (or a novel or poem), I didn’t hear it in the more than forty years I knew him. He revered beauty in women, and frequently pronounced himself “in love”—with air hostesses or waitresses, for example—whether or not his adoration was reciprocated, or even noticed, by the love object.
That this kindly monarch regarded it as his right to look on strangers as his subjects may be illustrated by the manner of our first meeting. It took place in Edinburgh on an August evening in 1979. I was in my flat in Forrest Road, a stone’s throw from the university campus and directly opposite the Forrest Hill Bar, a popular bohemian hangout known to one and all as Sandy Bell’s. Late summer in Scotland’s capital is festival season. Jim had been present at almost every Edinburgh Festival since the late 1950s and could justly claim to have played a part in the development of the burgeoning Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which in time overwhelmed the official event.
With the publisher John Calder, Jim was responsible for organizing the city’s first literary festivals, in 1962 and 1963, when they were called Writers’ Conferences. The earlier of the two helped establish the reputation of a practically unknown attendee, William Burroughs, on the basis of his second book, The Naked Lunch, then available only in the Olympia Press edition published dubiously in Paris (later editions dropped the definite article). From the stage, Norman Mailer proclaimed Burroughs “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Mary McCarthy, who was also among the guests, set herself to write a lengthy appreciation of Burroughs’ work for the inaugural issue of the New York Review of Books (February 1963). At the same conference, on a different day, the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi—Burroughs’ comrade and, like him, an unapologetic heroin addict—crossed claymores with the nation’s governing poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, and probably came out on top on that occasion.
Although I had no consciousness of the event at the time, having not yet reached my teens, I would grow into a solid enthusiasm for the writings of Burroughs, and something more than enthusiasm for the attitudes, and the vocabulary, of Trocchi. Those attitudes were in the literary air when I came of age, and I breathed deeply of the air, even though I didn’t smoke or inject the drugs.
In August 1979, when Jim knocked on my door, I was editing a quarterly literary magazine, the New Edinburgh Review, based in the offices of a small publisher, EUSPB—Edinburgh University Student Publications Board—in Buccleuch Place, on the university campus. I had graduated from Edinburgh University the year before, having sat my final exams in the very hall in which Mailer and McCarthy had affirmed Burroughs’ deranged genius. EUSPB was the home of various student publications, though the New Edinburgh Review itself was not a student magazine in the ordinary way.
One of the young women who worked in the office was having an after-hours drink in Sandy Bell’s when she fell into conversation with Jim, who had arrived from Paris an hour or two before. Not a difficult thing to do—quite hard to avoid, in fact, unless you were inclined to issue a snub. Jim talked to everyone.
“What sign are you? Do you ever go to Paris? Come to my place”—reaching into his shoulder bag for an A4 photocopied sheet, with address and two telephone numbers at the top, as well as news and miscellaneous information—travel, food, friendship, “love”—about the man standing before you. The big mustachioed face created an ambient good humor. “Sunday night dinners, everybody welcome, just call up—the number’s there. What’s your name? I’m Jim Haynes. This is Maria, she’s a Gemini . . . Steve, a Taurus . . . you can tell, can’t you? . . . Fiona . . . We’ve just met! They-all didn’t know one another until right now.” It was one of Jim’s favorite sentences. “And now they’re friends! Your name again . . . ?”
Everyone was treated in similar familiar style: superficial, without judgment. In Jim’s company, you might find yourself brought together with a man who had developed a way of growing blue carrots, before having your attention steered gently towards the quiet fellow on your left and introduced to Timothy Leary.
The young woman in the pub asked if he knew Jim Campbell. Always eager to add a name to his address book—his ambition, he liked to say, was to have everyone in the world in it—Jim replied that he did not. “He lives just over there,” she said, pointing to the tenement on the other side of Forrest Road.
In 1979, Jim was in his mid-forties, my senior by almost twenty years. He had landed in Edinburgh without a firm plan about where to stay during his two-week visit. Various options were no doubt open to him, none yet finalized. He disliked the single-bed hotel room, and anyway finding a room on the spur of the moment during the Edinburgh Festival would have been next to impossible. Without thinking much more about what the woman from EUSPB had said, he took his suitcase, climbed the stairs to the third floor at No. 22, and pressed the doorbell.
Inside, I was watching the regular Edinburgh Festival report on the local evening news. On opening the door, I saw a tall man, unsmiling, with black hair and a mustache, looking straight at me. At his feet, a suitcase.
“Are you Jim Campbell? I’m Jim Haynes. Can I come in?”
The name had an air of legend in Edinburgh, as well as in those spheres of London still aching for the return of sixties possibility. My former girlfriend, Diana, who had been living with me at Forrest Road, had returned to London two years earlier to work at the Open Space Theatre, headquarters of the maverick director Charles Marowitz. At some point, just by the way, she had mentioned to me “this person called Jim Haynes” as having had a connection with Marowitz. In the mid-sixties Jim had founded something called the Arts Lab in London, an experimental space—a novel use of the term—which hosted performances of all kinds: dance, poetry readings, free concerts, cut-up Shakespeare. The idea was to liberate the spirit of carnivalesque happening (another new term). He had also had a role in the origins of International Times, or IT, a pioneer of what was proudly known as the alternative press, copies of which I had sold on the streets a decade earlier to raise a pound or two to spend in the pub in the evenings.
Although he had not lived in Edinburgh for thirteen years, Jim had a strong reputation in the city as a doer, a fixer, someone who made things happen. Call-up to military service in America had brought him to the Royal Air Force radar station at Kirknewton, a base for the United States Air Force in Europe, a dozen miles from the city center. While still a serving military man, under an easygoing camp administration, he received permission to attend lectures at Edinburgh University, renting a room in the city at his own expense for daytime life, then driving back to the base at night. On those return journeys, he would wear what he called his student uniform—a black duffel coat—over his fatigues. On arrival at Kirknewton, “I’d park the car outside the highly guarded compound, quickly remove the duffel coat, put on my cap and, hey presto, my military life would begin again.”
Once happily discharged from the Air Force, in 1959, he set about founding a bookstore. The Paperback Bookshop in Charles Street, close to the university, was sometimes erroneously recalled by those who had been there as the Rhinoceros, so identified by the large horned head attached to an outside wall, which served as the shop sign. “I was walking down Princes Street with a friend one sunny morning,” Jim explained later, “when we encountered two workmen carrying out this mounted rhino head from the New Club. I asked them what they were doing with it, and they replied that they were throwing it away. I said that I would take it. I hailed a taxi, and we took it to Charles Street. By luck, there was a place on the outside wall of the bookshop where it could be easily fixed, and that was that.”
Acquisition of the bookshop itself had come about by similar happenstance. According to Jim’s account, he headed for the university district, “and went to look for my bookshop.” Coming across a junk emporium run by an elderly woman on Charles Street, he entered and said, “I’d like to buy your shop.” To his amazement, she replied (so he said), “My boy, my boy, it’s about time I retired.” The sum of £300 was agreed, “and within a week I was in the shop.”
There was probably more to it than that—extended residency in the United Kingdom and a business permit had to be obtained, to say nothing of architectural plans and lawyerly scrutiny—but he had fulfilled his latest ambition, and Edinburgh had a new bookseller. “I began by writing letters to publishers saying that I was going to start a paperback bookshop, it was going to be mainly for the students and staff of the University of Edinburgh, and that if they wanted to trust me with their books, I would sell them and pay them. The books just started rolling in.”
Jim was seldom shy about asking anyone for anything, and—integral to this character trait—was unafraid of rejection. Although a lot of people refused his requests—for money to fund his projects, for accommodation, for opportunistic love, and on this occasion for books to stock his shelves—it was surprising how many did not refuse.
