Authors: John Baxter
B004MMEIOG EBOK (4 page)
I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something, or seeing people doing something that they understood.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY,
A Moveable Feast
A
fter the aversion therapy of Los Angeles, it took my Paris doctor to get me back on my feet.
“Do you take any exercise at all?” she asked.
I stopped buttoning my shirt long enough to show her my hands.
“I bite my nails a lot.”
She stared, fish-eyed, over the top of her glasses. Not great laughers, the French, and Odile, my doctor, even less so. Interestingly, there’s no French equivalent of the phrase “bedside manner.” On the list of medical priorities, putting patients at ease and allaying their fears rates somewhere below selecting a fabric for the waiting-room curtains.
“For your age, your health is not bad,” she conceded, “but you should play some sport.”
“I detest games.”
Memories crowded back of enforced sports afternoons at school, daydreaming in the outfield during interminable cricket matches or rugby games. Not daydreaming too much, however, since, as in all forms of sport, stretches of tedium alternated with flurries of violent activity. Years later, when Michael Herr in his Vietnam memoir
Dispatches
defined these same characteristics as typical of war, I understood the hidden agenda of school games. The claim by the duke of Wellington that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” no longer sounded nonsensical.
“Join a
club sportif
then,” Odile suggested.
“Even worse!”
Club sportif
was Paris-speak for “gym.” The experience of others suggested it wouldn’t help. While he represented
The
New Yorker
in Paris, Adam Gopnik tried one. Many exercise machines were not yet installed, and those that were didn’t always work. Nor did the club provide towels—though such a service was, the receptionist explained, “envisaged”: shorthand for something that might take place in the future. They did, however, present him with a welcome gift that reflected exactly the Parisian concept of health—a bag of chocolate truffles.
Carrying the battle to the enemy, I asked, “Do
you
exercise?”
Odile didn’t blink. “My weight hasn’t changed since college. Nor my blood pressure. But if these were my figures . . .” She tapped her computer screen with her nail. “ . . . I would probably take up the marathon.”
As a concession, I walked home down rue Gay-Lussac and rue Soufflot, rather than waiting for the bus.
For the first time in a while, I paid attention to the Parisians passing me. Slim and erect, showing barely a gram of excess fat, they stepped out briskly, as full of good health as they were of croissants, foie gras, fried potatoes, steak, red wine, and cheese.
How did they do it?
I reviewed the physical state of the Anglo-Saxon expatriate community. Pale, slouching, sagging, habitually out of shape—we were a sorry advertisement for the intellectual life. It was little consolation that some notable physical wrecks preceded us: Gertrude Stein, chronically obese, thanks to the cooking of her companion, Alice Toklas; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, invariably plastered; Henry Miller, who, if he took any exercise at all, preferred the horizontal variety, in bed with a prostitute; and shuffling James Joyce, who went everywhere by taxi, always at someone else’s expense.
But then, as if to counterbalance single-handed the combined weight of this dropsical pantheon, there was Hemingway.
Back in the 1920s, when he lived on Place de la Contrescarpe, he would often have passed along this very sidewalk. It took little imagination to imagine him doing so now; I heard that light but forceful boxer’s footfall as he moved to overtake me, fists clenched, arms powering, breathing deeply, perspiring but with energy undiminished by the kilometer-long walk—thinking, perhaps, of the beer and potato salad he’d enjoy for lunch at Brasserie Lipp.
Then he was past, leaving a scent of leather and fresh sweat. I watched his figure diminish, the fabric belt across the lower back of his old-fashioned tweed jacket tightening over those tensing muscles, notebook showing in his right-hand jacket pocket, his mind swimming with visions of trout in Michigan streams and the dust and blood of the bullring. I could hear him sneer, as Bill Gorton sneers to Jake Barnes in
The Sun Also Rises
: “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”
He was out of sight now, across rue Saint-Dominique, on the last downhill stretch to where the Medici Fountain spouted clear water in the sun. To his left was the green glory of the Luxembourg Gardens. Then under the colonnade of the Odéon Theatre, pausing for a few minutes to browse the booksellers’ stalls. And after that, across Place de l’Odéon, and into rue de l’Odéon, descending to the little shop with the wooden sign hanging over the sidewalk, the sober face of Master Will Shaxsper. . .
