The Wine of Remembrance

Host Dr. Robert Philipson guides listeners through a lyrical meditation on memory, identity, and the lasting imprint of Paris. Framed by a moment of reflection on the banks of the Oubangui River in the Central African Republic, Philipson recalls the two years of his childhood spent in Paris—an experience that profoundly shaped both him and his mother, despite their outward return to American life. The episode captures the sometimes bittersweet reality of living with beauty, displacement, and the “Baudelairean longing for ailleurs” (elsewhere). As Paris fades into the past, it emerges again—through memory, art, and the riverbank reverie—as a defining and indelible presence.

Host Info:
Dr. Robert Philipson
Former professor of African-American studies and Harlem Renaissance scholar. Filmmaker and founder of Shoga Films, with a focus on the intersection of race, sexuality, and culture.
Website: shogafilms.org

Music

"J'ai Deux Amours" - Josephine Baker

"Easter" - Francis Bebey

"À la claire fontaine" - Baby Petons

"À La Tour Eiffel" - Melody Gardot & Philippe Powell

"Les rues de Paris" - Nicolas Godin

"Les Champs-Elysées" - Joe Dassin

"Sous Le Ciel De Paris" - Karrin Allyson

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Transcript

The Wine of Remembrance - Read by Dr. Robert Philipson

I was an American again, had been for the decade since we had returned from our sojourn in France. Nothing, it seemed, had stuck from my wonder years in the City of Lights except for something of the language I had learned to speak fluently by the end of our time there. And even that grew rusted beyond use. I minored in French as an undergraduate. Reading was not pleasurable, writing even less so, and I never had to speak it much in class. Nor did we speak much of the Paris years in our family, taken up as we were with the traumas and challenges of adolescence. As an American family in Paris, not knowing other American families, we were forced into a life together that was far more prolonged than our suburban mesa with its openness and centrifugal social forces would have demanded. As soon as we returned to Pasadena, we shot our separate ways. 

The only one who longed for Paris and sometimes spoke of it was my mother. With a shrug of resignation, she resumed her routine on the mesa. But she was a private woman and kept her unhappiness to herself. To cousin Marion in Paris she mourned through letters the bracing, cosmopolitan life she had known there. As children, natural narcissists, we knew little of her sense of loss. Well, I had my glimpses. There was a European-style outdoor café in an alleyway of downtown L.A. When I went with my mother she would order an espresso – not common in 1966 – and buy me an Italian soda with any flavor syrup that I chose. Then she would talk of Paris. “Bobby, do you remember the first and last time I brought home tête de veau?” I laughed. “Not one of your more successful forays into French cuisine.”  

These were blips. Paris, it seemed, was a chapter in the past.  

And then, when I applied to the Peace Corps, I was invited to serve in the Central African Republic, a former French colony, because, theoretically, I could speak the language used in their schools. I had no idea what I was stepping into, but that was part of the Peace Corps romance.  Due to its colonial history, the C.A.R. had its best air connection with Paris. There was no direct flight from America. And so, on the way to Africa, our little group of trainees had a day’s layover at the Orly airport. I hopped on public transport and went straight to the neighborhood I had lived in eleven years ago. I spent the time walking about in a happy haze of memory, noting what had changed and what had remained the same. Details of Paris living – the blue and white street signs, the round iron grates protecting the trees, the gleaming patisserie windows – bloomed to life. No need to see the monuments; I had my own Paris to revisit. 

I boarded a plane bound for Bangui that evening, and the African adventure continued, blasting all cottony nostalgia of la vie en rose from my head. Or so I thought. The rain forest of Mbaiki, where we concentrated on learning or improving our French, couldn’t have been more different from anything I had known before: all trees and rutted laterite roads and even a visit to a pygmy settlement. The second stage, practice teaching and lessons about the local culture, took place in the capital, a remote, sleepy town on the banks of the astonishing Oubangui River. I had never seen a watercourse like it, so broad and exotic with its intense green shores and dark coffee Africans in their dark coffee canoes. 

We were busy during the training program, but once that ended we waited to be delivered by the Central African government to our teaching posts upcountry. There were no commercial internal flights. The demands of cargo delivery and military schedules dictated air connections. Many of us cooled our heels in Bangui far longer than we expected. 

