The Pat Conroy Cookbook (24 page)

BLACK PEPPER AND PEAR TARTE TATIN
    
•
SERVES 8

PEPPERY TEA
               •
MAKES 8 CUPS

I
n the late spring of 1979, I was coming to the end of my time in Paris, and I could feel
The Lords of Discipline
moving toward completion. I would walk the city at night paying homage to writers who had lived there before me. I paid homage to Proust at his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, tipping my hat to Héloïse and Abelard, and paid my dues to the excesses of my rock-and-roll generation by spending ten minutes at the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors. I found the shop that had once housed Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, where every English-speaking writer in the world seemed to have landed, but where James Joyce would come for gossip, sustenance, pocket money, and the companionship of a woman who thought he was the greatest novelist on earth. I spent a morning at Victor Hugo’s house and walked past the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died and ate frequent dinners at Le Polidor, the cheap and unpretentious restaurant where every writer who passed through Paris had eaten dinner. Walking across the Luxembourg Gardens, I would stop at the doorway where Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, had kept an apartment, where Picasso and Matisse and Hemingway and Fitzgerald had come to pay homage.

Paris is a city of words and a secret city of words not written. Signs on buildings give away the names of unknown authors who once lived between those walls. You cannot take a step in Paris without walking on the footprints of a thousand artists and writers who have come before you. It excites every cell in your body; it unnerves you that you are adding your voice to the great simmering bouillon of all the writers who have come before you as the great city and time turn their blind careless eyes toward you. There, at the Deux Magots, Sartre sat with his hand on Simone de Beauvoir and his walleye lingering on an actress coming out of the powder room. Baudelaire got drunk in that tavern and Jean Cocteau ate a dozen oysters at the window of that café in the corner, and Mary McCarthy is living on the third floor of that building at this very moment. The light in her office is on.

But for me, Paris has always been the city of Ernest Hemingway since I first read
A Moveable Feast
in my sophomore year at The Citadel. That book took me over like a fever. Hemingway captured all the romance and wistfulness of both the city and the writing life. He made me want to sit in Parisian cafés, smoking Gitanes, taking notes for stories in embryo, reading
Le Monde
while sipping a café au lait and thumbing through a paperback edition of
Madame Bovary
. Now that I had done all this I was getting ready to leave Paris, and the thought of it almost killed me, because I realized I had taken a great chance by following my editor and his wife on his sabbatical year to Europe. I could feel that I had changed my whole life because of it. After reading
A Moveable Feast
, I had promised myself that I would one day live and write in Paris, and I had kept that promise and come to the city with a spirit of adventure that is rare for me. But I had written the last chapter of
The Lords of Discipline
, and my remaining time in the city was short.

From the time of my arrival, I had made pilgrimages to the places and houses, parks and apartments that Hemingway mentioned in his book. John and Susan Galassi stayed at a charming hotel across the street from where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway had rented an apartment above a sawmill at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine. I would wander for hours amid the prodigious human traffic that made its way down the rue Mouffetard to
the Place Contrescarpe, past booths overflowing with vegetables, groaning with massive white heads of cauliflower, rivers of mâche and asparagus and cabbages from the countryside. The
charcutier
with his trays of sausages and offal sang behind his counter as I passed live chickens in their boxes and the iced-down shrimp and oysters driven over from the coast. The strong smell of cheeses and the bakeries perfuming the streets with the brown aromas of croissants and pastries that made you salivate when you caught their sweet scents in the scrimmage of odors that fought for your attention as you made your way in crowds down that fine, unruly street.

I passed by the tobacconist and the man who sold horseflesh and the one who sold only artichokes and the onion lady who was just before the olive man whose whole existence centered on the presence of olives in France. I headed down the street slowly, Hemingway-besotted, as I tried to remember everything and everyone because the images of Paris would travel with me forever, wherever I went; the rue Mouffetard is carry-on luggage that will be available and on-call wherever I take pen to paper for the rest of my life.

As I write these words on Fripp Island, I realize that I am exactly Hemingway’s age when he first began to write
A Moveable Feast
at the Finca Vigia in Cuba in 1957. In his prose, I can feel the tenderness he had begun to feel for the fiery, virile young man he had once been, and the regret for things he had done and said. His love for his first wife, Hadley infuses the book, as does his pleasure in the company of his firstborn son, John, whom he nicknamed Bumby It is one of the great books ever written about a writer’s life and art. Its ardent sense of place still makes Paris seem like the most glamorous and enchanting place for a writer to be in the world.

I said goodbye to Paris slowly, and it took two weeks to pull it off. Again I went to all the places Hemingway mentions in
A Moveable Feast
. I drank a “black” wine from Cahors because he did, and I had a Rhum St. James at a café near Place St. Michel because Hemingway had done so. I lingered outside the sawmill on the night before I would leave Paris for a car trip to Rome with friends.