“A personal investigation”

Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Vagabond, first published in 1952, has been reissued by NYRB Classics in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, accompanied by Patrice Molinard's  photographs. Positioning itself as a text of notebooks, the book presents Paris as seen from the perspective of a privileged, middle-class Frenchman who dropped out of his bourgeois family life in order to live off the pavement. 

At 17, Clébert ran away from his Jesuit boarding school and joined the French Resistance. The end of World War II is what led him to opt-out of conventional bourgeois life and live on the streets. During his tramp years, he took observational notes and set them aside, just in case he should elect to write them. Preserving these notes is not a small feat when living hand-to-mouth and without a stable residence.

Unsurprisingly, in 1951, Clébert decided to write about it, and his notes happened to survive his tramping. This, too, is part of the book's mise-en-scene, since Clébert apparently drew the notes scraps from his bag, randomly, and wrote in relation to their chance appearance. The method is dada, but the costume is documentary, forming what he called "a personal investigation" into the underground Paris he discovered during the 1940s. 

What emerged is this quasi-anthropological travelog in the key of picaresque following what seems to be a quest-less quest.

“I was living, eating, sleeping and dreaming on a heap of sacks of potatoes…”

The narrative leaps from places, moments, encounters, and streets, pulling fragments and odd materials into its spontaneous vortex. Although Clébert reports that he initially hits the streets in search of sex, the city, with its "apartment buildings fit for troglodytes" and "unlikely skyscrapers silhouetted against the void,” seems the greater lure.

In this anti-postcard Paris of abandoned parking lots and occupied, half-gutted buildings, power lines and other city entrails are on full display. Flea markets teem with life and opportunity. Sociality occurs on stoops and sidewalks and cigarette exchanges, and living is the thing that remains a surprise when one finds a safe place to rest at night.

Clebert narrates this from a self-aware “I” that occasionally pauses to form a “We” among other transients that vanishes as quickly as it took shape:

Like all fellows of my calling, which is that of having no trade, that of the good-for-nothing and the ready-for-anything, I once worked in Les Halles: hands freezing cold and eyes stinging, at an hour when ordinary cafés were closing and turfing out their customers, I used to cross the Pont des Arts footbridge or the Pont Neuf (I was living at the time in Rue des Canettes, in a tiny room with a cot for a bed, no window except for a murky transom above the door and not so much as a pitcher for water to wash with), reach the toiling Right Bank, go and drink endless black coffees at the counter of the Pied de Cochon and watch the well-heeled coming in, after parking their cars outside, and climbing the stairs to the second floor with good-time girls in tow to eat steaming crusty onion soup that cost three times as much as it did at sidewalk level where I was, playing the night’s first game of 421 with head washers in stained smocks and aprons who came in to clean off coagulated blood and savor dry white wine before going back to turn powerful jets of water on the bones, still covered with flesh, of animals whose fate it was to become delectable charcuterie.

There is this constant sense of motion, crossing streets, finding places to pause, discovering an opportunity for food or small labor or drink. The reader accompanies Clebert on these circuitous voyages.

He is our guide to Paris' less touristed vistas.

He takes us for stroll along the Seine, with scenic stops at the makeshift places where the bodies of suicides are fished from the river and brought to dry land.

There are moments expressing the stark physicality of poverty:

As for me, I was living, eating, sleeping and dreaming on a heap of sacks of potatoes, having spent my entire fortune on illumination, venturing out only to scavenge and take the air, each time passing the employees and proprietor of the shop, who gave me vegetables or oranges but clapped palm to forehead behind me as I left. It was here too that my friends, who had digs just like mine or were the proud owners of shadowy corners of this providential quarter, came to visit me, slithering like worms through the gaping holes and cracks that rent all the façades of the block.

There are anecdotes and inherited street wisdoms, as well as exhilarating cityspaces consumed by loneliness, moonlight, and the soft orange of a lit cigarette:

Paris by night is a labyrinth where every street opens onto another or onto one of the boulevards so aptly described as arteries – a labyrinth through which I make my way in fits and starts, like a blood clot, jolting down the steepest inclines, emerging from bottlenecks into empty space. And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing – a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea, haven of peace and freedom from care.

Clébert narrates the origins of various topographical features, including the story of  Philippe Lebon, inventor of the gas burner in Paris, the ancestor of the street lamp. He mixes street-lore with gossip and description:

(It was here some time later that a tender-hearted soul named Fradin, most likely a retired shit-sniffer living off his rents, set up a sort of “hotel,” according to the old books, where guests slept all in a row with their backsides on old sacks and their feet sticking out onto the cobblestones and the napes of their necks resting on a cord stretched taut a few inches above the ground, which at the crack of dawn the wily hostel-keeper undid, thus causing a general collapse of heads and putting an abrupt if not too painful end to the dreams of his guests. . . .)