Ernest
, I thought,
I need your shoes.
Chapter 8
The Importance of Being Ernest
Turning up from St. Germain to go home past the bottom of the gardens to the Boulevard St. Michel one kept Shakespeare and Company to starboard and Adrienne Monnier’s Amis des Livres to port, and felt, as one rose with the tide toward the theatre, that one had passed the gates of dream—though which was horn and which was ivory, neither of those two rare friends would ever undertake to say. Why should they? It was enough for a confused young lawyer in a grand and vivid time to look from one side to the other and say to himself, as the cold came up from the river, Gide was here on Thursday and on Monday Joyce was there.
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, quoted in
Paris in the Twenties
by Armand Lanoux
A
nyone who lives in Paris ends up spending a lot of time walking. That’s particularly true if you live, as we do, in the sixth of its twenty
arrondissements
, or municipalities.
The sixth, or
sixième
, is Paris’s Greenwich Village or Soho. Historical and literary associations don’t simply litter the streets; one has to climb over them. Between 1918 and 1935, you might, standing on the corner of rue Bonaparte and boulevard Saint-Germain, with the Deux Magots café at your back, have encountered Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, William Faulkner, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, James Joyce, William Faulkner, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and scores more. Today, it’s the most expensive district of the city. A square meter of floor space, the area covered by a single armchair, costs $15,000, but in 1922, as Hemingway wrote in
Esquire
, you could live here for a year, rent, food, and drink included, for $1,000.
Hemingway came to Paris briefly as a wounded veteran in 1918, returned as a reporter for Canadian newspapers in 1921, and lived at a number of addresses on the Left Bank for seven years, writing the novels and short stories that established his reputation. He often visited our building and ate at the same restaurants where we still eat today. We even knew a few of the same people. No wonder I was taken with the sixth.
Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare and Company
Like everyone, I’d been seduced by
A Moveable Feast
and its picture of a bohemian paradise, inhabited by a handful of charmed foreigners whom the locals—those few who got a mention, mostly barmen and whores—held in awed respect. Reading Henry Miller’s memoirs, Sylvia Beach’s
Shakespeare and Company
, Morley Callaghan’s
That Summer in Paris
, and
Memoirs of Montparnasse
by another Canadian, John Glassco, you could almost believe only expatriates lived there
.
They casually referred to the
sixième
as “the Quarter,” almost as if a wall surrounded it, within which, as with Jean Gabin in the casbah of Algiers in
Pépé le Moko
and Charles Boyer in its U.S. remake,
Algiers
, normal laws didn’t apply
.
Most of these memoirs were written thirty years later, following a second world war. Distance lent enchantment. Looked at from postwar Europe, impoverished and split by political disputes, it was too easy for Beach, Miller, and in particular Hemingway to believe the sun had been warmer back then, the conversation wittier, the drinks more potent, the women more beautiful, the city cleaner, more honest, more innocent. “When spring came,” wrote Hemingway, “even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness, except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
The opinion of those “very few” mattered a great deal. When Scott Fitzgerald behaved badly at the Antibes home of his rich friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, they formally barred him for a week. It was bad enough that they specified the period of exile, like grounding a teenager, but worse that Fitzgerald, when his sentence ended, slunk back into their circle.
Or take the famous incident of Hemingway “liberating” Odéon.
In July 1944, Paris, abandoned by the Germans, had not yet been claimed by the advancing Allies, who’d held back to let the French march in first with Charles de Gaulle leading the parade down the Champs-Elysées. As his entourage passed through Montparnasse, writer Leon Edel noted the damage done to its famous cafés, the Dôme, La Coupole, and the boarded-up Rotonde. “Across the gay glass fronts of another day, chairs and tables were heaped up in earthquake disorder. Down the way, at the Gare Montparnasse, Nazis in field-green were surrendering in terror or glum despair. It was strange, stranger than all fiction, to encounter at that moment, in the July twilight, scenes of a dead past.”