The bookshop was the first in Britain to specialize in paperbacks. John Calder, London-based but with enduring ties to Edinburgh, was in the process of developing a list with a colorful avant-garde bias. Calder books were larger, firmer, gratifyingly weightier in the hand than the slimmer, inexpensive Penguin paperback. They were adventurous in form, sometimes risqué in content: Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Henry Miller, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Roussel, and of course Burroughs and Trocchi. The names by themselves, even their spelling and pronunciation, announced something new, daring, surprising. It fitted Jim’s project perfectly. “Through links with Stockholm and Copenhagen wholesalers I was able to get hold of a lot of books that were not available anywhere else in the UK.” The dominant literary flavor was experimental—essential to securing youthful interest—and the Paperback Bookshop was experimental, too.
Jim’s model was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, founded in 1953 on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. The type of books he wished to stock at the Paperback, some of doubtful legality, if not outright banned, were beginning a march on the mainstream. Tropic of Cancer was in the vanguard, Lady Chatterley’s Lover bringing up the rear, Lolita on the flank. It was in the air, in San Francisco, New York, Paris, but not the Edinburgh air; or not until the arrival of Jim Haynes. A photograph taken around 1960 shows an elderly lady outside the shop, with crumpled newspaper in one hand and a bottle of kerosene in the other. She has just set fire to a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Jim looks on with interest.
To the likes of me, in the summer of 1979, the Paperback Bookshop was familiar only through hearsay. People a decade older or more shared their memories with unfailing delight. You could enter, accept a cup of coffee, and chat to Jim about the exciting new arrivals from London, New York or beyond—the publication of a book in paperback being not as common as it later became. If you lacked the money to buy one, he might offer to lend it. “Bring it back when you’re ready. Tell me what you think about it.”
The cellar was excavated and reconfigured as an art gallery. He began to stage one-act plays before tiny audiences. The first, unlikely as it sounds, was David Hume’s posthumously published dramatic text of 1779, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in which three characters, Demea, Philo and Cleanthes, debate the nature of God. It received a review in the Scotsman, the national newspaper:
The eighteenth-century ambiance was created effectively in one corner of the bookshop, the rest of which was well filled with an audience who doubtless envied the performers their claret. But excellent coffee was provided to the entire audience afterwards. A discussion followed and when I left it was in full swing. This is probably the contribution of the Festival which owes more than any other to Edinburgh. It can be strongly recommended to anyone who enjoys a good Scottish argument.
One of the most penetrating insights into Jim’s character was related by Jim himself (I heard it echoed by many others): “Anyone who had a new idea was told, ‘See Jim Haynes, you can do it there.’ And they were usually right.” His least favorite word was “No.” He was open to just about anything. You’ve written a play with an empty stage and no characters? “See Jim Haynes.”
Those performative gestures were, like Calder’s publishing list, modern and “Continental,” and are only a sample of the horde with which Jim was by nature overloaded. His name began to flow freely among the students and long-haired bohemians—they were starting to be called beatniks—who were becoming numerous in the city.
Edinburgh was by tradition an experimental place. It was accustomed to looking deeply, scientifically, into its own past. The Edinburgh past, specifically the Enlightenment of the later eighteenth century, had introduced great things in the realms of geology, architecture, philosophy and literature. The cultural identity of the city as it stood in 1960 was inseparable from those achievements. “The Athens of the North” is an overused cliché, but as a description is not unmerited. Over time, however, neo-classical tradition had calcified and left Edinburgh looking, and feeling, in many ways more like a petrified site of past enchantment than of present adventure. Edinburgh Castle, appearing to rise organically out of an immense rock in the city center, stands as the immovable symbol of historic grandeur. At the end of the 1950s, the place was shackled to such ancient wonders. It took someone with New World instinct, with a step that moved naturally in the direction of the future—or call it just “the next thing”—to nudge the city into the new decade, someone with the instinct to see what shape that decade was likely to take.
Only certain things, of course: an unexpected bookshop was one. Soon there would be an equally improbable theatre. After that, Edinburgh would play host to the gatherings at the university’s McEwan Hall, Mailer chinking glasses with MacDiarmid, McCarthy with MacDiarmid’s ally and successor, Norman MacCaig. Improbable, but improbability was the key to understanding Jim, not the application of Humean reason. Jim’s native land was not Scotland; nor was it his place of birth, Haynesville, Louisiana. It was the Land of Unlikeliness, governed by the motto “Why Not?” Once introduced, a spirit was at large in the city, a new feeling that could ask of any situation: “Can it be done?” And word would arrive from the Paperback Bookshop in Charles Street, in Edinburgh’s Old Town: “Let’s do it.”
Dramatic productions in the basement at the Paperback soon evolved into something more like a proper theatre. By the time I arrived in Edinburgh from Glasgow in 1974 to begin my studies, the Traverse was known throughout the theatre world. It was originally run by Jim and two or three others in a single grimy room in a flat in James Court, off the Royal Mile. By coincidence, James Court, when a sparkling new eighteenth-century sandstone construction, had been home to David Hume, the unexpected author of the Paperback’s first theatrical show. That production had led directly to the founding of the Traverse in Hume’s former domain.
Like many of the narrow courts, closes, alleys and wynds snaking off Edinburgh’s High Street (or Royal Mile), James Court in its original form was crowded with living quarters of various sorts and sizes. Hume described his in a letter of 1769 as “very cheerful, and even elegant, but too small to display my great Talent for Cookery.” An art, he added, in which “no body excels me.”
Patrons of the Traverse Theatre in its earliest incarnation might have had a sense of what Hume meant by “too small.” The seating arrangement took the form of velvet seats which had been dislocated and were on the point of being discarded by the New Palace Cinema, 500 yards down the Royal Mile from James Court, opposite the house of another famous Scot, the sixteenth-century Calvinist preacher John Knox, Hume’s (and Jim’s) historic nemesis. He had driven the playhouses and all the ungodly denizens associated with them from the streets of Edinburgh. Jim, the anti-Knox, gave the New Palace seats a new home.
Later, he established a system whereby portable chairs were stacked at the entrance to the Traverse’s bare auditorium. When members of the audience passed through, they were invited to pick up chairs and position them wherever they wished in the area before the stage. As Jim said in his droll manner, “Full house every night!”
*
Standing at the open door of my Forrest Road flat on an August evening, I was setting eyes on this character for the first time.
“Can I come in?”
Once inside, he looked round the living room, took in the bookcases, saw the four interrelated paintings on the walls by my friend Alan Shipway, a follower of the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, surveyed the grand bay window and the street below, with its telescopic view into the pub he had just left.
“This is nice,” Jim said politely. “Can I stay here?”
But of course. Was any other answer possible? In any case, that’s what I replied. A simple supper was offered. In the kitchen, he flicked through copies of the New Edinburgh Review. The latest number, Autumn 1979, had an essay about jazz by James Baldwin—the only one he ever wrote—which I had commissioned from Baldwin in the South of France and obtained for a token fee through naive persistence. Our mutual friend in the pub must have told him about it, because Jim mentioned the article before I did. It might have been the very thing that had steered him in my direction, that gloss of bookish glamour which he would always find attractive, its sheen visible even through the windows from the pub below.
Putting aside our knives and forks, we made our way down the Royal Mile to the Edinburgh Film Theatre, which had a bar that offered space and comfort: a rare change in the Edinburgh of those days from the beery, smoky pubs. “Ever been to Paris?” Next time I must stay at his place. “What sign are you? Let me guess.” A girl standing near us at the bar, overhearing, said something in reaction. In the snap of a transition from stranger to familiar, accomplished with no effort whatsoever, Jim was discussing astrological affairs with her in his lightsome, laughing way. By the time she left our company, she too had an invitation to Paris.