On one of those fallow days, I took a notebook to the banks of the Oubangui. I fancied myself a writer, and I would describe the scene before me. It was going to be the literary equivalent of  plein air painting – all light and description and color – and I would end up in a flood of tears. 

I am sitting on the banks of the Oubangui flowing west from Central African to the sea. It is a place of impressive and exotic beauty: the great river rushes by carrying bits of greenery torn from the upper portion of the continent. Except for the rapid near my bankside perch, the river’s surface runs smooth and sensuously. Long dugout canoes glide by as languorously as junks sliding into the golden moire of a Chinese sunset. As always, the great greenery of the continent and the vastness of the sky dominate the scene; the river flows broad and powerfully to compete. Such beauty is obvious and would strike the eye of any visitor. The quality of light, the huge fantastic cloud formations, the silver sheen of the river itself will constantly shift and mutate, but the basic elements of this scene’s beauty – river, forest, sky – remain constant. 

Yet as I look at this beauty, it wears a raiment of exoticism that only outsiders perceive. What do the Africans see when they gaze upon this river? A highway? An obstacle? A source of food and water? Were they to come to Pasadena might they not find our city hall with its Spanish Colonial Revival architecture equally exotic, whereas to me it was scarcely to be remarked upon? “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but the adage hides more complexity. The beholder has a life, a biography, an education, a personality that creates “personal” beauty that is as invisible to outsiders as exoticism is to insiders. This is the house where I grew up! Can you not see past its fading stucco exterior and half-dead backyard lawn? I lived in Paris for two years, and on some level I knew it was beautiful – the “Paris” of adults – but I had been ripped out of my familiar context, and, always a crybaby even in the best of times, my tears fell copiously at first.  I couldn’t understand the language; the street signs were as mystically incoherent as the non-linear streets they marked. So easy to get lost, and if I did get lost, how would I find my way home?  

My school life, central to any eleven-year-old, started off as a Calvary of horrors. That same yawp on the streets was all they spoke at school. I would have to learn it. Put back a grade for being “stupid,” I felt humiliated. I couldn’t understand what was going on in class. The school itself was worn down, architecturally dreary, sexually segregated, and ruled by an ossified pedagogy of the previous century: rote learning at its worst. The history lessons were uncontexualized highlights of French history written on the chalkboard in colors that had to be exactly reproduced in our student cahiers. A wrong color took your grade down. But even if I managed to copy these lessons exactly as they were written on the chalkboard, I was as ignorant of the highlighted names and events after as before: Louis XVI, les États généraux, le Sermant du Jeu de paume. In geography, we created a grid on our cahier page and drew, as best we could, the twists and turns of France’s rivers: the Seine, the Rhône, the Loire – as well as their tributaries! And the dreaded dictations! All famous passages from French literature (and you better know how to spell the tenses of the utterly archaic passé simple) whose sophisticated sentiments far surpassed the comprehension of any elementary school boy. 

We stood every time the teacher entered the classroom, remained standing until we were told to sit. We sat at ancient wooden desks and dipped our nib pens in their inkwells. (That was a bridge too far for me. My cahiers were a splattered mess until the French system cracked ever so slightly to grant me the special dispensation of a ballpoint pen. Mais c’est dommage quand même. Il n’aurait jamais la discipline ni le plaisir d’une belle ecriture.)  

I was a stranger and thus exposed to all the childhood cruelties of being different. Schoolboys would approach me in the small courtyard that served as our playground and spit out parroted phrases in English. These were innocuous in themselves, but the intention was to hurt, and I was an easy mark. My rage was all the more entertaining for passing through the mangle of my linguistic handicap. One boy in particular named De Vilelle – funny how the names of our childhood tormentors burn into us – said “What time is it please?” in a way the infuriated me far more than any insult. After a particularly vicious bombardment of broken English, I implored my mother to give me a curse to fling back. She taught me the French word for “pig” – cochon. Unfortunately I heard couchons! whose meaning is considerably different, and for the next few days, I bitterly challenged my huitième tormentors to go to bed with me.  

