LA TERRE DES MORTS . . .

In March of 2012 we visited the grave of rock ’n’ roll icon Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas.  In April of 2012 we visited the grave of iconoclastic jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker just outside Kansas City.  Last summer I spent a happy hour or so touring UMass Boston students around Glasnevin Cemetery, visiting the graves of James Joyce’s parents, Charles Stewart Parnell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Maud Gonne MacBride, Michael Collins, Brendan Behan . . .

Anyone detecting a pattern yet?

Oscar Wilde's grave

It was thus inevitable that we would spend some quality time in cemeteries in Paris.  There are two that are sites of essential pilgrimage.  The first one we visited was Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the largest burial ground within the city limits of Paris.  We particularly wanted to pay our respects to Oscar Wilde, who died in Paris in 1900.  Obviously we were not the first to have that impulse.  Wilde was initially buried in a different cemetery on the outskirts of Paris but was reinterred in 1909, and now lies beneath a striking tombstone carved from a twenty-ton block of stone by celebrated sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein.  A nude male “flying demon-angel,” as Epstein described it, the stone was initially deemed indecent by French authorities for its anatomical correctness: they went so far as to cover it with a tarpaulin.  Over the past century it has been vandalized, and in recent years it has been defaced by admirers of Wilde leaving lipsticked kiss marks on its surface.  In 2011, officials at the cemetery constructed a glass case around the gravesite: now the glass is smeared with kisses.  No doubt, the lines from Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” cut as an epitaph into the back of his tombstone, prophesy the nature of some of those who pause at his final resting place:

And alien tears will fill for him

Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.

Jim Morrison's grave

In death, just as in life, peace has not come easily for Oscar Wilde.  But at least he has lots of distinguished company in Père-Lachaise: legendary lovers Abélard and Héloïse, beloved chanteuse Édith Piaf and jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, novelist Marcel Proust and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, American authors Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein, Polish composer Frédéric Chopin and Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani . . . and of course Jim Morrison, iconic singer of the American rock band The Doors.  Morrison’s gravesite may be the only rival to Wilde’s as a place of essential pilgrimage for the hundreds of thousands of visitors that Père-Lachaise draws annually.

Picasso memorial to Apollinaire

Now let me go off on a tangent.  As I mentioned, one of Wilde’s afterlife neighbors is poet Guillaume Apollinaire.  About a decade after Wilde’s death, he emerged as a force of nature in the Parisian literary and artistic scene until his early death in 1918.  Apparently he lived above Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint Germain (we had a bite to eat there a few weeks ago); he is commemorated nearby by a sculpture dedicated to his memory by his close friend Picasso.  The sculpture actually represents the head of Picasso’s lover Dora Marr—not of Apollinaire; coincidentally, it is located in a garden next to Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the church where Oscar Wilde’s funeral was held (Wilde had converted to Catholicism on his deathbed).  Anyway, I had a special interest in visiting Apollinaire’s grave, as one of my first literary exercises after we arrived in Paris was a translation of one of his poems, “‘Le Tzigane”‘ (The Gypsy).  I had read two published translations of the poem, neither of which seemed to work quite right with the facing-page original.  So I decided to try my own hand at translating it:

LA TZIGANE

after Apollinaire

The gypsy foresaw

our two lives

crossed by darkness.

We bid her adieu, then

from that pit

bright Hope emerged:

love, clumsy

as a trained bear,

danced upright

at our command,

though the bluebird

shed its feathers

and beggars forswore

their Hail Marys.

We knew full well

that we were damned.

Still, into the street love

pulled us, hand in hand:

all this the gypsy foretold.

Samuel Beckett's grave

Sartre and de Beauvoir's grave

Now let me come back from that tangent and describe the second cemetery we visited—Cimetière du Montparnasse.  We were most interested in seeing the graves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (still unmarried but still together) and of Samuel Beckett (still together with his wife, with whom he had a very strained relationship—and thus probably still as miserable in death as he was in life).  We found both grave sites quite easily . . .  But two days later I felt the need to return to Montparnasse and immerse myself more deeply (as it were) in its grounds.  So I put together a list of a dozen more names I wanted to track down . . . and spent a fine two hours walking back and forth in the land of the dead.  Among the luminaries I visited were French littérateurs Guy de Maupassant, Charles Baudelaire, Marguerite Duras and Joseph Kessel, American essayist Susan Sontag, and celebrated photographers Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia) and George Brassaï (born Gyula Halász in Hungary).  Clearly, many of these figures still have admirers and visitors, as a number of the gravestones were covered with tokens of remembrance: handwritten notes, flowers, Metro tickets, coins, pebbles . . .

A cemetery may not be the most obvious sites to visit in a city like Paris so rich in art, architecture, and more conspicuous manifestations of “history.”  For us, though, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise and Cimetière du Montparnasse were fascinating places to spend a few hours.

Abélard and Héloïse's grave

Apollinaire's grave

Marguerite Duras' grave

Maupassant's grave