It is now more than a half century since Paris for the first time began to be included in the memories of a small contingent of youngish American expatriates, richer than most in creative ambition and rather modest in purse. For the most part, we had recently shipped, third class, to France across the Atlantic. We had settled in the small hotels on the Left Bank near the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, itself perfectly equipped with a large corner café called Les Deux Magots and an impressive twelfth-century Romanesque church with a small garden of old trees, from whose branches the metropolitan blackbirds sang at dawn, audible to me in my bed close by in the Rue Bonaparte.
Though unacquainted with one another, as compatriots we soon discovered our chance similarity. We were a literary lot. Each of us aspired to become a famous writer as soon as possible. After the New York publication of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” he was the first one to touch fame. As I look back on the stir created by his individual style of writing, what stands out in my memory is the fact that his heroes, like Ernest himself, were of outsize masculinity even in small matters. In a letter he wrote to me, he said that he liked to hunt because he liked to kill. By temperament, he was professionally excessive; it was a form of generosity. Married four times, he taught each of his wives how to shoot and how to survive on safari. When he finally shot himself, it was the ultimate melodrama of his spectacular existence. Ernest’s father had also been a suicide, and so had mine, the two deaths occurring at about the same period of our young lives, when we were in our twenties. (I was older than Ernest by seven years.) This was a piece of personal duplicate history that he and I discovered accidentally one day and discussed with exploratory interest at a quiet back table in the Deux Magots. I recall how I, as an agnostic, took a more rationalist view than he of suicide—as an act for freedom. In my mind and conscience, it was a possible, permissible act of liberation from whatever humiliating bondage on earth could no longer be borne with self-respect, and our talk ended with the mutual declaration that if either of us ever killed ourself, the other was not to grieve but to remember that liberty could be as important in the act of dying as in the acts of living. So, years later, I did not believe that Ernest’s death in Idaho from that grotesque gunshot was an accident, as officially reported at first. I automatically recognized the shot as his mortal act of gaining liberty. But I grieved deeply when the pitiful facts of his final bondage were made public—those unbearable bouts of maladive suffering for a man who, as I knew (because he had told me), was a stoic in relation to the pain he had frequently undergone in his accident-prone life, and, what was worse, his realization, at the last, of his tottering faculties and the threatened loss of his reason. At Ernest’s death, I grieved most because he died in a state of ruin.
The hearth and home of the Left Bank American literary colony after 1920 turned out to be Shakespeare and Company, the extraordinary Rue de l’Odéon bookstore founded by the American Sylvia Beach. She had gone to Paris in 1917, during the worst war in French history, because, as she said, she “had a particular interest in contemporary French writing.” Her father, the Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, D.D., was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, of whose congregation Woodrow Wilson was a member while president of Princeton University. Settling her bookshop in the Rue de l’Odéon, Sylvia was able to learn how such an establishment should be run from her close friend Mlle. Adrienne Monnier, owner of the Maison des Amis des Livres, a French literary center just across the street. The compatibility of these two extraordinary women shopkeepers, opposite numbers across what became a cultural Franco-English language stream flowing down their street, visibly added to the quarter’s picturesque quality. Adrienne was mildly spectacular. Buxom as a handsome abbess, she was a placidly eccentric neighborhood figure in a costume she had invented for herself and permanently adopted. It consisted of a full long gray skirt and a sleeveless velveteen waistcoat worn over a white blouse. Sylvia, thin as a schoolgirl, dressed like one, in a juvenile short skirt and jacket over a white blouse with a big white turndown collar, like one of Colette’s young heroines.
Shortly after Sylvia had opened her shop, she received the visit (as she later told me) of two American women. “One of them, with a very fine face, was stout, wore a long robe, and had on her head a most becoming top of a basket. She was accompanied by a slim, dark, whimsical woman; she reminded me of a gypsy.” They were, of course, Gertrude Stein and Miss Alice B. Toklas. Miss Stein was the first subscriber to Sylvia’s lending library, for which she wrote a jocular little advertisement, sent to the rest of us Americans in the quarter, to incite us also to subscribe, which most of us did. It read, “Rich and Poor in English to Subscribers in French and other Latin Tongues,” and concluded with a more cogent statement of Sylvia’s book-rental terms. The three ladies became neighborhood friends, though always at sword’s point in their differing opinions on writing. In fact, Gertrude was so outraged when Sylvia began the publication of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” that she called at Shakespeare and Company to inform Sylvia that thereafter she and Miss Toklas would borrow books only from the eminently respectable official American Library, on the Right Bank.