Little by little Paris insinuated herself into my consciousness. I acquired a decent command of schoolboy French, and the things we did impressed even a mind reared on candy bars and TV. (We didn’t have one while living abroad.) The Eiffel Tower, to choose the obvious example, has been a tourist cliché since its opening in 1889. Even I knew it was a French icon and was familiar with the way it towered over the city well before I stood, awed and excited, at its gargantuan base. What child wouldn’t be thrilled by the curves and arcs, the triangles and parallelograms, the surprising grillwork lining the arc of the semi-circles planted at the base? The view from the top, 276 meters, is what everyone remembers, but stand directly underneath and look up. This symmetry and latticework – could one call something of this dimension delicate? – will punch into anybody’s mind, no matter how jaded, distracted, or incurious. And this is only the beginning. For the child there is the novelty of ticket booths at each base pillar, the gee-whiz wonder of the many lifts, some of them inclined, rising to and falling from the second floor. On that floor, where the child exits to another set of lifts, the enormous windows of a fancy restaurant survey the city from 115 meters. The final lift takes the child on his smooth and wondrous journey up the wrought-iron geometry of the tapering top. He steps onto the platform, and lo! the vision of Paris from the perspective of the angels smashes into his memory. No matter what else he sees, this he’ll always recall.  

It is a peak experience, and many an American child has had it branded on his brain. Beautiful. Impressive. But a cliché. This American child, however, greeted the Tower on a daily basis during his walk to school; noted how it peeked over the Mansard roofs of the buildings on the street where his cousin lived; took comfort from its presence in any space open enough – the Place de la Concorde – or high enough – Montmartre’s summit – to welcome the constant friend.   

We could not see the Eiffel Tower from our apartment building, but once we crossed the street, bam!, the Arc de Triomphe hunkered two blocks away, separated from the neighborhood by a whizzing perimeter of circling cars. The apartment we lived in was at the northern tip of the posh 16th arrondissement, large and possessed of a faded European elegance: high molded ceilings, chandeliers in the front rooms, tall French windows behind heavy yellow drapes, and horrible engravings of rococo angels on the walls. For some reason, these dreary artworks frightened me excessively, and I refused to look at them directly. Most of them came down in time, but the one most menacing to me stayed on the wall of my bedroom for the whole two years. It took a fabulous amount of concentration never to look directly at that picture – only a child could be capable of it – but although its presence is a permanent fixture of my Parisian sojourn, I could not describe it to save my life – clouds and putti and arrows in some hazy design. My bedroom was actually a conscripted second salon; I also had tall French windows looking out onto the city. From my room I could see not only a good slice of Avenue d’Iéna but some of Avenue Marceau and even the rear of the ultra-modern Drugstore publicis fronting the Champs-Elysées. I loved standing at the windows at night, staring at the traffic and lights of the avenues. Often, however, I would receive warning that the angels in my nemesis-picture were preparing to shoot their poisoned arrows. I had only until the count of ten to get under the covers, providing miraculous protective powers. On occasion, I miscalculated the time I had to barricade myself, but countdown slowed enough – who knows how? -- to allow those precious extra seconds. There were some thrilling close calls, however. 

As far as her vast arts and history was concerned, I was much too young, too callow to appreciate that side of Paris. And not just Paris. I was dragged uncomprehending and filled with fatigue through palaces, museums and cathedrals, culminating during an Easter tour of Italy in a mad, three-hour endurance run through some 42 rooms of the Uffizi Gallery.  Towards the end of our cultural travail we were speeding past walls and roomfuls of Florentine and Renaissance masterworks. That was an outlier, however, Normally my parents kept our cultural inoculations at bearable levels. A Sunday at the Jeu de Paume would be compensated for by devoting the next Sunday to a picnic and a game of boules in the Bois de Boulogne. 

My parents, especially my mother, drank Paris to the lees. One could hardly blame them for wanting to try everything the experience of living there had to offer. After thirteen years of the postwar American dream – babies, suburbs, automobiles –it seemed like a lifting of the veil. For Mother Paris was a glittering pool reflecting in images of the city all the life and enthusiasm she had previously tried to lavish on the PTA and the Girl Scouts. She marketed every day, but what a joy it was to enter each of the little shops on the rue Jean Giradoux and buy camembert, bâtards,  and jambon de Paris. I went with her some mornings and explored the contents of each little store: the clean, well-lighted laiterie, the dark and crowded cave, the sweet-smelling bakery of elongated loaves and glossy pastries; the boucherie with brains and sweetbreads sitting on marble counters in the open air.  