Hemingway bypassed Montparnasse and came straight to Odéon. He hoped to salvage something of the Paris he had known before he left for the United States, Cuba, and fame. As Beach tells it,
A string of jeeps came up the street and stopped in front of my house. I heard a deep voice calling “Sylvia!” And everybody in the street took up the cry of “Sylvia!” “It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway!” cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs; we met with a crash, he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people in the street and in the windows cheered. He was in battle dress, grimy and bloody. A machine gun clanked on the floor. He asked Adrienne for a piece of soap, and she gave him her last cake.
Stirring stuff—but, alas, mostly invented. When I first moved to rue de l’Odéon, our octogenarian ground-floor neighbor, Madeleine Dechaux, still recalled that day, but not the way Beach describes it. A young woman in 1944, she watched the new arrivals from her first-floor window. Hemingway didn’t shout for Sylvia. Instead—sensibly—he called up to Madeleine, asking if there were any Germans on the roof. She told him they had all fled, and by the time she walked through her apartment and out onto the stairs, the travel-stained group of mostly teenaged cameramen and journalists were crowding the lobby.
In Madame Dechaux’s memory, Hemingway didn’t race up the stairs. Instead, Adrienne descended to greet him while someone went to fetch Sylvia from where she was then living. She and Monnier hadn’t shared the Odéon apartment since 1937, when Adrienne began an affair with the young photographer Gisele Freund. Monnier urged Hemingway to wait there for Beach. Instead, he drew her aside, by the big green-painted radiator that still today feeds heat up the stairwell.
“Just tell me one thing,” Madeleine Dechaux heard him murmur. “Sylvia didn’t collaborate, did she?”
It was a revealing moment. Beneath all his bluster, the unsure adolescent in Hemingway continued to fret about what “the very few” might think.
In all classes of society, one finds plenty of people who, full of mad presumption or in a deplorable abuse of the French language, call themselves “flaneurs” without understanding the first elements of that art which we do not hesitate to place next to music, the dance, and even mathematics.
LOUIS HUART,
“Physiologie du Flaneur,”
1841
I
n the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was terrified of revolution. France had survived a century of internal strife, but if one could judge from the experience of other countries, more was imminent. As it happened, revolution never did come. Two world wars would protect France from civil unrest until the student-led disturbances of 1968, still referred to with some embarrassment as
les événements—
the events. But Napoleon’s generals couldn’t know that. Narrow streets and crowded tenements lent themselves to house-to-house warfare. They pestered him for broad avenues joining all the institutions of government—routes down which infantry, cavalry, and even artillery could be moved at the first murmur of trouble.
Napoleon ordered Paris rebuilt. The job went to Georges Eugene Haussmann—“Baron” Haussmann, as he liked to be styled, though he was no nobleman—who did nothing by halves. He drove his boulevards through the festering alleys and created fantasies like the Etoile—the star—where twelve of them crash together in a carousel. From its heart erupts the Arc de Triomphe, a stone colossus shouldering out of the earth.
No jutting shop front or portico was permitted to encroach on the pavement. Even the balconies that stretched the width of each new building were limited to the second and sixth floors. Most important, no building could be taller than the width of the boulevard on which it stood. With this commandment alone, he gave the emperor his military thoroughfares but guaranteed they would be sunlit from midmorning to late afternoon, with wide tree-lined sidewalks.
Comparing a map of old Paris from the time of the Revolution with the new city created by Haussmann, in which the ancient crooked and narrow alleys had been replaced by spacious and wide boulevards, one can’t help but be moved by the logic and clarity of his decisions. He made enemies, of course. He lined plenty of pockets, including his own, with the municipal contracts he negotiated. Many of the poor were made homeless. Whole districts of ancient and cheap housing were torn down, replaced by new, solid, and sanitary apartment blocks in which the former inhabitants couldn’t afford to live. But he got people back onto the streets. Because of sidewalks, one could more easily go on foot to a destination rather than taking a horse or coach. Walking, formerly an unsanitary necessity, became a positive pleasure. Soon a new upwardly mobile middle class flooded in, creating a market for food, wine, clothing, and entertainment. Napoleon fired Haussmann in 1870 when the Revolution never eventuated and landowners whined about the new cost of doing business. But Haussmann lived until 1891, and saw what he had created become one of the glories of Europe.
