In Paris as an invité d'honneur for an Indian-themed literary festival, I found I was unoccupied and at a loose end, as any invité d'honneur will be. The idea that a successful literary festival will focus on literature is quixotic and unfeasible. This one had a session on astrology, to which the reign of the BJP has lent a new seriousness, and the Mairie de Paris at the Place Gambetta exuded, once you'd passed security, a smell of samosas. My co- invité d'honneur, the lovely Jerry Pinto, had arrived before me, and spent much of the day wandering about a graveyard. We were in the dour 20th arrondissement. It was sunless, but not raining. It was cold. Jerry told me that the Père Lachaise cemetery was actually next door to our small hotel. The hotel itself was being refurbished (it was off-season, after all) and had strips of tarpaulin laid out wherever one's feet could step: a visual antinomy of the red carpet. "All the communists are buried in the same place," said Jerry, who, by the time I arrived, had done a thorough recce of Père Lachaise. Marxists have a way of ending up together.
I wanted to see Jim Morrison's grave. He was in Père Lachaise too. I'd always liked Morrison - "day destroys the night/ Night divides the day.../ Break on through to the other side" - but I found the thought of being a pilgrim to the grave funny, almost as funny as being a fan at a rock concert. At the same time, I was moved - I didn't need to think of Morrison's final resting-place to feel sad: I find his songs, performances, even his beautiful face, both exhilarating and moving. But there's something doubly sad about a young exile's grave - one of rock's soldiers, felled inexplicably, unnecessarily, in peacetime.
"I went to Oscar Wilde's grave too," said Jerry. Wilde's ruin is as famous as his aphorisms. I had forgotten that Morrison and Wilde had had their untimely demises abroad. "Of course, Wilde is actually buried in a pauper's grave. No one knows where," said Jerry, "What you see in Père Lachaise is a headstone." I raised my eyebrows but was visited, again, by great sadness. One feels an intense, regretful protectiveness towards Wilde, as if one were somehow personally responsible for the atrocious inhumanity of his last years. One suffers not for his sins, but thinking of his purity. Maybe it was this that made Jerry share this bit of apocrypha - because, since leaving Paris, I've found no confirmation of it anywhere. Yes, Wilde was first buried in Bagneux Cemetery, but his remains were evidently shifted to Père Lachaise in 1909.
The next morning, I met up with a German academic I knew from Calcutta - she was interested in my campaign for this city's architecture - who'd informed me she was in Paris at this time. We elected to see each other not among the waves of tourists at St Michel, but at the hotel entrance. Jerry, with whom I'd just had breakfast, shooed us off towards the Père Lachaise cemetery. "You go," he said in his lax Bombay way, "I spent hours there yesterday."
Secretly, I was glad my companion was European. Europeans are less inhibited by maps than Indians. (The Salon L'Inde Des Livres might have a panel discussion on this in a future edition.) There's a time and place to get lost, as Walter Benjamin once said. This morning wasn't one of them. I had duties that afternoon. When we arrived at the cemetery, we encountered a gigantic blob on a notice board near the entrance. It told us where the important graves were. Jim Morrison seemed very near. Others located on the board included Sarah Bernhardt, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust and Seurat. Each was in a different, far-flung part of the graveyard. What could possibly join one to the other except death, 20th-century Paris and modernity? The imaginary lines were marginally clearer than the route leading from, say, Proust to Bernhardt. We advanced up a slight gradient, radiant floral arrangements to our right and a garbage skip in the distance. "The flowers are for Jim Morrison," I said. My companion smiled: "They could also be for Apollinaire." "No, Apollinaire's flowers would be in the skip." We turned right into a path flanked by obelisks and mausoleums installed by astonishing inherited wealth. A destitute would find a place of rest here only if he or she were a genius.
We went to the end of the path, turned left, and concluded we were lost. Finding Jim Morrison in the thicket of well-to-do signposts looked momentarily impossible. My companion disclosed her un-European aversion to map-reading. I knew there had to be something atypical about her: or why would she have been wandering the by-lanes of Calcutta a few months ago? We retraced our steps in the cold November light. I strode briskly, knowing our project had hardly begun, that the graveyard was huge, and that the business of being an invité d'honneur beckoned. We stared at the blob. Then we went back to the path with a false sense of clarity. In retrospect, I marvelled at Jerry's expertise at navigating death's alleyways - he seemed to have visited every important headstone. But we were resolved and, by now, less alienated. "It's strange," I said to my companion, "to walk purposefully in a graveyard." "But better than to lie in one," she said.
A man who worked in the cemetery brought home to us that we'd misunderstood the blob. It was upside down: Jim Morrison was at the opposite end. My German friend had a sudden flash: she could ask Google maps for help. It worked in the way apps do: pushing us headlong and confusing us intermittently. A pathway lit up on her phone. A German voice mispronounced French names. Morrison's reputation for elusiveness seemed wholly justified.
The grave, when we found it, was a slab, the size of a small parapet for boys to sit on in a small town. It was hemmed in by edifices. On the headstone I discovered his full name, James Douglas Morrison, its middle-class propriety forever damaged by the rock revolution. Flowers adorned the grave, but not the deluge I'd expected; no crowds, like the ones around the Mona Lisa at the Louvre - just a few devout expeditioners who registered my alien presence as much as Morrison's.
Then began our trek to Oscar Wilde. We passed other graves and, by chance, saw Pierre Bourdieu's, buried with his wife beneath what was now a transiently bright sky. He hadn't been listed in the blob. As we turned from the grave, my companion, a sociologist like Bourdieu, asked me why I was unconverted to his notion of the "literary field". "I'm not opposing it with romantic individuality," I said, "or proposing that the writer is essentially alone." We continued walking up the difficult, paved path. "It's just that I think the 'field' is more unpredictable than Bourdieu makes it out to be. It's a mystery why writers sometimes conspire against prestige, and why they sabotage chances for straightforward success - why they sometimes act not on behalf of their own survival, but of the survival of a particular sensibility. The 'field' is surely made up of far more contradictory impulses than Bourdieu allows." We'd left him well behind by now, and were lost again. The Google maps woman misled you unless you paid constant attention.
The headstone of Wilde's tomb is a winged figure sculpted by Jacob Epstein in a Mesopotamian-Assyrian style. It's cordoned off to protect it from the kisses of admirers. Not far from it is Raymond Roussel's grave (like Bourdieu's, not listed in the guide); Roussel, who wrote a 'novel' and long poem about Africa without ever having visited that continent, and travelled to Egypt, but never emerged from the hotel or from a special form of transportation in which he was carried, called the roulette, to actually 'see' where he was.
We duly photographed the winged creature. Wilde was a joyous cynic, never taken in by concepts that others were slaves to. His freedom from illusions expressed itself in his imperious aphorisms. I see Walter Benjamin as another such figure: a dandy of thought, resistant to inherited ideas. On the other side of this sophistication is - common to both Wilde and Benjamin - a gaucheness, an almost childlike purity to which those extravagant insights are related. It's an innocence that leads to a fundamental misreading of the world's brutality. From a place of unsullied, unsuspecting simplicity springs Wilde's death, as does Benjamin's suicide in 1940 in Portbou, where he concluded, very possibly wrongly, that there was no escape for him from the Nazis. For me and my companion, the exit was near; Wilde and Benjamin had unexpectedly found there was none.
