THE EXISTENTIAL ENGLISHMAN
PARIS AMONG THE ARTISTS
MICHAEL PEPPIATT
Bloomsbury, 365pp, £25
Peppiatt’s life in Paris began in the Sixties after Cambridge, where he worked as an art critic for the French magazine Réalités. He stayed for some decades settling himself into the art scene, eventually becoming a magazine publisher and all the while making himself indispensable to the figures and characters that peopled the ancient capital. This is his memoir, structured around the addresses where he lived, recalling the bohemian atmosphere of Montparnasse, the Latin Quarter, StGermain-des-prés and Le Marais. It is a book of ‘deep intimacy’, he promises, in which he attempts to show that he and the city have blended; ‘You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you.’ Duncan Fallowell, writing in the Spectator, enjoyed this remembrance of things past; ‘his prose is waffly, amiable and loaded with familiar phrases’. But for Laura Freeman, writing in the Times, the book ‘fails to fulfill its promise’; this memoir ‘exasperates more than it bewitches’. There is just a little too much name-dropping – Francis Bacon, Sartre, Beckett, Serge Gainsbourg, Catherine Deneuve – and too much self-absorption. William Leith in the
Evening Standard ‘loved it’, but can see why it can be exasperating; Michael Peppiatt is ‘on a quest to find his own inner mess’.
The Guardian’s Stephen Poole described it as a fond account which ‘passes by easily in the manner of quaffable gossip’, but added that ‘stricter editing wouldn’t have hurt’. Tim Smith-laing felt that this was the very heart of the memoir. In the
Daily Telegraph, he felt that the ‘swirl of parties, interviews and chance encounters that fill this memoir’ all go to show that Peppiatt is a ‘gifted and indefatigable conversationalist’ where the ‘namedrops mount around you in tumbling heaps’. He could see that a reader might reach the end and think, ‘Well, good for you!’