The effect is so rich that one could almost miss the "old books" that sourced this tale.

The affect is smooth, congruous—-all daub with no signs of wattle.

“Like all fellows of my calling, which is that of having no trade, that of the good-for-nothing and the ready-for-anything…”

As Clebert steps into his persona, in accordance with his "calling," I began to wonder how much of our "inherited sin" (i.e. wealth and class privilege) can be abandoned. If reality attends to what is the case, then the case cannot ignore the reality that most transient persons lack an opportunity to publish their notebooks (let alone imagine this publication will be translated and distributed after their death). 

It seems that those most likely to publish their experiences are those who have chosen poverty and opting-out as a way of life for the purpose of making a statement or understanding the world. And there is a world that Clebert navigates, a topography of the secret Paris occupied by those whom the ordinary Parisian prefers not to see or notice.

There is the jouissance of farting as a friend plays the harmonica: "One autumn evening we indulged in an orgy that was quite fabulous, albeit peaceful and indeed devoid of the sensuous pleasures of fornication, for we were all men, with only rats and bats for company."

"Those were the days," Clerbert writes, before slipping back into his tourist guide costume and qualifying his nostalgia with a warning: 

But memories butter no parsnips, and now that I was a citified tramp in quest of the two things essential to the welfare of any honest man, namely food and lodging, it was time to bestir myself.

Nicholson-Smith's translation is fantastic and filled with archaic weirdness; surely no word could suit that last sentence the way "bestir" suits it up, the way "bestir" gestures towards a business suit in the past of the speaker. 

Would I recommend this book? Absolutely. It wears its era well—and wears this era in a way that converses with the present. It anticipates the critiques that will follow, including those of Orientalism, trauma tourism, and neocolonial cosplay. Lucy Sante's introduction provides splendid context for Clerbert's project. She tracks the bop-style prose reminiscent of Jack Kerouac, and intimates that the book was inspired by Henry Miller and Blaise ­Cendrars.

The terrain covered in Paris Vagabond sparkles, trembles, vomits, and raises its opting-out fist against the world of the fathers, with qualification. This qualification is Clebert, himself, or a strange discord between narrative tone and the embodied challenges of transient life. A certain braggadocio saunters forth at the outset, in his claims of having "infiltrated" the dark heart of Paris for 300 days and nights just to deliver a story with style, like a "stuntman." 

Perhaps it should not be surprising that a man who wrote these words in 1951 would also be the reporter in Asia for Paris Match and France Soir before going on to live among various underprivileged groups, authoring studies of these groups, adding novels about the alchemist of King-Sun (L'Alchimiste du Roi-Soleil) and a hermit (L'hermite) to the mix of a legacy that includes publishing a total of 33 books during his long life, among them, biographies of notable families (Les Daudet, une famille bien française), guidebooks to "mysterious" Provence (Guide de la Provence mystérieuse); tour guides to thermal France (Guide de la France thermale); histories of Provence during the time of the first Christians (Provence antique, 3: Aux temps des premiers chrétiens); geological uplift (La Durance. Rivières et vallées de France); even  Dictionnaire du Surréalisme in 1996. 

Searches on Clebert reveal nothing.

“Little is known about his genealogy as he preferred to keep his personal life private.”

Privacy is quite costly for authors, and I wonder how he could afford it.

“There are no public records or information regarding his family background, ancestors, or descendants.”

How did he secure a publisher for so many books while living in legendary precarity?

“Clébert's legacy lies in his written works, which continue to inspire readers and urban explorers around the world.”

Legends are made of so much less.

“And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing – a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea….”

It is a glamorous life, this guidebooking of the undiscovered other. If Clerbet's legacy is complicated by the gap between his lived experience and his reportage, it is not because he sought the public eye. In many ways, he wrote, traveled, and kept a low profile, retreating to a mountainous region of Provence in 1956, and living among the "abandoned stone villages, and took up residence there without running water or electricity, before moving in 1968 to Oppède-le-Vieux," according to Wikipedia. 

During the war, Oppède-le-Vieux had served as a gathering place and refuge for artists. Clerbert moved there in 1968—and spent the rest of life with Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator's widow, as a neighbor, whose husband, Saint Exupéry, authored a fictionalized account of the failed artist's commune titled Kingdom of the Rocks (1946).

The quiet terror of the middle class has always been its support of bad government, its conservative tendency to vote for whatever maintains their status. Like the German 1968ers, Clebert's critique of the war – and his role in the resistance — required a severance from one's family and future plans. He wanted to be un-identified by privilege.