Oscar Wilde said that good Americans go to Paris when they die, but for many the ville lumière was a regular destination in life, and for some, the one place where they felt free to live realized, adult lives. Herewith, a few titles by and about notable American lovers of Paris:
Paris was Yesterday by Janet Flanner
This is a lovely collection of the Paris Letters which were published in Harold Ross’s New Yorker during the 1920’s and the 1930’s. Ross told her to report not what she thought about Paris and France, but what the French thought-and so she did. Wonderful vignettes of people like Carlo Ponzi the con man, Marlene Dietrich, Colette, and Coco Chanel, make that distant era come alive.
Paris in the Fifties by Stanley Karnow
A treasure from a Time Magazine writer who spent many years in France after the second world war. Karnow met and married a Frenchwoman, learned fluent French, interviewed or met or quarreled with everybody who was anybody in the 1950’s. Unexpected dividend: a detailed portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Another, the discussion of the rise of the House of Dior. Still another, a close account of the Sartre-de Beauvoir-Camus matrix, followed by eager French-like sports figures.
Being Geniuses together, 1920-1930 by Robert McAlmon
A classic self-serving memoir of Paris, with preface and afterword as correctives by Kay Boyle. McAlmon although unproductive as a writer, edited a literary journal published with his wife’s money and a series of short novels, the Contact editions, but he knew everybody and trades on that acquaintance in this book. Kay Boyle, novelist and poet, political activist, victim of McCarthy, was also famous for whom she knew and lived a long, principled, active life. Her first novel was published by the Black Sun Press, owned by Harry and Caresse Crosby, two rich, famous, and doomed figures of 1920’s Paris.
Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and others on the Left Bank, 1946-60 by James Campbell.
An engrossing account of the many who left where they were from for Paris and a life of creativity-or so they believed. For Wright, the pleasure of life in a relatively prejudice-free France was not enough-Campbell suggests that he ‘needed’ the goad of American racism to produce his work-and he lost the connection with his fellow writers early on. Campbell discusses the possibility that Wright was associated (unwillingly) with the FBI and talks about his large file with the agency. For Baldwin, Paris offered little money, but a kind of fulfillment-freedom from the religion-laced upbringing, the ability to be freely gay, and outspoken in his belief that Wright’s characters were just another variant on Uncle Tom. Beckett was not an American, but his escape to Paris to write in peace (in an adopted language) represents a similar trajectory. This great book offers portraits of others as well, among the notables Chester Himes, a former convict and author of amusing detective stories, and Maurice Girodias, founder of Olympia Press. Girodias, an Englishman, published some raw erotica (Marquis de Sade’s Justine was an early title), but also provided a home for Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer) Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch).
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
This amusing valentine from Gertrude to Alice depicts the early life of one of the most famous literary couples of all time. Although hardly an objective witness, Stein nails certain literary figures (Ezra Pound: ‘a village explainer. Very nice if you’re a village, but if not, not’) and does not stint on her judgments of Hemingway, Joyce, et al. The lives of creative lesbian women in Paris is a whole story of its own; there are many biographies of people like Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde, et al., but the story of gay men who went to Paris for creative and personal freedom remains to be told. (There is a little bit in James Baldwin’s novels Giovanni’s Room and Another Country.)
~ John S.
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