He stayed two weeks. Within a few days of his arrival, I was growing accustomed to living in a crowded flat. Jim knew lots of people in Edinburgh and made himself known to more each day as one star sign after another was revealed and the festival went on. They would arrive, perch on the cusp of his genial personality, indulge themselves in the warmth of his familiarity—and sometimes in the depth of his pockets—then depart. If they had a continued presence in his life, mostly, it was as a name in the boundless spread of the address book.
The telephone began to ring with a new regularity.
“Is that you, Jim?” “Yes, this is Jim.” “No, the other Jim. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
Two young actresses arrived from Paris, one American, the other German, Anna Kohler, who later joined the experimental New York company, the Wooster Group. They came with rucksacks on their backs and sleeping bags belted underneath, in expectation of a couple of yards of cushioned Scottish floor for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival. From London, Daniel Topolski, the Oxford rowing coach, turned up, bringing his infectious charm along. My indigent poet pals wandered in and out. Friendships developed. Daniel and I and some other crew sailed through the Dodecanese islands in a rickety cutter a few years later. Jim liked few things better than connecting people.
The density of population inside the flat generated occasional tensions. Anna’s companion, Bea, took a copy of Jane Eyre from the shelves without asking, stuck it in her bag with good intentions, then confessed that she had left it behind in a café. The fact that I remember speaking sharply to her suggests I regretted doing so instantly. (She replaced it, and I still have the copy.) Once, my friend Ron Butlin—later the official poet laureate of Edinburgh—stumbled back from the pub with me to Forrest Road close to midnight. A decision having been made that he was not fit to go farther, he took a blanket and looked for an empty space on the now quite busy living-room floor. By the time I rose in the morning, he was gone. Bea greeted me in the kitchen with deadpan New York delivery. “Met your friend Ron last night. Said he was a poet. Huh. Coulda fooled me.”
On another occasion, I returned from an evening out to find a party in progress, with Jim in the role of host. “Do you know Roger? He’s a Sagittarius. Anna is Pisces—well, you knew that. Marcel . . . This is Jim Campbell.”
Jim who?
“He lives here.”
Surprise parties or not, Jim was a model guest most of the time. Good manners were at the core of his constitution. His temperance in areas where others were intemperate—drink, drugs—combined with his worldly-wise, let’s-do-it approach, lent his character integrity, visible even from afar. Jim was true to his father’s motto: “When you do something nice for somebody, forget it immediately . . .”
The integrity faded only rarely. Jim’s drug was people but not all people’s drug was Jim. My younger sister, still in her teens in 1980, when Jim returned to lodge with me again, came to stay from Glasgow for a few days, in order to prowl round the festival. I ensured that the single bed in the spare room was free and ready. Jim made a pass in the middle of the night, a strike against hospitality which his legendary courtesy, if nothing else, should have forbidden. “If you make a pass at somebody and they reject you, forget it immediately. If you make an unwelcome pass at somebody, they never forget it.” That was not a motto he applied as diligently as he did the other.
Some of my friends were impatient with the shallows through which he moved, talked and thought, from day to day, failing to perceive that the lack of depth, lack of insight, absence of critical discrimination in artistic effort, were what made the entire Improbable project possible. Ron, the poet, was among those who never understood what I saw in Jim, what it was about him that I believed in. With anyone other than Jim, I too might have found these blanks inadmissible and would have rejected the personality that had been stuck together with an assemblage of So what?, OK, What sign are you?, then had been consumed by that same patchwork. But Jim’s lack of evaluation was essential to his talent, which was to make things happen in the lives of people surrounding him that would not happen otherwise. It was a unique gift, and no one I’ve ever known has possessed it in the same way.
On the eve of departure of his first visit to Forrest Road, as festivalgoers folded their tents, he insisted that the invitation to visit Paris and stay at his place was an open one, now, at any time. It was not long before I accepted it.
II
He lived in a row of what were originally designed as artists’ studios, 83 rue de la Tombe-Issoire, Métro Alésia. It was not far from Montparnasse and Jim’s beloved bistro, La Coupole. Villa Seurat, mentioned in the opening sentence of Tropic of Cancer, was a few minutes’ walk away. (Villa Seurat is not a house but a street, blocked off at one end; in the book, Miller renamed it the Villa Borghese.) The door of Jim’s atelier at No. 83 was hardly ever locked, even during the night. If you were due to arrive at an hour when he had made plans to be out, he would tell whoever was inside to expect you.
There was always somebody at home: a Swedish tourist to whom Jim had offered help after her purse was stolen on the Métro; an off-duty air hostess who had accepted one of his newsletters on a flight from New York to Paris and had come to a Sunday night dinner; a young man in self-exile from Iran who was learning to play jazz piano (with a friend of Jim’s giving the lessons, or, if professional instruction, with Jim paying for them).
One evening Jim introduced me to a slim, red-headed American woman with a Continental air. She was dressed in tight leather trousers and a suitably gorgeous silk blouse. She was a writer of short stories, he said. “Jim Campbell. He’s the editor of a magazine in Edin-boro.” She took my hand.
“Oh yes, Jim, isn’t that where you—”
“That’s where I go to the festival every year. I’ve been to forty-five of ’em. Last year and the year before I put up at his apartment!”
He said it with an air of surprised contentment, as if everything had once again fitted into place. Connections!
She was seeking ideas about where to place her stories. I invited her to send some my way. I also mentioned other journals, while Jim chimed in with his own suggestions. “London Magazine—is that still going? Any chance there?” Instinct suggested there would not be, but I felt duty-bound to be optimistic. During our conversation, she let fall that she was a Buddhist. Lots of people seemed to be, without it showing in their speech or habits—drop-out students, aspiring poets, occasional visitors to the Samye Ling monastery in the Scottish Borders, self-taught practitioners of meditation. And now a refined short story writer in expensive clothes. Maybe you only had to say so, in order for it to be true. When I asked what she did for a living—she had yet to sell a single story—she replied, with a hint of the coquette, visible for a split second only but forever memorable, “I’m a call girl, actually.”
On another occasion I arrived at rue de la Tombe-Issoire from Charles de Gaulle Airport late on a Saturday afternoon. Jim’s atelier was open plan: the front door admitted one to a large kitchen/dining/living room, with a broad uncurtained window from waist height to the high ceiling. It would have offered blessed light to the resident artists of the past and gave a view of the outside mews to present inhabitants. His bedroom and general headquarters were on the mezzanine floor, with a figure-length open space through which he could look down and talk to those in the living room below. Next to his room, on the same level, was a small space packed with books and yellowing magazines which doubled as guest quarters. Again there were no doors. A four-foot-high screen was all that cut it off from the living room downstairs, creating a balcony effect. Sometimes three people slept side by side there on a large mattress on the floor, I among them.
You took potluck on arrival at rue de la Tombe-Issoire. On this occasion, I was told by Jim that I could have the upstairs bedroom to myself, once the present guests had vacated it, which they were on the point of doing. This was welcome news: my own room in Paris, downstairs company guaranteed, with a degree of upstairs privacy and independence.
The two women who had been sleeping there for the past few nights went up and down the twisting staircase leading from the living room, checking, enumerating, remembering a toothbrush, asking permission to make a last telephone call, pursuing an inquiry about this person or that whom they had met during their stay.
At a certain point I was introduced. They were from Chicago. I shook the hand first of one, then the other. Both were called Sarah. They were lesbian nuns—Jim said it in the same tone he would have used had he informed me that they were primary schoolteachers—and were compiling a book of interviews with other lesbian nuns about their experiences. They had a reservation on a train bound for somewhere in the South of France at 8 p.m. from Gare de Lyon. “Jim’s from Edin-boro . . . I stay with him during the festival.”