The publication in toto of “Ulysses” in 1922 by Shakespeare and Company was indubitably the most exciting, important, historic single event for the early Paris expatriate literary colony. It burst over us, young in Paris, like an explosion in print, whose words and phrases fell upon us like a gift of tongues. Over the years, “Ulysses,” which we read only in its early fractions, had established itself as part of our literary life to come, when and if it should ever be completed and published. As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she had to become Joyce’s secretary, editor, impresario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her shop. To help finance the book’s printing, she organized international and local subscription lists. After typesetting had begun, in Dijon, Joyce, in a kind of postscript ecstasy of creation, scribbled some ninety thousand additional words on the costly, repeatedly reset proofs, making a four-hundred-thousand-word volume, of which Sylvia managed to have two copies printed for his fortieth birthday, on February 2, 1922—one for him, one for her.
By the eighth edition, despite the loss of sales in England and the United States, where “Ulysses” was banned and seized, Joyce was living luxuriously. When we minor Left Bankers occasionally went to dance in the evening at Les Trianons, in Montparnasse, we could peer into its elegant restaurant and see the Joyces still at dinner. But we never saw Sylvia dining with them. We also used to see him often in front of Sylvia’s shop. He was a frail-looking figure to have caused such an international commotion—twirling his cane, with his black hat cocked on the back of his head, and wearing not very clean white sneakers. As Sylvia herself apologetically said, “There was always something a little shabby about Mr. Joyce.” She thought him handsome, with his deep-blue eyes, one badly damaged by glaucoma, which had half blinded him. The strain of proofreading his almost illegible handwriting helped ruin her eyesight, too. After years of penury, “Ulysses” was the payoff investment of his lifetime, Sylvia said, while hardly acknowledging the fact that the publishing costs had almost wiped out her Shakespeare and Company. The peak of his prosperity came in 1932, with the news of the sale of his book to Random House for a forty-five-thousand-dollar advance, which, she confessed, he failed to announce to her, and of which, as was later known, he never offered her a penny. “I understood from the first that, working with or for Mr. Joyce, the pleasure was mine—an infinite pleasure: the profits were for him,” she wrote gently in her book of memoirs. “All that was available from his work, and I managed to keep it available, was his.” What she mostly gained, besides fame, were unwelcome offers—and she a minister’s daughter—to publish erotica as a steady thing, such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” at the request of Aldous Huxley, and the spicy memoirs of a maître d’hôtel at Maxim’s.
Can anyone read “Ulysses” now, read it entire, word by word, with the impetus we did fifty years ago? I wonder. And I disbelieve.
Still strong today are the memories of the good new taste of the Paris food that I was eating for the first time precisely in that long “Ulysses” publishing period. With my stomach stirred to hitherto unexperienced satisfactions, with my palate even now able to recall the sudden pleasure of drinking a tumbler of more than ordinary red or white French wine, I can relive the sensual satisfaction of first chewing a bite of meat and a crust of fresh French bread, and then the following swallow of the wine itself. My preferred small restaurant was in the Rue Jacob, just below the Place Saint-Germain. It was called La Quatrième République. Since France at that moment was still living under the Third Republic of President Poincaré, I early asked M. Chuzeville, the restaurant owner, who was also its cook, why he had projected himself forward in history. M. Chuzeville, who wore luxuriant mustachios and was probably a disgruntled Socialist, said that at the rate the Third Republic government of France was running downhill a Fourth Republic would soon be unavoidable, so he had named his bistro for it in advance, to be ready for the future without having to paint a new sign over his door, which would cost money. He was a polite, taciturn mountain man from the Jura, a region noted for its odd pelure d’oignon wine, so named because of its onion-skin color—in taste a little hard and calcareous, ordinarily difficult to procure in Paris in those days, and doubtless a product of the vineyard of a Chuzeville cousin, who sold it to him cheap.
