Never Any End to Paris Read Online Free

comments on the writer led me to think that if one day I happened to visit Monsieur Gracq, I would try to ensure that he wasn’t the first person ever to notice that I bear or might bear a certain resemblance to Hemingway. I wouldn’t want him to throw me out of his house in a rage.
    Julien Gracq writes: “If I had to write a study on Hemingway, I would entitle it
On Talent Considered as a Limit
. He sets up dialogue with the same certainty with which Sacha Guitry takes the stage: he knows he will never bore us; he puts marks on paper as naturally as others walk down stairs. His mere presence bewitches us; then we go outside to smoke and stop thinking about him. This sort of talent, repeated in book after book, does not allow for incubation or maturation, for risk or defeat: it is nothing more than an interlude.”
    And he adds: “In the hunt for the exact word, there are two breeds: the trappers and the stalkers: Rimbaud and Mallarmé. The second group invariably has a higher percentage of successes, their yield might not bear comparison
. . . but they never come back with live specimens
.”
    (Rimbaud and Mallarmé. For a moment I recalled a terrifying question that Marguerite Duras had asked me about them one day when my guard was down . . .)

11
     
    In Key West, once disqualified and expelled from the Hemingway look-alike contest, I started to think, quite intensely, about Marguerite Duras and above all about the evening in the house at Neauphle-le-Château where, as she explained the pallid but intense plot of her novel
The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas
, she actually became that book. If it’s true we become the stories we tell about ourselves, this is exactly what happened to Marguerite that evening, she turned into that story which takes place on a plateau halfway up a hill where, aging and immobile, M. Andesmas, able to see only the edge of a ravine filled with light and crisscrossed by birds, resting in a wicker armchair, waits for Michel Arc. It is a story of waiting, waiting for death, perhaps. It’s hot. Rising from the chasm, the bottom of which M. Andesmas cannot see, comes music from a record player. It’s the summer’s hit song: “When the lilacs will bloom, my love, / when the lilacs will bloom forever.” The record player is in the village square. People are dancing. A reddish-brown dog walks past and disappears into the forest. Michel Arc keeps him waiting, he takes a long, long time, too long. M. Andesmas falls asleep and the shadow of a nearby beech tree moves toward him. There is a gust of wind. The beech tree trembles . . .
    There are no half-measures in the literature of Marguerite Duras. You either love it or hate it profoundly. Her writing is no interlude, this seems clear to me. That day, in Key West, I remember that I suddenly began to think first about Marguerite Duras and then — I suppose in order to stop agonizing over being disqualified — I began to think of the many writers who were better than Hemingway. For years I’d known deep down that there were many better writers. In fact, within a few months of moving to Paris, I’d stopped reading Hemingway in order to devote my time to other writers, some of whom immediately seemed better; though he has always been like a great father to me,
Papa
Hemingway, whom I’ve never wished to entirely dethrone, and the proof is in my insistence on believing I look like him. After all, he influenced my vocation with these lines that drove me to be unhappy in Paris: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other . . . Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”
    There is never any end to Paris.
    I remember the days when I started to plan the first book of my life, that novel I was going to write in the sixth-floor garret of number 5, Rue