When the two Sarahs were finally ready, bags securely packed, we all made our way to Montparnasse and La Coupole, to have a drink—farewell and thank you from them to Jim, bon voyage from me to them. That pleasant interlude over, I headed to café La Palette, rue de Seine, one of my by now customary rendezvous points in a city that was starting to feel familiar, to join a Scottish friend long resident in Paris. High up on a shelf behind the bar were arranged the colorful palettes of local painters, some of them transformed by time and rumor into the palettes of legendary artists.
Seated outdoors on the terrace, I was flattered to be recognized by the headwaiter, even after three months away. He was cast from the classic template of the Parisian waiter: white shirt, black waistcoat, strict in manner, expert in memory. My friend Louis arrived, and the waiter appeared to recognize him, too. A brisk handshake; a suggestion of a smile; an order taken; a greeting over our heads to another customer once he had returned and set down two foaming glasses and a saucer for coins beside it. Louis referred to him as “the Sartrean waiter,” meaning the figure in L’Être et le néant whom Sartre deployed to illustrate the concept of an individual unable to liberate himself from his professional performance.
By the time I stepped out of the Métro station Alésia and made my way towards rue de la Tombe-Issoire, it was almost midnight. I let myself in through the unlocked door, took off my shoes and mounted the steps to the upstairs bedroom as silently as I could, hoping not to disturb my host, asleep in the adjoining room. As I undressed in the dark, I realized that someone was in the bed—two people, in fact. A voice whispered, “Sorry, Jim. We missed our train.” It was one of the Sarahs. I wasn’t at all put out. The other Sarah sleepily shuffled an inch or two closer to the wall and I got in.
They left early the next morning. At the kitchen table later, Jim said, “I figured you wouldn’t mind finding two beautiful nuns in your bed.”
It was all treated as part of normal life. As was the constant ringing of the telephone. “Hello! Sure! Of course I remember you . . . Ella . . . yes. Come on over . . . Oh, we’ll find you a corner somewhere. You’re not Ella? What did you say your name was? Let me write that down. From Finland! I have a beautiful friend in Finland . . . Métro Alésia . . . Ciao!”
And so it went on, from one day to the next. I asked him once if he ever spent an evening alone at Atelier A2.
He thought for a moment. No. Never.
Jim was openhanded not only with his own address, telephone number and sleeping berths, but with other people’s. In Edinburgh, and in my later London life, I received many requests down the line from Paris to provide a bed for someone who was on the point of crossing the Channel but lacked a place to stay. It wasn’t always a delight, and I lacked Jim’s lucky freedom from judgment. One middle-aged Frenchwoman, whose name I’ve forgotten if I ever learned it, arrived with a considerable amount of luggage in the afternoon, went straight to the spare bedroom, and surfaced thirty-six hours later. When she did appear, it was to tell me that she knew the Beatles and that she was on a self-imposed cold turkey cure. Whether to kick drink or drugs, I never discovered. She visited kitchen and bathroom briefly, before returning to a further prolonged seclusion.
On another occasion, he despatched a young Brazilian woman who likewise showed a reluctance to go outdoors. When I suggested that she might take the opportunity to visit some London sights, she rearranged her figure at full stretch on the sofa. “I can see it on video.”
There were other arrivals, some more congenial, but eventually I said no to serving as the London branch of Hôtel Tombe-Issoire. Jim seemed bewildered at my refusal, and I’ve never ceased to feel a twinge of guilt for opting out of the project.
An exception to Jim’s policy of free exchange of telephone numbers and floor space was his neighbor Samuel Beckett. He didn’t boast about the acquaintance. When asked about it in my hearing, he was purposefully vague, saying only, “He lives down the street.” They had met at the Old Vic Theatre in London one evening, when Jim, having found himself with a spare ticket, handed it in at the box office with a request to pass it on to whoever was first to inquire about a single seat. It was, of course, numbered, and so Jim could look forward to the treat of meeting a new friend before curtain went up.
By chance, the taker was Beckett—and now he was seated next to Jim. By chance, they had someone in common: Jim’s old ally at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, John Calder. Not some ordinary friend—Calder was Beckett’s English publisher. “You’re a friend of John’s? I’m a friend of John’s! I’m staying with him in his apartment above the office right now. I always do in London.” How about that?
By chance, Jim and Sam—first-name terms already!—were neighbors in Paris. “You live in the Fourteenth? No kidding. I live in the Fourteenth!”
All were what could be called Jim chances.
When he returned to Paris, he sent his new friend from the theatre a copy of his own first book, Hello, I Love You!, self-published at rue de la Tombe-Issoire in 1976, “to encourage more people to be more loving to one another.” It came with a quotation from Germaine Greer on the front cover: “If we were sexually liberated there’d be no president, no police force, no night sticks, no governments.” Hello, I Love You! was dedicated to the cause. Jim was proud of it. “One morning I received a letter from a young woman in New Zealand who told me that her lover had left her; she was contemplating suicide and then someone gave her a copy of Hello, I Love You! She read the book, laughed at the madness of contemplating suicide and decided to write me a thank-you letter instead.”
Beckett also wrote in response, not a letter but a card. “Dear Jim, Many thanks for Hello je t’aime. Best, Sam.” As well as French, Jim had the book translated into German and Italian. He reckoned that “there must be 30 to 40,000 copies circulating.”
I saw the card from Beckett. Later, I saw another that made a pleasant impression on me. In the summer of 1992, I rented an apartment in Javel, in the west of Paris, to do some preparatory work on a book about the anglophone literary community in the city after the Second World War. The flat, which was practically unfurnished, came my way via Jim, with the help of his immense address book. He himself was in America all through the time that I was in France, but I was nevertheless in the habit of dropping into Atelier A2, to see Anna Kohler, Ali the piano-playing Iranian, and whoever else was camping at rue de la Tombe-Issoire. There was always someone new. Ali and Anna had permission to open the mail, with instructions to contact Jim if anything urgent arose that required his attention. The daily arrival of the post, at about 11 in the morning, was of great importance to Jim. He was the only person I knew to have two telephones. Between them, they rang at least twenty times a day when he was in residence.
When I entered one lunchtime, I saw an assortment of newly delivered envelopes, large and small, spread out on the kitchen table. There was always mail. Jim sent his newsletters to acquaintances throughout the world, which drew the postcards and letters of response that he coveted. He subscribed to various journals, including the International Herald Tribune, which by itself obliged the friendly postwoman to call every day.
One of the envelopes on the table had the sender’s name and address scribbled on the back: “S. Beckett. 38 Blvd St Jacques, 14ième.”
Jim had recently had dealings with a Dutch feminist theatre company, which hoped to mount an all-female production of Waiting for Godot in Amsterdam. They had approached Beckett’s agent, who was in command of the playwright’s strict conditions governing performance rights, and had received in response a firm No. I suppose that some members of the theatre troupe had met Jim while passing through Paris, perhaps staying a night or two at the atelier. On hearing of Beckett’s refusal, Jim evidently offered to raise the subject with his neighbor.
At this period, Jim had begun to form associations with people in Poland. He had made regular visits to the country when it was behind the Iron Curtain. Those journeys were necessarily of a formal nature, as any foreigner from the free West was obliged to surmount a succession of obstacles in order to obtain a visa. In preparation for visits to Warsaw, Jim would pack as much Nescafé, toothpaste, chocolate and other simple luxuries as he could into his baggage, then distribute them among acquaintances in the city when he got there. When the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1991, and Poland was no longer a Communist state, though still poor and needy, Jim began to organize informal coach trips, adding bags of secondhand clothing, Western newspapers and magazines to the coffee, fruit, and assorted sweet things that he had been accustomed to carrying across the frontier. The proceeds of the Sunday night dinners at rue de la Tombe-Issoire were now devoted to this expensive project.
