http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121511516727827437.html
The city once attracted American writers and artists looking for
sanctuary. But the rest of the world turned into Paris, and Paris
became more like everywhere else.
By DINAW MENGESTU
July 5, 2008
In a picture taken in 1954 in front of the Café Tournon in Paris's
chic sixth arrondissement, the writers and editors of the recently
founded Paris Review are arranged in a human pyramid, with a row of
casually dressed women sitting in chairs at the bottom and George
Plimpton, the editor and co-founder, standing at the top with a
slightly bemused, self-satisfied smile and a cigarette and what looks
to be a glass of wine in his hand. The photograph feels emblematic of
what Parisian expatriate life must have been like in those heady
postwar years: young, liberating and full of an intellectual vigor
that was embodied in café life and the host of literary reviews that
were springing up all across the Left Bank. Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir were holding their already famous philosophical
debates at a table at the nearby Café de Flore. Richard Wright had
arrived a few years earlier, as had Saul Bellow and a young, and
relatively unknown and impoverished James Baldwin, who was living at
the Hotel Verneuil, a cheap, slightly run-down hotel nearby.
For the past six months, I've been living roughly five minutes away
from the Café Tournon, and the even more famous Café de Flore and Les
Deux Magots -- the former epicenters of Parisian and American
expatriate intellectual life. I went to the Tournon for lunch
recently, with James Campbell's eloquent and aptly titled book
"Exiled in Paris" tucked under my arm, curious to see if there was
anything left of the café as it must have looked more than 50 years
earlier when that picture was taken: when it was still possible to
buy drugs in the little nook near the restrooms or have a chance
encounter with one of the dozens of African-American writers and
artists that had made Paris home following the end of World War II.
It seems to almost go without saying now that I was the only American around.
Things have changed drastically in the last 55 years; the Café
Tournon, along with the rest of St. Germain, has cleaned up its act,
with a proper, well-appointed façade, an elegant but casual hardwood
décor and a roundtable of leather chairs in the back. The former
bohemian quarters of the Left Bank that were once home to even the
poorest of writers have become the center of Paris's starry-eyed
tourist trade, and the dollar has plummeted so far against the euro
that what once seemed to be a semipermanent settlement of Americans,
particularly writers and artists, has all but vanished. Recently
while sitting outside of a café just off the Boulevard St. Germain I
overheard an American woman remark to her two friends, "Eight dollars
for a bottle of still water. Eight dollars," her voice not so much
angry as baffled.
It's hard if not inevitable now to think of that previous generation
of writers and not romanticize them and their lives here a bit: to
think of yourself sitting under a bright light at a table in the back
of the elegant Café de Flore, in shouting distance of Sartre or
Simone de Beauvoir, or to have been on the terrace at the neighboring
Les Deux Magots when James Baldwin and Richard Wright reportedly had
a heated argument about an essay Baldwin had written excoriating
Wright's "Native Son." Such events and conversations seem to belong
exclusively to another era, one that was measured in francs instead
of euros, when there wasn't an American Apparel store to be found
just on the other side of the Boulevard St. Germain.
What's really missing these days isn't just café literary life, but a
palpable and vibrant American cultural life. As a friend who works
for one of France's largest publishers pointed out to me, French
writers, editors, publishers and journalists are still there at the
major cafés and brasseries that have now become famous, and they're
still talking about books and philosophy, perhaps with even the same
degree of heady, intellectual rigor that Sartre would have done. And
as if to prove the point even further, the major cafés of St. Germain
-- Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp -- all have
literary prizes, which come with money and their own individual perks
ranging from complimentary Champagne to a large tab that can be used
at the writer's discretion. In other words, books and literature in
general are all still discussed and debated; there just happen to be
no Americans around when they are.
The absence of Americans is not a matter of sheer numbers. There are
still almost as many Americans passing through Paris these days as in
previous years. With the exception of a brief dip following the start
of the war in Iraq and the branding of "freedom fries" in the
nation's Capitol building, Americans have continued to arrive in
droves. (The decline in fact was so notable that the French tourist
industry launched a campaign targeted towards American tourists
titled, "Let's Fall in Love Again.") You can still hear and see them
standing outside of the famous cafés on the weekend, and for the
average Parisian, the American tourist trade marches on unchecked.
When I asked a group of friends over dinner whether they noticed that
there were fewer Americans in Paris, the collective response from the
table could be summed up as: Are you crazy? There are so many
Americans here. And while they may have been right about the numbers,
or the obvious presence which all tourists bring with them, it's hard
not to believe that a certain type of long-standing love affair
between Americans and the city hasn't in fact come to an end, that
there's been a permanent departure that no advertisement campaign,
however charming, can reverse.
Odile Hellier, the slightly petite, appropriately bespectacled, and
at times effusively generous French owner of the English-language
Village Voice bookstore in St. Germain des Prés remembers fondly her
own version of the good old days in the early 1980s, when a strong
American expatriate community created literary journals and reviews
in Paris, the types of which hadn't really existed since the 1950s.
In her cramped, white-walled and yet neatly ordered office at the
back of the bookstore, whose selection can best be described as
almost excessively literary in scope, she still keeps a bundle of
notebooks with the names of writers and some of the journals they
created in those days. The nostalgia in her voice, which is filled
with a rarely heard type of passionate earnestness, almost goes without saying.
"So many," she says once, and then again two more times for emphasis,
referring to both the Americans and the writers who once flocked
here. "France still looked like a country where it was easy to live.
The Village Voice took off because of that." The bookstore, like the
Americans that initially helped sustain it, has been on the decline
ever since, with a notable dip in sales that has continued unabated.
"For me, the community has exploded," and by exploded she means disintegrated.