It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? This is the Paris of nostalgia. My mother too had a steep learning curve: the bumbling with money (prices were posted in New Francs, but everyone spoke of them as Old Francs), her frustration with the language, the condescension of the storekeepers, and the animosity of the maids out shopping for their mistresses. Fed up one day with the woman hectoring her from behind, she turned and snapped, “Tombez mort!” (The insult got lost in translation.) But she loved the experience, even during the first difficult months. She loved being outside, walking around, seeing, absorbing, listening to the life of the city. 

The city . . . This was our first lived experience of the city. And what city is more picked over, in terms of clichés, than Paris? But when you live with a cliché and it becomes a part of you, the raiment of exoticism melts away. The fabulously wide, white sidewalks of the Champs-Elysées, the opulent architecture of the Garnier Opera House, the lavish outdoor displays of crab and oysters and shrimp on beds of ice before the seafood brasseries – all clichés! But I had taken the 10-minute walk down the Champs-Elysées to visit the bibiliothèque amèricaine, to check out Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton – I couldn’t get enough of The Fabulous Five. The American bookstore, Brentano’s, was located at 37, avenue de l’Opéra, le dernier cri in sleek book sales where the clerks of the children’s section in the basement were kind enough to let me sit and read for hours. The iced seafood cornucopias we passed on our way to Le Relais de Venise, a cramped, unpretentious restaurant serving mouthwatering steak-frites as its sole main dish.  

What we discovered about great cities is that they are great not only for their monuments, their art and their history; they are great for the life of their streets and their squares and their parks. And then there are the special urban signatures of their existence, the pretzel carts of New York, the double decker buses of London. Paris was a symphony of such grace notes: the heavy stone buildings with their portes cochères and concierge buzzers, the sinuous iron metro entrances, the espresso makers and pinball machines of the corner cafes, the crêpe stands where the maître crêpier spread sweeping arcs of yellow batter on the hot black disk of the galetière. This was a greatness that was accessible even to a twelve-year-old mind, and though I did not know it, Paris was marking me with the character of her existence. 

Every school day, three seasons out of four, I walked the 2-kilometer trajectory four times between our apartment and the école maternelle on Rue Decamp. (I ate the midday meal at home. School cafeterias and pack lunches were not part of the local culture.) When I remember those walks – how much longer they seemed than two kilometers! – I think of the frigid blue predawn of a Paris winter. I had never known such cold in California. I am bundled in a scarf and heavy jacket. The streetlights of Avenue Kléber switch off, and I shift my book bag from hand to hand so that each will have a chance to rest within my pocket. The air is so cold that I feel it sliding into my lungs, and the scrape of my feet on the sidewalk sounds harsh and brittle. As I cross the avenue at the Rue de Longchamps, the unmistakable Tower is perfectly framed by the two wings of the Trocadero Palace. This I take in four times a day – my walk to school.  

It was at such moments that Paris worked her influence on me – and all unconsciously. I was not a child of precocious sensibilities. I explored Paris as much in my own way as did my mother, the difference being that she gloried fully in the mutable beauty around her whereas I could only capture in retrospect, in frozen images, the life  that touched my imagination with loveliness and discontent. 

Except one time, one time when I was able to grasp the preciousness of life as it drew me in its current. It was my first time fully conscious, and of course it was with my mother. It was her longing embrace of Paris, all the greatness and transcendence of our daily lives, which infused that afternoon with magic and imprinted it on my memory. 

It was a Thursday afternoon in April and filled with sun. Elementary school children had Thursdays and Sundays for holidays. My mother went shopping in the morning as she usually did, then invited me over lunch to walk with her to a Delacroix exhibition at the Louvre. I did not know who Delacroix was, but being invited by my mother in such an adult undertaking pleased me immensely, and I accepted. 