Having noted the sender of the envelope on the kitchen table, Ali and I decided to open it. Inside, we found a postcard and a cheque from a French bank. On the card, a brief message in Beckett’s spidery handwriting: “All-woman Godot out of the question.” Underneath: “Enclosed: 2,000 francs for Poland.”
III
When Jim’s father died sometime in the 1980s, he came into an inheritance, which he used to buy a second studio in the alley at No. 83. It was not as stylish as the other and, being the subject of a past conversion, was confined to a single floor, but desirable enough. As soon as it was habitable, Jim installed one long-term resident of A2 after another in it, eventually making it over by deed to a girlfriend. It was a typical gesture: what came into the Bank of Jim quickly went out again, on further investments. Investments in people. “That’s what it’s for,” Jim would say, placing his American Express card on top of the restaurant bill before anyone else had a chance to do so.
He also had a job of sorts at Université Paris VIII, Vincennes, where he taught one day a week. If asked what his subject was, he would answer “sexual politics” or, at other times, “theatre.” Traverse anecdotes would follow.
The students evidently valued him, because one morning when I was at A2 the postwoman delivered a letter he had been expecting. With an uncharacteristic mumble, he sliced it open, then handed it to me. The university was offering him a permanent contract.
Jim’s generosity was remunerated in ways that meant the most to him—with friendship and shelter in distant towns, usually the kind of town that hosts a festival of some sort: Frankfurt, Cannes, Edinburgh. When this agreeable system let him down, he fell back on the advice of his father, forgetting immediately about his own selfless acts.
The good he brought to the circle of friends he had acquired in Poland was rewarded in the same way. All through the 1980s—still Cold War years—he made the journey east at the end of October to attend the annual Jazz Jamboree, otherwise known as the Warsaw Jazz Festival. It had existed for over twenty years in one form or another, and by the beginning of the decade had developed into an international event, drawing from the pool of the great surviving figures in American jazz, as well as from Latin America and Europe.
If an interested onlooker had stopped to think about it for a moment, he might have been surprised at the capaciousness of the festival budget. How much did it cost to transport Miles Davis and his latest sextet, with roadies and all the other people and equipment necessary to a world-famous ensemble, from New York to Warsaw? To accommodate them in comfort, provide protection for their gear, and at the end of it all to pay what they were accustomed to receiving?
On top of that, the festival evidently had a handsome fund for visitors. An official invitation on headed paper would be extended by the organizers to a friend or person of supposed influence, in London, Paris or beyond, to be presented at the Polish Embassy in the prospective guest’s homeland. Absent unforeseeable complicating factors, this would be accepted as reasonable cause for the issue of a visa to step behind the Iron Curtain. The invitee would be flown to and from Warsaw on a complimentary ticket, sometimes first class, courtesy of the festival. Once there, he or she was installed in the luxurious Forum Hotel near Jazz Jamboree headquarters (the hotel was occupied almost entirely by foreigners). Free passes were made available to all the concerts, which took place in the Sala Kongresowa, an immense wedding-cake building visible from all points in Warsaw. Constructed in 1955, it was said to have been a gift to the people of the city as a memorial to the life of Comrade Stalin. It was ridiculed and loathed by all the Poles I met. Detested as it was, and however hideous on the outside, it was labyrinthine and functional within.
In the early autumn of 1984, Jim rang me at my desk at the Times Literary Supplement in London to ask if I would like to join him at that year’s event, which was to take place over three days in the last week of October. I was immediately enthusiastic. On overhearing my response to the call, a senior colleague at a neighboring desk expressed doubt. “Who’s paying for it?”
He repeated the question more than once, as a form of rhetorical advice. “Be sure to know who your paymasters are.”
The opportunity was too good to pass over. With my friend Fanny Dubes, who was also close to Jim and had helped him compile and publish an eccentric autobiography that year (Thanks for Coming!), I flew from Heathrow to Warsaw. Without having been asked, Jim was waiting at the airport to greet the plane. He shepherded us into a taxi bound for the Forum Hotel, where we were given a room with twin beds on the fourteenth floor. In the lift on the way up, Jim made a circular motion with a finger, taking in walls and ceiling, miming the information that the lift was likely to be bugged. Inside the room, he went through a similar silent performance.
Fanny and I could not imagine what we might say to one another that could be of interest to a secret-service listener. It added a sense of drama, mixed with humor but also caution, to what was already an adventure: Eastern Europe, Communism, a closed society, a luxury hotel, all-day jazz, pounds and dollars exchanged for złotys on the black market at embarrassingly advantageous rates. The absurd perspective was a native form of self-defense for many in Communist states, and the visitor quickly got used to it. While our pockets were weighted down with money, the shops contained little to spend it on.
In the hotel lobby, and in the lifts when other guests were present, we encountered a pervasive social frostiness. A similar atmosphere emanated from the staff in the small, attractive bar on the ground floor. There was a restaurant where we ate well, without thought of payment. A waiter came towards us and politely offered caviar for sale. Somebody bought some. Someone else warned that he might be working for the police, and that this could be a lure into an undefinable trap. Arabs hung around doorways, looking to left and right. Drug dealers, I was told. Wouldn’t that land you in a prison camp? Yes, but . . . perhaps they too were working for the police?
The veracity of these and other tales was irrelevant. When everything shrinks to the dimensions of double bluff and rumor, you dare not put your trust in anything, including your own observations.
The next morning, Jim told us how to find the festival office, and Fanny and I set out in search of our free festival passes. A stellar lineup was in prospect for the coming days: Art Blakey’s latest array of youthful Jazz Messengers; the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, a former Messenger himself; the harpist Alice Coltrane, widow of John and a star in her own right; the free-form alto-saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Of particular excitement to me was the promise of Ray Charles, whom I had loved since listening in my early teens to 45 rpm singles sneaked from the bedroom of my elder sisters.
On the streets surrounding the hotel, people moved in a manner balanced between furtiveness and fear, glancing without warmth in the direction of the Westerners or purposefully ignoring our presence. It was the same with the reception in restaurants, if you could find one that was open; and, if open, that would admit you. No matter. We, the festival’s invitees, recognized ourselves as the freest people in this unfree world.
And yet we wanted to be even more free. When Fanny and I finally located the Jazz Jamboree headquarters in a drab back street some way from Sala Kongresowa and announced ourselves as official guests of the festival, we were not greeted with the welcome we had expected. At first it appeared that the magic pass might be withheld: the pass that would admit us to every concert on the program, enable us to wander backstage, permit Fanny to take photographs, even allow us to stand in the wings while the music played, mingling with roadies, lighting engineers, big-presence backing singers taking a heavy sweat-and-perfume breather, and all the rest of those who work in such situations to present “the show.”
Fanny did most of the bargaining, but the woman at the office remained unimpressed. She declined to accept our eligibility. The name of the festival’s chief organizer, Paweł Brodowski, editor of Jazz Forum, was mentioned repeatedly. I had brought a book for him from London, at Jim’s request, Red and Hot by S. Frederick Starr, the story of jazz in the Soviet Union. It was published by Oxford University Press, and was not available in Poland.
The needle on the barometer behind the desk still pointed to contempt, but it wavered. Maybe our presumed acquaintance with Paweł—we had yet to encounter him in person, although we were theoretically his guests—had after all raised the temperature just enough in our favor. Making no effort to disguise her head-shaking, she gave in to our insistence and made to issue the two passes, much to our relief.
We did not get them for nothing. When she had filled out the cards with our names, trimmed them, signed them, sealed them in small cellophane squares, she looked directly first at me, then at Fanny, before asking in lightly accented English: “Why cannot you just pay? Most people here cannot afford the jazz.” The shame diminished with time but has never left.