Others who came later tried to add their signature to his. At best, they scrawled a graffito. In the 1960s, President Georges Pompidou attempted to fill the city with tower blocks. He succeeded in imposing only one—the Tour Montparnasse, Paris’s lone, embarrassing skyscraper. At least François Mitterrand had the discretion to place his monument, the glass slabs of the new national library, on the edge of the city, at Tolbiac, where one needn’t look at them.
André Malraux, minister of culture for both de Gaulle and Pompidou, worked with a lighter touch. Rather than meddling with the city’s structure, he attended to its upkeep, reviving a law that required the exterior of every building to be cleaned at least once each decade. He told Edmond Michelet, his successor: “Je vous légue un Paris blanc”
—
“I bequeath you a white Paris.”
If the Paris of pedestrians has heroes, they are Haussmann and Malraux. When, in the nation’s ultimate accolade, Malraux’s bones were transferred to the Panthéon, his simple wooden coffin lay in state for a day, guarded only by Giacometti’s
L’Homme Qui Marche—
a statue, life-size, of a gangling, long-limbed man striding purposefully into the future. The god of walkers.
W
ith wide clean streets, Parisians began to walk, and to walk for the pleasure of it. They even coined a word for this diversion. It’s called
flânerie,
and someone who does it is a
flâneur.
The boulevards remade Paris as the freeways remade Los Angeles. About LA’s road system, Joan Didion wrote:
A typical flaneur, from
Physiologie du Flaneur, 1841
Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident.
Walking in Paris requires the same rhythm. People who lead tours or write guides crave an itinerary, the route from A to B. The
flâneur
has no such aim. Their
promenade
exists for itself, irrespective of destination. It may involve little or no movement. One might simply remain in one place—a café, for instance—and watch what goes by. I asked writer Michael Moorcock, confined to a wheelchair at the time with a foot problem, to nominate his Most Beautiful Walk in Paris. He sent me a photo of himself seated in the middle of the Luxembourg Gardens. A square meter, correctly chosen, with all that he could see from that point, was happiness enough.
I’d been in Paris for about six years before this sense invaded me. Once our daughter Louise was old enough for kindergarten, I’d take her there, first by bus, then up rue Notre Dame des Champs—where, as it happens, Hemingway lived for a time. An avenue winding along the slope of Montparnasse, it’s lined with apartment buildings and schools. We threaded through groups of slim teenagers, smoking and chattering. In other countries, boys and girls separate like oil and water, but here the sexes intermingled. They stood aside courteously as we passed, a father with his little girl by the hand: a sketch of their adult life and their future as husbands and wives.
Having delivered her to the nuns—“Au’voir, Papa . . . Au’voir, chérie”—I often returned through the Luxembourg. One November morning the sky was that metallic gray one sees in the zinc-covered roofs of Paris, a sure sign of imminent snow, though I didn’t expect, as I entered the gardens from rue d’Assas, that it would start at that moment. Turning my face from the wind-driven dust of ice, stingingly cold, I passed the shuttered puppet theater and the playground with its silent rides. Detouring around the sandpit and the unmanned police box, I reached the curved balustrade at the top of the wide stone steps that led into the lower garden, directly behind the Sénat.
All color had drained from the park, reducing it to a photograph by Kertesz or Cartier-Bresson. Nobody occupied the chairs that morning or sailed boats on the pond. There was none of the gaiety and ease one associated with the gardens in summer. Yet I felt elated. As if, like ultraviolet light, it could not penetrate glass, the essence of Paris is lost if seen through the double glazing of a hotel room or from the top of a tour bus. You must be on foot, with chilled hands thrust into your pockets, scarf wrapped round your throat, and thoughts of a hot
café crème
in your imagination. It made the difference between simply being present and being
there.
