Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,90

right city. It’s crazy how everything comes at you. Everything is an accident. Life is one big accident. I didn’t love this girl the way I loved the German girl, by the way. Maybe because there wasn’t so much sturm und drang.

INTERVIEWER: That was Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata no. 1 in D minor, performed by Thomas Igloi with Clifford Benson on the piano. Now remind me, Ezra Blazer, wasn’t it around this time The Paris Review started up?

EZRA BLAZER: Oh, yes. I think those fellows got there in fifty-three, fifty-four. So this was just a year or two later. And sure, I knew everybody. George, Peter, Tom. Blair. Bill. Doc. Wonderful guys. Charming, adventurous, serious about literature, and, blessedly, wholly unacademic. Paris then still had that aura of the American expatriate adventure: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Transition, Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach, Joyce. And the Paris Review crew, they were romantic about what they were doing. You know that E. E. Cummings poem? “let’s start a magazine / to hell with literature . . . something fearlessly obscene . . .” They were romantic but they were hard-nosed, too, and they were doing something brand-new. Though in the end, like me, they were in Paris because it was fun. And plenty of fun there was.

INTERVIEWER: Were you writing by this time?

EZRA BLAZER: Trying to. I wrote some delightfully poetic little short stories, very sensitive short stories, about . . . Oh, I don’t know. World peace. Pink sunlight on the Seine. That was one problem: the rampant sentimentality of youth. Another was that I was constantly trying to shoehorn characters into each other’s lives, planting them on street corners or in cafés together so that they could talk. So that they could explain things to each other, from across the great human divide. But it was all so contrived. Contrived and meddlesome, really, because sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist. If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. If they don’t, well, that’s interesting, too. Or, if it isn’t interesting, then maybe you need to back up and start again. But at least you haven’t betrayed the reality of things. In my twenties, I was always fighting this, always trying to force meaningful convergence with my ravishing prose. And the result was these airless little short stories that could not be faulted on the sentence level but that had no resonance, no reason for being, no spontaneity. Nothing happened. I showed one to George once and he sent me a note that began, “You plainly have gifts, dear Ez, but you need a subject. This is like Babar written by E. M. Forster.”

INTERVIEWER: Next record.

EZRA BLAZER: Well, at one of the clubs we used to go to we heard Chet Baker play, with Bobby Jaspar, I think, and Maurice Vander, a wonderful pianist, he was around a lot, too. I remember one night listening to them play “How About You?” and feeling just overcome by where I was and what I still had in front of me. All of it! When you’re young you can’t wait for the main event to begin. I couldn’t wait for anything back then. No thinking, just charging—always charging ahead! Do you remember that feeling?

INTERVIEWER: That was “How About You?,” performed by Chet Baker, Bobby Jaspar, Maurice Vander, Benoit Quersin, and Jean-Louis Viale. And can you tell us, Ezra Blazer, why did you leave Paris?

EZRA BLAZER: Why did I leave. A part of me has always wondered. A part of me—the audacious part—has always said to the sensible part: Why didn’t you just stay? If only for the women. Because the erotic life in Paris had nothing to do with what I’d known as a boy at Allegheny. But then, after about a year and a half of it, I really had to come home. My writing, if you can call it that—Well, I didn’t know what I was doing. As I said, it was all this lyrical sentimental crap about nothing. So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a