There were further Iron Curtain intrigues on the subject of money. Among our party was the American jazz trombonist and bass trumpeter Mike Zwerin. He lived in Paris, where I had met him many times at rue de la Tombe-Issoire. One of the Tribe of Jim, he was practically the equal of the leader, a status based on seniority and a certain renown. In addition to being a reputable musician, Mike was also “popular music correspondent,” as he put it, of the International Herald Tribune, for which he would be writing dispatches from the festival. He basked in a welcome shade of humor and skepticism concerning the tribal chief, for whom he nevertheless felt a despairing affection. They had traveled together by plane from Paris to Warsaw, and Jim had gone through his usual routine with one of the flight attendants. “He gave her two of his newsletters. He invited her to his Sunday dinners. He said ‘I love you.’ Oh my God.” Mike put his head in his hands. “I love you!”
Mike was here in his own right, a genuine guest of honor. He could let fall without noticeable vanity the names of jazz greats with whom he had shared a stage over the years, including the pianists Earl Hines and John Lewis, the latter being a founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet. The name that he both liked and disliked to hear mentioned in connection with his own was Miles Davis. As a very young man, Mike had taken the trombone seat in the rehearsals for the Davis nonet which in 1949–50 recorded sessions that would eventually be released as Birth of the Cool. The first choice for the instrument was J. J. Johnson, lately of Count Basie’s band, but his temporary unavailability led to Miles approaching Mike after hearing him at a New York nightclub, and offering him Johnson’s place at the rehearsal. “You keep pretty good time,” the trumpeter rasped, before adding, “for a white cat.”
Mike’s name is noted among the personnel on the extended CD set The Complete Birth of the Cool—a collector’s item with rehearsal sessions included—along with those of Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz and Max Roach.
“A footnote to jazz history,” Mike would say of this distinction, self-deprecatingly, but his autobiography, Close Enough for Jazz, includes an engaging section on the topic “Miles and me,” and he enjoyed repeating the “pretty good time for a white cat” story. He had gone on to form his own bands and had had a decent part-time career in music, without the obsessive practice that might have enabled the breakthrough. He acknowledged this himself. Now he was an occasional player on the Paris club scene, as well as writing about popular music for the Herald Tribune.
On the second evening, before the main concert began, Fanny and I went to call on Mike on the floor below ours at the Forum Hotel. We found him in his room, smoking, drinking whisky and listening to jazz on a miniature cassette player—also called into action for press interviews—with speakers the size of bars of soap attached to the machine by threadlike cables. I had recently published my first book, Invisible Country, about a journey by thumb through Scotland, and I brandished it proudly. Mike himself had a new book due out the following year, with a witty title that played on the jazz standard “St. Louis Blues.” La Tristesse de Saint Louis was about the existence and durability of jazz in Nazi concentration camps, a subject that has not received the attention it deserves.
As we sipped fiery liquids from duty-free bottles, I wondered aloud who was paying for this fabulous event—this jamboree—that we were all enjoying. (“Be sure to know who your paymasters are.”) Mike scarcely paused. Why, the American government, of course. “Or the US taxpayer, if you prefer.” Jazz Jamboree was funded by the United States Information Service (USIS), a rough equivalent of the British Council, with, so people were apt to remark, a stronger line in cultural persuasion. They put the money in, as part of the long-term project of exporting American art to countries governed by regimes ideologically opposed to it. In the manner of the Marshall Plan in the years after the Second World War, it was politics packaged as sustenance; in this case, as entertainment.
The export of culture for propaganda purposes can have only the vaguest of expectations. Art, talent, performance, intelligence forge their own paths and are in the long run ungovernable. Yet the plan worked in certain visible ways. In the clubs around the Sala Kongresowa, such as Akwarium, the forward-looking young musicians of Warsaw were not dedicating themselves to Polish folk tunes or the anthems of the Komsomol. They wanted discordant harmonies and syncopated tempos. The imaginative mind might impose these rhythms onto immovable political scenarios close to home. The Polish branch of the music carried on developing an indigenous flavor, but these loyal players knew where the Kingdom of Transblucency was located, who was in charge and what its constitution stated. What was jazz, after all—historically, the descendant of the blues—if not the sound of freedom?
“Did you think Ray Charles was being paid in złotys?” Mike asked with the suggestion of a chuckle. The fee for Ray Charles and His Orchestra with the Raelettes in 1984, I learned later from someone close to the festival, was $30,000. It is doubtful if Ray Charles was advised to know who his paymasters were. If his management team had reason to seek the money-counters’ attention, they knew where to find them: not in a backstreet office in Warsaw staffed by a formidable female clerk, but in Washington, DC.
Some years further on, when the Berlin Wall came down and the peoples of Eastern Europe joined the free world, at least in theory, the dollars that had kept the Jazz Jamboree in high style were unavailable. The USIS concluded that these diverting incursions into life beyond the Wall were no longer required. The jazz festival went on, but without the comforts of the Forum Hotel, the first-class plane tickets, the concert passes, the perfume assault from the gleaming neck of a Raelette waiting with her hairstyled sisters in the wings for the cue to stride onstage and lift the great man’s song yet higher.
The legendary jazz warriors, whom we had seen circulating in the lobbies of the hotels, were in a sense the victims of their own success. Being the emissaries of a music rooted in protest at historic and present oppressions in their own land, they had been directed to foreign shores to wave the flag for country and culture, wielding trumpets and double basses in grand arenas. The host nation’s security sentries could do little other than look on in impotence and, possibly, ignorance. In time, the enemy folded, and the Wall came down. The telephone number of Ray Charles’s agent could be casually dropped into a Pentagon wastepaper basket. The next cheque for $30,000 would be assigned to a different cause. The presence of each of us in Warsaw—from Art Blakey and Alice Coltrane to Fanny and me, Mike Zwerin and Jim Haynes—had been an extension of the program. We knew who our paymasters were.
Memories of my visits to Poland are precious now that it no longer stands as a barrier between the Soviet-controlled states of Eastern Europe and the free West. I returned to Warsaw on two subsequent occasions while the festival remained the beneficiary of American largesse. Should I have refused the privileges bestowed on me? I remain shamed by “Most people here cannot afford the jazz,” but to have said no to Jim’s invitation in the first place would have meant turning my back on a form of education I would not otherwise have received. It deepened my understanding of both jazz and postwar Europe. Similarly, for Jim to have renounced his Nescafé-and-chocolate missions, supported at first by Jazz Jamboree (and the CIA, if you choose to look at it that way) and later with help from generous donors, including Samuel Beckett, would have meant withdrawing from his chosen career in kindness.
The lessons were offered, and absorbed, from hour to hour. The severe form of instruction encountered at the Jazz Jamboree office was only one method. There was another, more edifying, and more amenable to vindication. The sounds issuing from the stage had a connection with fact, a fluid and elusive element in the land of 2 + 2 = 5, of rumor and untruth. For those Poles who had succeeded in acquiring tickets, a concert by Ornette Coleman that began and ended on an autumn Sunday evening might endure in spiritual presence throughout the listener’s lifetime.
Some of the Americans playing this music had paid an unimaginable price for the beat that kept audiences transfixed. The latest absurdity was that now they were playing on behalf of freedom, in a hall imposed on this city by the inheritors of a murderous tyrant. The confluence of “truth” and “conscience” and “the right thing” and “know who your paymasters are” became twisted and tangled, echoing the sounds issuing from Ornette’s famous plastic saxophone, while the auditory imagination worked to force it into a sort of sense. The people of Warsaw would have been poorer without it. In our modest fashion, Jim, Mike, Fanny and I would be, too.
IV
At the end of October 1984, many local residents, including those with a liking for jazz, had something of more immediate import on their minds. While the opening session was in swing at the Sala Kongresowa, leaflets were being passed around inside and outside the Church of St. Stanislaus Kostka in a Warsaw suburb, urging workers to go on strike unless the mysterious disappearance of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko was resolved.