The bistro itself was very avant-garde in décor. The Russian George Hoyningen-Huene—at that time just starting his career as a photographer for Vogue—was also a painter, and on the wall enclosing the restaurant’s narrow circular staircase, which, like a snail’s shell, wound upward to the second-floor dining room, he had painted a series of false steps in a Cubist design. Very striking as a lesson in abstract distortion, they were also very treacherous, since if you looked at the walls’ false painted treads while going up or down, you were likely to miss the reality of the shallow wooden steps beneath your feet. As a Russian joke, he had nicknamed Yvonne, the little waitress, Yvonne the Terrible, because, he said, she was such a terrible waitress, which was palpably untrue, as she never once fell down the steps during the years I lunched there. The lunch was fixed in price and in its lack of surprises. There was a plate of hors d’œuvres, including a slice of Jura paté, flavored with wild thyme, and, as the main dish, a succulent stew or an escallop of veal, a salad, and goat’s cheese, plus a small carafe of the onionskin wine and, of course, a demitasse of black French coffee, which tasted like death. It was a civilized, countrified, delicious, inexpensive French meal. It probably cost me about thirty cents, plus a ten-cent tip for Yvonne the Terrible.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
My Parent, Neal: Transitioning at Sixty-two
Over in the Luxembourg district, on a winding street leading down from the Pantheon, final home of the illustrious French dead, there were a series of bals musettes where we used to go and dance at night. They were modest neighborhood dance halls, such as had traditionally flourished in the last century in Montmartre, then the territory of the Impressionist painters. When the bohemian quarter shifted to Montparnasse, the bals musettes followed. They were noisy and economical. The young men paid a few sous each time they stepped out with a partner onto the dance floor, which was also economical in the use of its space. It offered little room for anything but dancing. The tables where one sat for drinking were pushed against the wall; the crowd was too young and too inexperienced to drink much anyway. As for the orchestra, which consisted of a violin and an accordion, it roosted out of everyone’s way up on top of a platform built on a pole. Friday and Saturday nights were the big nights, and one saw some fine waltzing and fancy dancing; the java was passionately popular, and le fox—the foxtrot, a recent importation from America—was beginning to catch on. As you never conversed with your partner—it was considered an invasion of privacy—you never knew who he was, except that he was perhaps a Sorbonne student or, more likely, a superior young workman, dressed in his best, well shaved, and gallantly scented after his weekly bath. Though operating in the bohemian quarter, the bals musettes were always extremely respectable, whereas the small boîtes—like the Jungle, on the Boulevard Montparnasse—were brazen, gay, and licentious in their atmosphere.
Up to the nineteen-thirties, I mostly lunched in my Rue Jacob restaurant in the company of some minor Surrealists, Surrealism having become the latest Paris revolutionary aesthetic movement, such as Paris always foments when the cerebral sap of the Gallic mind runs in two opposite directions at once, one aiming at the destruction of a present society and the other at the establishment of a utopia on which nobody can agree. At the Café des Deux Magots, the Surrealists had their own club table facing the door, from which vantage point a seated Surrealist could insult any newcomer with whom he happened to be feuding. Nancy Cunard, who had just begun her well-known liaison with Louis Aragon, Surrealism’s greatest novelist and prince of poets, often lunched with me at the Fourth Republic. A minor and mannerly Surrealist table companion was the young writer René Crevel, whose novel “Les Pieds dans le Plat,” or “Putting Your Foot in It,” had been an intellectual success. He lisped slightly, rather like a child, and had innocent, large, childish eyes, which always shone when he was telling absurd, fantastic tales. Ultimately, he became part of the band of young men surrounding the eccentric Princess Violette Murat. (In a strange physical disproportion, she had nearly no neck. “She looks more like a truffle than a violet,” Marcel Proust had said of her when he saw her one night at the Ritz.) She eventually went down to Toulon, where she lived at the dockside in an abandoned submarine and took to smoking opium intemperately, in which René joined her. For him, it was fatal.
Djuna Barnes was the most important woman writer we had in Paris. She was famous among us for her great short story “A Night Among the Horses,” and her novel “Nightwood” attained enormous popularity among young European intellectuals all the way from Rome to Berlin. I wrote of it at the time as “a difficult book to describe, since the only proper way of dealing with its strange, nocturnal elements is to have written it in the first place, which surely no one but Miss Barnes could have done.” Djuna was tall, quite handsome, bold-voiced, and a remarkable talker, full of reminiscences of her Washington Square life in New York and her eccentric childhood somewhere up the Hudson: her father, who entertained odd ideas of nourishment, decided that since chickens ate pebbles to aid their digestion, a few pebbles in the diet of his children might be equally salubrious. I was devoted to Djuna, and she was quite fond of me, too, in her superior way. Djuna wrote a play that she showed to T. S. Eliot; he told her that it contained the most splendid, archaic language he had ever had the pleasure of reading but that, frankly, he couldn’t make head or tail of its drama. She gave it to me to read, and I told her, also frankly, that it was the richest vocabulary I had ever read but that I did not understand one jot or tittle of what it was saying. With withering scorn, she said, “I never expected to find you were as stupid as Tom Eliot.” I thanked her for the only compliment she had ever given me.