We stepped into the glittering air of April and walked the two blocks to the Champs-Elysées. Once on the Champs, we turned out backs to the huge benevolent Arc de Triomphe (even when the top had been taken over by soldiers during the months of OAS bombings the Arc always seemed friendly and familiar) and headed down the long, gentle slope of sidewalk that ran past the high-end stores, the posh brasseries, the ritzy George V to the Rond Point. To my childish eyes, the sidewalks of the Champs seemed twenty yards wide, so white they made you squint in the sun. Of the grands boulevards it is the grandest. Its sweep from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde is as Napoleon had envisioned it: majestic. The upper half is building, the lower portion, park; both retain a vision of life that is grander and more gracious than any American street I’ve known. In the city section: white buildings, white sidewalks, great glass windows displaying luxury cars and extravagant retail. Through this celebration of materialist hubris clicked smartly-dressed men and women, a French and foreign panoply of the rich, the entitled, and the gawkers.  

But the Champs-Elysées was my avenue in my neighborhood. My landmark was the sleek, open-air candy shop in front of the Folies Bergères with its large baskets of truffles, chews, and hard candies. As for the expensive cinemas featuring foreign films in version originale, I was less intrigued by the brightly lit lobbies than the French posters advertising Les canons de Navarone, Divorce à l’Italiènne, and the crown jewel of gay cinephiles everywhere, Qu’est-il arrivé à Baby Jane? (“Quand la tension monte, rappelez-vous que ce n’est qu’un film.”) Most impressive as a marker of America’s cultural power and its ineradicable presence in my memory of the Champs was the huge, shockingly red reproduction of the West Side Story poster – wide black, blood-spattered font bordering the angled thin black lines of abstracted fire escapes – holding high court over the Cinéma Normandie for a whole year – inouï! 

The sign still reigns as my mother and I pass shops, brasseries, and gilded iron gates, round-grated trees and avenues planned for coach-and-fours. Once past the jets of Rond Point marking the entrance to the Jardins des Champs-Elysées, we continue on paths of dirt and gravel, past the puppet show’s applause, under the elms and chestnut trees just filling out for spring. And to the Concorde. The scene widens, the man-made symmetry, temporarily obscured by nature, reasserts itself: two huge fountains and a needle of stone. The brown and gold street lamps form a paean of geometrical praise. The cars whiz about in frenzy of purpose but like the droplets that spin and play off the lavishly ornate fountains, their course is dictated by the structure of stone. And even this is set within a grander symmetry, for the Place is the center of the Empire’s cruciform dominance, the transept running from the Madelaine to the Chambre des Deputés, the nave stretching from the Louvre to the Arc, the restored monarchy’s cross with its pointed obelisk, from Luxor itself, forever rigid at its center. 

We crossed the Concorde to the roar of traffic and the fainter splashing of the fountains. Arriving safely on the other side, we entered the Tuileries, the great formal gardens of the Louvre. These are tremendously long, bounded with high terraces and crisscrossed by broad geometrical paths. Walled from the city’s traffic and commerce, they are life at its most civilized, the veined white statues of naked heroes and goddesses, the children sending toy boats across the octagonal pond. Around the pond, green iron chairs offered indefinite respite for 20 francs, and for those who didn’t need it – strolling, truly strolling, the easy openness of Baudelaire, Maurice Chevalier, and Georges Seurat.  

My mother and I walked up the central alleyway, disturbing a congress of pigeons just beyond the second pond. At the intersection of Avenue Lemonnier that cuts across the gardens where the elongated wings of the Louvre begin, we bought ice-cream cones from a vendor caressing three silver crowns on his cart. My mother asked for strawberry; I vacillated between chocolate and vanilla. The silver crowns came off; the old man dug into his wells to let me try both flavors. And still I hesitated. “Il faut faire le choix, petit. Il faut faire le choix.” 

The choice. No, the choice was never mine, not as a child. As an adult, perhaps, and even then I’m not sure. Paris never left me, even when I thought she had. The city chose me.  

And now we traverse the parquet floors under the high ceilings of the Louvre. On the walls hang the mysterious, roiling paintings of Delacroix. Here the exotic slapped me in the face: tigers playing with one another, the lion hunts of the Moors, the dreamy intimate Women of Algiers, faces of despair and inscrutable hopelessness at the Massacre at Chios, Liberty with her tricolor leading the July Revolution from one unpopular monarchy to another. My mother and I walked slowly through the exhibition, marveling at his colors and tracing his sinuous lines. My mother pointed these out to me, but through her eyes I saw them myself, the first time, I believe, I appreciated a work of art. It was not the dutiful applause of a dead hand; it was emotion in the present: personal, immediate, there. No doubt the company and the progress of the afternoon had softened me up, but I had finally seen it, felt it, and a threshold had been crossed. A few weeks later I would stand before Michaelangelo’s David, and this time unprompted, the synapses would spark, an opening of vision only to be understood with the coming of age.  