The thirty-seven-year-old priest was connected to the Solidarity movement, then challenging the government on various fronts, from industrial conditions to civil rights. Father Jerzy had disappeared the week before our arrival. It emerged later that he had been seen being bundled into a car by three policemen. As the festival got underway, the only solid fact was that he was missing, perhaps being held hostage or worse.
The tension created by this event increased from day to day. On the festival Sunday, I attended a vigil at St. Stanislaus Kostka together with hundreds of Poles. The Minister of the Interior announced on television the night before that three members of the security services had been arrested. This set in motion a fresh round of rumor. Each of the kidnappers, we were told, had a different story, which paradoxically gave the crowd in and around the church a glimmer of hope. One banner draped on the railings outside read, in Polish, “Truth will relieve us.” The parishioners, already preparing for mourning, listened to the continuous mass given by one of Father Jerzy’s colleagues. Someone had suggested that the reason behind Popiełuszko’s bold outspokenness against the authorities was that he suffered from a mortal disease. Just another rumor, more cynical than most.
It was poignant, if not ironic, to go directly from there to the concert given by Ray Charles—“The world is in an uproar / The danger zone is everywhere”—or to sit and listen to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz ensemble. The saxophonist told Mike in the course of an interview for the Herald Tribune that he was evolving a new “democracy of sound” in which “all notes are equal.”
It makes (a kind of) sense when you hear it. It fitted the mood of the moment. Fanny photographed him while crouching below the main deck of the stage, and her picture accompanied Mike’s article in the Trib.
As we headed for the Warsaw airport on October 30, sorry to be leaving, the last rumor we heard was that the authorities were on the point of reimposing martial law to deal with the unrest. Once safely established back at my desk, next to my more worldly senior colleague, I learned from the BBC that the body of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko had been dragged up from a reservoir in the city of Włocławek, northwest of Warsaw.
*
When the Communist Party in Poland dissolved along with those in neighboring countries, some years later, the sense of liberation from Kremlin domination was felt by many people as a form of personal vindication, the historic realization of something they had believed in, possibly for decades, with lips kept tightly closed.
Many in the free West, plebeians as well as presidents, had worked more in hope than expectation of this outcome. Jim Haynes was entitled to feel that he had made a contribution, in the form of his own domestic Marshall Plan, using instant coffee and cheap jeans (made in China) to boost morale, persisting with everyday charity as a means of pro-Western propaganda. Jim’s openhandedness could appear to be without limit. The center of the operation was his atelier in rue de la Tombe-Issoire. He and his workforce of guests and temporary residents assumed without much scrutiny the benign compliance of whoever happened to be passing through.
I can’t claim to have done anything noble in furtherance of the Polish campaign, though I handed over my francs for the Sunday night dinners when in Paris, which in turn went into the fund. I wrote articles about Jazz Jamboree for the TLS and the Scotsman in Edinburgh. One was reprinted in the local English-language paper, the Warsaw Voice. Occasionally, I took on the role of useful gofer, commissioned by Jim to carry a bagful of something or other on my next trip across the Channel. A package would be delivered to my door in London by someone with instructions from Jim. Having intended to travel light, one was all of a sudden laden with goods of a mysterious sort handed over by a stranger.
Jim was inclined to assume that everyone’s devotion to the cause was as lofty as his own. The belief was drawn from the same set of generous impulses that led him to direct a middle-aged French alcoholic or drug addict to my London flat in order to undergo cold turkey. When I told him about it later, the last thing that would occur to him to say was sorry. Compassion for “the poor old girl,” or a chestnut of the “It’s an experience” variety was the most I could expect.
It was around this time that the character of rue de la Tombe-Issoire changed, in keeping with the changes in the wider world. To a certain degree, it had already happened, with the installation in my favorite guest room of a set of friends of Jack Moore, Jim’s lifelong friend and one of the team that had set up the Traverse Theatre in James Court in the early 1960s. Jack had become a permanent resident of the atelier, with his private quarters in the basement. He was an agreeable presence, weirdly knowledgeable about an array of subjects, ever in need of a few francs, a nonstop talker, sometimes very funny, and a maestro in the kitchen. Small and tubby, Jack was thickly mustachioed and extravagantly gay, with a liking for describing alarming carnal practices in a loud voice to whoever happened to be present, as he whisked a gravy or filleted a fish.
Now, when I arrived from London in the hope of procuring the room with the balcony looking down on those below—such preferences were not subject to advance planning—I was apt to find it occupied by one or more of Jack’s friends, fitting slender forms into glove-like black PVC or leather costumes in readiness for an evening out. “You can have the sofa,” Jim would say genially, gesturing in the direction of the worn object on which two or three people were currently settled.
Eventually, after midnight, when one guest after another had drifted away, it was possible to switch off the light and try to sleep—Jim himself could doze off through any amount of merrymaking from below, and often didn’t wait for visitors to depart before turning in—only to be jolted awake by Jack and his weary troupe arriving back at dawn, investigating the refrigerator and dragging wooden chairs over the kitchen floor to seat themselves at the table, yards from the makeshift bed.
It was time to seek other arrangements. The pricing of hotel rooms in Paris was still regulated and generally affordable. I had stayed in a variety of fleapits in my time, including Deli’s, within casting distance of boulevard Saint-Michel and just around the corner from rue Gît-le-Coeur. The street was famous for being the location of Madame Rachou’s Beat Hotel, once a fleapit like Deli’s but now modernized beyond recognition and boasting two stars.
A different kind of fleapit was provided by George Whitman, the proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company on rue de la Bûcherie. He and Jim did not get on, Whitman having declined to stock Hello, I Love You! and other books published from Atelier A2, such as Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman and Jim’s manifesto, Workers of the World, Unite and Stop Working!
The fleas at Shakespeare and Company were not fleas at all but creepy-crawlies, smaller than ants, with a greater claim to the dubious mattress than I had. I was nevertheless grateful for the view of Notre-Dame and for Whitman’s hospitality—which came in the form of pancakes and maple syrup delivered by his own hand at breakfast time, together with coffee sweetened beyond drinkable and the injunction “Write!”
When I dropped into Atelier A2 these days to see Jim, perhaps in the hope of coinciding with Jack’s boeuf bourguignon, delivered to the table with unstoppable commentary on the mechanical intrigues of aeronautic engineering or how to blend the perfect béchamel, I found myself seated at the table in the exclusive company of young men. The realization dawned at the same time as its kindred reflection: there used to be girls at Jim’s place. Some of the men, having arrived for an overnight stay which had stretched to six months, were from the world’s increasing number of troubled regions.
Jim did his usual round of introductions. “This is Bruno . . . Bruno’s from Kraków. He’s a Leo. No, sorry! Aries! You’re not a Leo! I’m the only Leo around here. Jim’s from Edin-boro . . . He was my host at the festival . . . You’ve been to Kraków, haven’t you? He’s a . . . What are you anyway?”
It was one of those new lodgers—a Bruno or an Andrzej or some other, from Kraków or Warsaw or a distant provincial town, a Leo or a Capricorn or a Taurus—who would one day fly into a homicidal rage and smash whatever was breakable in the kitchen, on the black-and-white checkered floor tiles or against the walls, before using one of Jack’s porcelain mixing bowls to shatter the glass in the great living-room window—practically a glass wall, an original feature of this picturesque row of artists’ studios. Forced outside by others, he tried to storm back in but found the door bolted from inside. He wasn’t finished, however. In the narrow shrub garden which fringed the alley leading from the metal gate on rue de la Tombe-Issoire to the studios, he found an axe, with which he proceeded to hack his way through Jim’s front door.
I have forgotten, if I ever knew, what kicked off this fifteen minutes of madness. I know only that it came to an end when the police arrived and the maniac was cuffed and carried off. Those inside had feared they would be killed if the man to whom Jim had offered shelter—“To Jim: who feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, shelters the needy”—succeeded in chopping his way back in. I can recall his round, friendly face awaiting delivery of the healthy plate at Jack’s table.