I had earlier written an unsuccessful first novel, called “The Cubical City,” for which I had been mentioned by critics as possibly a successor to Rose Macaulay, provided I stuck at my labors, and Virgil Thomson had roundly declared that I should cease being apologetic about my book. In October, 1925, I started the biweekly “Letter from Paris” for this magazine. The only specific guidance I received from the editor, Harold Ross, was his statement that he wanted to know what the French thought was going on in France, not what I thought was going on. Since my assignment was to tell what the French thought was going on, my only obvious, complete, facile source of information was the French press. In one of my first letters, I reported on a completely new type of American theatrical entertainment that had just opened in Paris, at the Champs-Élysées Theatre. It was called “La Revue Nègre.” I wrote about it timidly and like a dullard. As a matter of fact, it was so incomparably novel an element in French public pleasures that its star, the hitherto unknown Josephine Baker, remains to me a still fresh vision—sensual, exciting, and isolated in my memory today, almost fifty years later. She made her entry onstage entirely nude (except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs), carried on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage, he paused and swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood like his magnificent dark burden in an instant of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theatre. Within a half hour of the final curtain on opening night, the news and meaning of her arrival had spread by the grapevine through the cafés on the Champs-Élysées, where the witnesses of her triumph sat over their drinks excitedly repeating their report of what they had just seen. She had become the established new American star of Europe.
At any season, and all year long, in the evening the view of the city from the bridges was always exquisitely pictorial. One’s eyes became the eyes of a painter, because the sight itself approximated art, with the narrow, pallid façades of the buildings lining the river; with the tall trees growing down by the water’s edge; with, behind them, the vast chiaroscuro of the palatial Louvre, lightened by the luminous lemon color of the Paris sunset off toward the west; with the great square, pale stone silhouette of Notre Dame to the east.
The French painters in Paris frequented Montparnasse, and sat on the terraces of the Dôme and the Select. André Derain was the only artist I knew who frequented the Deux Magots. He was a big, well-dressed, countrified fellow who always wore an urban felt hat, which he would ceremoniously lift to me, with a bow, as he passed my table. The beautiful Max Ernst and his beautiful wife also occasionally graced the Deux Magots terrace. The really great artist visitor to the Saint-Germain quarter was Picasso, but much later. After 1945, he began coming to the Café de Flore at night. He always sat at the second table in front of the main door, with Spanish friends. I would sit at a table where, without seeming to, I could view his remarkably mobile face, with its amazingly watchful eyes. He never did anything except sip his one small bottle of mineral water, speak with his Spanish friends, and look at all the people who were not looking directly at him. When he had finished his drink, invariably before eleven, he left for home, in the Rue des Grand Augustins. One of the waiters was a Spaniard, and he said to me, “Señor Picasso always walks home by exactly the same route each night; it never varies. He is a genius, and a man of fixed habits.” Everyone respected the isolation that Picasso had established for himself there at the Flore.
About fifteen years ago, I happened to be in Cannes, where, on the Croisette one morning, I met the young artist son of an old New York friend of mine. The young man spoke to me and gave me his news. He was married, and newly a father, and as a favor Picasso, whom he knew, had drawn a vague sketch of the young artist’s infant son, which he had promised to sign and dedicate if the father would go to Picasso’s villa, La Californie, that very day at noon. Did I want to drive up with him? I said I would like to take the drive but would not get out of the car. When we arrived at the gate of La Californie, the young father went inside with his drawing, but he emerged a moment later to say, “Picasso says to come in,” which I did not wish to do, as an intrusion was the last thing I had intended. When Picasso sent a second pressing demand, I was forced to accept. As I walked into the salon, which was as crowded with varied art works as an auction room, Picasso turned to me with his hand outstretched in greeting, and then, with a loud cry of astonishment, shouted, “You! Why didn’t you ever speak to me in the old days at the Flore? For years we saw each other and never spoke, until now. Are you just the same as you were? You look it!” By this time, he had his arms around me and was thumping me enthusiastically on the back. “You look fine, not a day older,” he said, and I said, “Nor do you,” and he said, “That’s true—that’s the way you and I are. We don’t get older, we just get riper. Do you still love life the way you used to, and love people the way you did? I watched you and always wanted to know what you were thinking. Tell me, do you still love the human race, especially your best friends? Do you still love love?”
“I do,” I said, astonished at the turn the monologue was taking.
“And so do I!” he shouted, laughing. “Oh, we’re great ones for that, you and I. Isn’t love the greatest refreshment in life?” And he hugged me with his strong arms. ♦
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