When we stepped out of the Louvre, the light had taken on the yellow cast of the late April afternoon. The shadows of the old palace stretched across the gardens, and we could feel the presence of the Seine beyond its walls. It was time to go home. We walked toward the Arc du Carrousel, the smaller sibling of Napoleon’s triumphal arches. The Carrousel stands at the head of the imperial cross. From its shelter one looks down the green length of the Tuileries, up the broad sweep of the Champs-Elysées to the great, silhouetted bulk of the Arc du Triomphe, perfectly bisected by the obelisk’s tapering shaft. As my mother and I approached the Carrousel’s vantage, a light breeze swept across the gardens, tipping the balance of the afternoon into evening. We stared along our progress and held silent. We would not walk back. Already the reddening of the setting sun had set the distant Arc aglow. The breeze died down; its absence left a pause, a brief caesura of time. 

“We’ll have to leave here soon,” my mother said. 

And that was all. 

Had I been older, I would have been jarred by the unexpectedness of her statement. As a child, however, I accepted, accepted without comprehension that at the afternoon’s peak, at the summit of our journey washed in gold, she had pronounced the end, pronounced it with a grief and resignation I could not fathom. 

It was true. We did have to go back, back to the mesa, back to the insatiable urban sprawl, the smog and freeways, the constricted complacency of people who knew nothing other than their cossetted middle-class lives. What choice did we have? We followed our parents as blindly back to Pasadena as we had followed them to France. Our trust was total, and we did not understand what Paris had done to us – nor was it uniform. Each sibling had her own experience of Paris, of Europe. For me and my younger sister, who had become French écoliers during our two years there, the repercussions would echo throughout our lives, but we had no foreknowledge of that.  

What choice did my father have, supporting a family of six? The aerospace industry had slumped; a European branch of Atlantic Research Corporation was no longer viable. And since my father was a man who didn’t share his emotions, I never knew if he formed a bond with the city itself. He didn’t like the Parisians. The French, during this period of Gaullist chauvinism, took every opportunity to display their disdain for the callow materialism of what they conceived America to be, and my father, never having gained any facility with the language, made no friends among them. (“The French are as awful to each other as they are to strangers,” he wrote me later, “and if it weren’t for the generals’ need for a constant supply of cannon fodder, I doubt they’d reproduce.”) 

What choice did my mother have? She had to follow her husband and children. For her it would hurt the most. No more strolling afternoons, no more night-walks on the quays of the Seine with the family and the family dog, no more weekend trips to Brussels and London, no more sophisticated café conversations with cousin Marion about art and politics and men, no more winter vendors selling hot sweet chestnuts in newspaper cones, no more, no more the blood and pulse of the city. 

It is evening now. The African sunset has fired the clouds in the west, and their colors reflect in the river’s silver flow. It is quiet and peaceful and cool. The green hills of the opposite bank begin to dull with the waning of the day. It’s an odd place to think about Paris, an odd place to think about anything but the beauty of such water and these hills. But the eye of the behold looks out from a mind, and the mind has its memories to bear. If I think of Paris, my mother, and the yellowing light of an April afternoon, it is because they have a place in this African scene, because I have a place in this African scene. I am half a world away from my family now. I thought I had come for myself, to see and explore, my Wanderjahre. But no! I may pay homage to the debts of my past, to live in youth on the horizon my mother beheld. In her yearning for Paris, I commingled nostalgia with a life of plenitude elsewhere; home was never good enough. We had, each in our own way, absorbed the Baudelairean longing for . . . ailleurs. 

N’es-tu pas l’oasis où je rêve, et la gourde 

Où je hume à longs traits le vin du souvenir? 

These silly tears! Cheap sentimentality! Paris, Pasadena, now Africa – not knowing what Africa may come to mean. It is still exotic. But who can tell me, as I sit in this impossible, foreign land, that the beauty I perceive does not redeem in part the beauty that my mother left for me?