Other than that, I have just one recollection of the event as Jim related it—not a recollection, really, but an understanding: that this was an outermost ripple of the latest parting of the world’s seas, which we had all witnessed and cheered not long ago, and that Atelier A2 was never going to be the same again.
V
Jim’s fundamental perception of history was that society was in need of greater togetherness, and his view of himself, in whatever spheres were available in the present moment, was as the agent of connection. “People to People” was the name given to yet another of his projects, resulting in a series of Handshake books, arranged by country or region. The idea was to offer information to prospective travelers on a limited budget about where to lodge cheaply, if not for free, and with whom. All you needed to do was to pick up the telephone in a public call box. Numbers and dialing codes were included in the book. It was a pre-cell phone, pre-internet, bureaucracy-free version of Airbnb. Getting people together on a friendly basis could be accomplished with ease in the cafés of the Left Bank or at Atelier A2 on Sunday evenings or any other time of the week, but Jim had wider ambitions. Let’s bring nations together! Friends of Jim across the world were asked for permission to include details of their whereabouts and availability in the People to People series.
The custom-controlled frontier has long stood as a baffling obstacle to a certain type of utopian dreamer who sees no good reason why a person should not step from one colored square of the map on to another of a different hue, without impediment. As a US passport holder, Jim could travel almost anywhere he pleased, hopping from country to country in search of the contentment he took from plugging into whatever social socket he might find, of whatever model, in each and every place in which he found himself. He absorbed his battery charge from the ever-changing local supply, and the supply was people. “I’m a people person.” This banality took on a whisper of authenticity in Jim. He was well aware that such happy freedom was not enjoyed by all.
When he heard about a man called Garry Davis, a minor American stage actor born in 1921, who had renounced his US citizenship and declared the establishment of “World Government,” with himself as its first passport holder, Jim caught an echo of his own ideals. He decided to seek him out. Davis had achieved publicity in 1948 when he interrupted a session of the United Nations General Assembly, demanding “the peace which only a world government can give.” Before being apprehended and escorted out of the building, he had time to make his core declaration, that sovereign states “divide us and lead us to the abyss of Total War.”
The World Passport was based on Davis’ interpretation of Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is sometimes referred to as a “fantasy travel document.” Davis also set himself up to issue birth certificates. He devised a “world currency” which in some hard-to-understand manner was bound up with solar energy. He claimed to have put his World Passport to use on a trip to and from India in 1956, crossing one frontier after another simply by presenting his personally designed booklet.
Jim located Garry Davis in Alsace, suitably a frontier region, in the mid-1970s. Quite quickly, he became involved in Davis’ World Service Authority, the organization founded to promote the World Government’s policies and aims. Jim helped in the production of the passports, which he described as “beautiful documents, elaborately produced, in seven languages; blue, with a gold map of the world.”
As if you could ask for anything more. Atelier A2 was chosen to be the embassy of the World Service Authority, with the power to issue World Passports. This would make Atelier A2 effectively the first Embassy of the World, or perhaps the One World Embassy, though I don’t recall Jim ever using either of those names. He was, however, proud to describe his atelier in his autobiography as “the only embassy in the world that was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week”—meaning, basically, that people could walk through the iron gates at the foot of the alley and let themselves into the unlocked studio whenever they felt like it, as was almost always the case chez Jim before the calamitous rage of the axe-wielding guest.
“At all hours of the day or night there would be a knock on my door,” Jim stated proudly in Thanks for Coming!, “and there would be Czechs or Poles or Israelis or North Africans or Asians or somebody who knew about these passports.”
Jim said these things in a tone of total conviction. He was never less than certain as he recounted the ins and outs of this or that scheme that it would come across in the ears of the many rational people he knew as a valid project. The Paperback Bookshop had got going under this persuasive propeller, so had the Traverse Theatre, and probably the Arts Lab in London and International Times, too. Only in a more bureaucratized era of downgraded spontaneity did he have the experience of seeing his projects go flat. A footage-based film about Marlene Dietrich he made with Jack was grounded because of rights and associated problems. These were legal hitches Jim thought little about or, if he did, only at the last minute.
It was the ability to step with authority into the latest phase of invention and planning that saved him from the disabling perception that the World Passport was little more than a delusion devised by a crank. In time, it was added to the regular recitation of achievements, wherever he found himself, rolled out in a tone pitched somewhere between self-deprecation and humorous disbelief at these testifiable realities. The Paperback, the Traverse, Henry Miller at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, the magazine Suck and its notorious nude photo of Germaine (no second name required), claiming to have introduced John to Yoko . . . and now the World Passport.
Was it nevertheless possible that anyone had actually got through a douane without trouble with one of these little booklets? Garry Davis’ boast that he had been admitted at one frontier post after another had to be placed side by side with the fact that by 1975 he had been imprisoned twenty times as a consequence of attempting to cross a border without credible papers. Jim’s pronouncements on the wonders of the passports omitted this information.
Imprisonment and a criminal record did not prevent Davis from awarding World Passports to prestigious people, whether they expressed need of one or not. Yehudi Menuhin received his first World Passport in 1954, presumably by mail or from one of the embassies in existence before Atelier A2 became the Paris HQ. Decades later, Menuhin took possession of another, from Davis’ own hand. In 2012, a World Passport in the name of Julian Assange was sent to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where the founder of WikiLeaks was holed up while trying to fend off accusations of various kinds. Whether he ever attempted to use it to get past the Metropolitan Police officers stationed outside the building is not known. Assange remained at the Embassy in South Kensington for a further seven years, before being removed to a high-security prison.
An alleged beneficiary of the scheme—the only one whose name I ever heard mentioned in Paris—was a former US Army soldier named Will Reed, who had renounced his American citizenship in protest at the Vietnam War. Sometime in the early 1970s, he found himself in prison in Thailand, without reliable documentation. In Thanks for Coming!, Jim put it this way: “Will Reed was stuck in a Bangkok jail because he had no papers, and with one of our World Passports he not only got out of prison but managed to cross some thirteen or fourteen frontiers to end up in Paris as the printer who produced my first two books.”
I never encountered Will Reed at Jim’s place, but I heard the story numerous times. The name cropped up often, having become synonymous with the most grandiose of all the connection schemes.
The nation state was not in decline, for better or worse, but twilight in the epoch of “Let’s do it!”—a secular version of freedom of worship—descended in the final decade of the twentieth century, in areas ranging from sexual relations to book publication to assumptions about diversity of opinion, in places where illumination had hitherto been taken for granted. A less indulgent time was approaching for dreamers like Jim Haynes, Garry Davis, the erstwhile paragons of International Times, the beneficiaries of Handshake Editions, even the midnight rambler’s discovery of a pair of nuns unexpectedly stranded in Paris for an extra night and half-asleep in the upstairs bedroom at Atelier A2. “Hello, I love you!” had begun to sound less like a utopian code-breaking utterance from the Age of Aquarius, more like a decaying sixties joke that had rebounded on the mustachioed man with the greying hair from the mythic golden age.
The backpacking youngsters now washing up on the beaches of Atelier A2 in hope of a bed for the night, directed there with the assistance of newfangled satellite guidance from all over Europe, America, Australia and beyond, were not yet born when the sixties ended. “That amazing, magical decade” is how I would hear it described by people of Jim’s generation, sometimes in his presence.
To the new arrivals, the magic might shine for the duration of a soirée, in the way that ornately framed paintings of top-hatted and bonneted strollers arm in arm in the Champs-Élysées could make a pleasing substitute for reality, before the travelers stepped out of the Belle Époque galleries into the Paris afternoon, checking their screens in search of direction.