Cross Channel by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

circle. They did, after all, admit occasional outsiders - an unfrocked priest, a Communist Party militant - to their discussions. And perhaps they thought a conventional twenty-nine-year-old Englishman supposedly acquired through a linguistic misunderstanding might usefully broaden their terms of reference. My uncle was fond of attributing his permitted presence to the French dictum that within every lawyer there lurk the remnants of a poet. I am not of either world, you understand (and neither was my uncle). Is this piece of wisdom any truer than its opposite: that within every poet there lurk the remnants of a lawyer?
    Uncle Freddy maintained that the session which heattended took place in the apartment of the man he met in the bar; which limits it to five possible locations. There were about a dozen participants according to my uncle; nine according to the Recherches . I should make it clear that since Session 5(a) was not published until 1990, and my uncle died in 1985, he was only ever faced with self-inflicted incompatibilities. Further, the tale of Uncle Freddy and the Surrealists was strictly for what he called the smoking-room, where narrative libertarianism was more acceptable. After swearing listeners to lifelong silence vis-à-vis Aunt Kate, he would enlarge on the frank licentiousness of what had taken place back in 1928. At times he would claim to have been shocked, and maintain that he had heard more filth in one evening among Parisian intellectuals than he had in three years of barrack-room life during the last war. At others, his self-presentation was as the English man-about-town, the card, the dandy, all too willing to pass on a few tips, a few handy refinements of technique, to this gathering of Frenchmen whose cerebral intensity, in his view, hampered their normal sensual responses.
    The published Session, needless to say, confirms neither version. Those who have read the Recherches will be familiar with their strange mixture of pseudo-scientific inquiry and frank subjective response. The truth is that everyone talks about sex in a different way, just as everyone, we naturally assume, does it in a different way. Andre Breton, animator of the group, is a lofty Socratic figure, austere and at times repellent (‘I don’t like anyone to caress me. I hate that.’). The others are variously benign to cynical, self-mocking to boastful, candid to satirical. The dialogues are happily full of humour; occasionally of the unintended sort, inflicted by posterity’s frigid judgment; but more often intended, issuing from a rueful acknowledgment of our human frailty. Forinstance, in Session 3, Breton is catechising his male companions about whether they would allow a woman to touch their sex when it was not erect. Marcel Noll replies that he hates it. Benjamin Péret says that if a woman does that to him, he feels diminished. Breton agrees: diminished is exactly the right word for how he would feel. To which Louis Aragon rejoins: ‘If a woman touched my sex only when it was erect, it wouldn’t get that way very often.’
    I am straying from the point. I’m probably also trying to put off the admission that my uncle’s participation in Session 5(a) is for most of its extent frankly disappointing. Perhaps there was a false democracy in the assumption that an Englishman picked up in a bar because of a verbal mistake would have important testimony to offer this probing tribunal. ‘T.F.’ is asked many of the usual questions: under what conditions he prefers to have sex; how he lost his virginity; whether and how he can tell if a woman has reached orgasm; how many people he has had sexual relations with; how recently he has masturbated; how many times in succession he is capable of orgasm; and so on. I shall not bother to relate my uncle’s responses, because they are either banal or, I suspect, not wholly truthful. When asked by Breton the characteristically compendious question, ‘Apart from ejaculating in the