Obviously a large part of that disintegration can be traced back to
the dollar's rapid decline against the euro. If Baldwin and Wright
were to sit down today to two cups of coffee on the terrace of Les
Deux Magots to argue about an essay, their bill, without tip, would
be almost $15. The decline in American life in Paris, however, can't
be all about the dollar and its rise and fall. When Baldwin arrived
in Paris in 1947, he arguably had less here in terms of financial and
material support than he would have had he stayed in New York. He
came regardless, following on the heels of Richard Wright. Both men,
along with dozens of other African-American writers and artists, were
fleeing America's divisive and often violent racism, and France, or
Paris in particular, was in the midst of its long-running love affair
with African-American culture, and jazz in particular, and seemed
openly freer and more inviting than any place in America could ever
be. A decade later, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S.
Burroughs would arrive in Paris seeking a similar relief, or freedom,
from 1950s American society and culture.
Since then America has grown up, both culturally and politically,
expanding its civil-rights legislation to closer reflect its founding
principles of equality, while at the same time shedding some of the
cultural conservatism that in the late 1950s led to the prosecution
of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the publication of Ginsberg's
drug- and sex-laden "Howl and Other Poems." As it's done so,
inevitably the egalitarian appeal of Paris has declined with it. It's
not just the Americans that the French miss, as much for economic as
sentimental reasons to be sure, but the idea that France, and Paris
in particular, was somehow markedly distinct and different from the
United States and the rest of the world. If there's a nostalgia for
the American presence that was once here, it's a nostalgia directly
tied to the idea that Paris was once more open, more politically and
culturally liberal and therefore easier to live and create in than
most other cities. As Odile pointed out to me, following the birth of
the euro and the subsequent rise in the cost of living, "France
became more like the others," the others being the rest of the
Western world, and America in particular, where commerce and not
culture is the dominant social factor.
A recent walk along Boulevard St. Germain with a French book editor
and friend quickly became an exercise in nostalgia as he tried to
recall the names of some of the smaller family-owned stores that had
dominated the street before the explosion of French and foreign chain
stores took over; "None of this was here," being the phrase he used
most often to describe what's happened since. Perhaps even more
emblematic is the decidedly pro-American business model of the
current president, Nicolas Sarkozy (aka "Sarko L'Americain" as he's
sometimes mocked in the French media), whose attempts to adjust the
retirement age of civil servants and squeeze more efficiency out of
the government have been met with massive nationwide strikes that
seem aimed more at holding on to the remnants of a vanishing culture
than challenging the logic of the policy.
Today it's impossible for me to imagine the sense of refuge and
sanctuary that other Americans once found here. Paris has its own
complicated racial issues to settle; as the violent riots in the
suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis recently demonstrated, there is little
fraternité or égalité when it comes to France's large and growing
African and North African immigrant communities. As a writer of
African origin, I'm aware that it's precisely my American identity
that protects me not only from the casual discrimination that other
Africans experience here, but from the harassment of the police, who
are prone to stopping Paris's African immigrants, particularly those
living in the northern sections of the city. The food market near my
former apartment in the 18th arrondissement, which in almost every
detail, from the languages spoken to the fabrics of the women's
dresses and the haggling at the vegetable stalls, was a perfect
replica of some of the markets I've known in Africa, could sometimes
feel like a market under siege with a constant and heavily armed
large police presence marking the entrance off the Boulevard Barbès.
The policeman's common cry for papiers, papiers -- documents proving
legal residence -- is one that I know I can all but ignore thanks to
my American accent first, and my passport second.
James Baldwin noted shortly after he first arrived in France, "I
didn't go to Paris. I left New York." Inherent in that statement is
the idea that it wasn't the destination but the departure that
mattered most. I can't help but think that to some degree that
sentiment still holds true, although for drastically different
reasons than before. Paris has lost some of what once made it so
special and unique, enough so that it's hard to imagine another
outburst of American cultural creativity taking place in Paris again
anytime soon. Why Paris when there's the rest of the world, much of
which is cheaper and more unknown? It's a question I hear constantly,
less so from Americans than Parisians who seem baffled by my decision
to be here.
At the same time, perhaps that is the real, private joy and freedom
of being in Paris these days -- the freedom not from politics or
culture, but from an expatriate community in which to define yourself
as part of or against. Shortly before I left America for Paris I had
spoken with a friend about the possibility of moving to Buenos Aires.
"Buenos Aires could become the Paris for our generation," she noted,
and I could see why she said that. I had heard rumors of other people
that we knew moving there, or if not there then to other cities
around the world that were supposed to be indicative of a certain
cultural vibrancy and easy, carefree life.
I can't say that there's much of either to be found in Paris these
days, which is why I suppose there's a search for its newest
incarnation, whether it's in Buenos Aires or Berlin or another
destination that is supposedly rumored to be the next great spot, the
place where we all really should be. The pressure of being
fashionable has lifted from the city, and if possible by extension to
the writers who live in it, leaving us free to wander and sit in
complete anonymity with only our own thoughts for comfort in a way
that would have been impossible 20 or 40 years earlier.
Unlike many of the writers and Americans who came here before, my
reasons for being here are purely selfish and self-absorbed, with
nothing and no one to run from. I used to say that I came to Paris
because it was so quiet, in large part because at the time I could
hardly speak the language. While today that may no longer be as
completely true, the city still strikes me as quiet. There's no
romantic ideal to be lived out here anymore -- no cafés, readings or
events that can't be missed. What remain today are largely ghosts
that are easy if not even comforting to live amongst. They had their
Paris -- garrulous and crowded with the politics and culture of
America -- and now finally, with no one else around, I can have mine.
--
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears."
.
No comments:
Post a Comment