Category Archives: Paris

Paris, London, Venice

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Toute existence est une lettre postée anonymement; la mienne porte trois cachets: Paris, Londres, Venise; le sort m’y fixa, souvent à mon insu, mais certes pas à la légère. –Paul Morand, Venises

[All of life is a letter posted anonymously; mine bears three stamps: Paris, London, Venice. It was fate that took me there, though I often didn't realize it, but certainly not casually.]

Perhaps it’s some belated fin-de-siècle fates that have assigned me to these three Jamesian cities, but for better or worse they’re where I’m linked; they are my subjects and my backdrops and my milieux. It seems somehow appropriate, then, that my first novel, about Venice, is being published in Paris before anywhere else, just as I prepare to move to London, at least part-time for now.

Morand, in his wonderful book-length essay Venises, reflects on his career as a diplomat and his relationship to history, to literature, to his family, and to place, writing lyrically about his connection to Venice, but also his tendency to find “Venices” elsewhere– in Paris, London, and even Bangkok. Anywhere there is unpredictable water, canals, waterways, watervistas, there is another Venice. And he reads back these cities onto Venice, where “every street is the Seine.”

Paris, as I have said, is where I taught myself to write, sitting in cafés imitating Ernest Hemingway, but as Paris became my new everyday, I moved indoors from the cafés, and developed the writing habits that are, by now, inseparable from the work itself. (That’s a fancy way of saying I can only write on my couch.) But spending more and more time in Venice gave me a space away from my everyday life– even in a beautiful city like Paris, daily life becomes humdrum– to measure the effects moving to a foreign country were having on my psyche.  To set my first novel in Paris seemed too obvious, and potentially limiting– I didn’t want to typecast myself as someone who could only write about her own experiences, and expatriates in Paris is a subject that I believe has to be approached with either sheer innocence or advanced cynicism, neither of which I had at the time. So I turned to Venice, which seemed the perfect metaphor for the act of building your home in a place where you have no foundation to do so– no land to build on, only bits of mud.

The result, in English, is Floating Cities, but for now– and as of today!– the book is out (only) in French under the title Une Année à Venise. To have my first book come out in the city where I became a writer seems the sweetest of coincidences.

 


 

 

Dreaming in French

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My latest review, of Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, is up at The Daily Beast:

Dreaming in French is, above all, an attempt to validate an undervalued aspect of American culture: the study abroad narrative. The stories of girls overseas have not often been part of the canon of American expatriate writing, Kaplan points out. We have a wealth of material from Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, et al, from their own days on the GI Bill, their Guggenheims, or their Fulbrights. Young American men in Paris were intent on “embrac[ing] irresponsibility,” as James Baldwin put it, producing work that is “gritty, irreverent, macho, [and] frequently alcoholic.” Their female peers, on the other hand, were determined “to embrace a new language and master a highly coded way of life.” Kaplan, a deft historian, avails herself of a range of sources in order to reconstruct their experiences, talking to their classmates and the families who housed them, reading their letters home, looking at the photos they and their friends took, watching the available footage of them speaking French, and reading the newspapers they would have read.

I was once a student at Columbia’s Reid Hall in Paris and a professor at New York University’s Paris campus—I can confirm that the experience of studying abroad marks you for life, forcing you to interrogate your identity as you reconstitute it in a foreign setting. You are not simply “translating” yourself into that language; you are building your identity within it. “True philosophy,” Kaplan quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “means learning to see the world anew.” In their time in the City of Lights, Kennedy, Sontag and Davis didn’t just get an education. They acquired a worldview, and one that would leave an inarguable imprint on history.

(Read more)

In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner wrote that “Alice Kaplan’s ‘Dreaming in French’ is an easy book to admire but a hard one to muster much enthusiasm for.” I couldn’t disagree more– I haven’t felt so enthusiastic about a book in quite some time.

“The obstacle that Ms. Kaplan confronts,” he says, “is that these women did not leave a great deal behind in terms of written accounts of their Paris years. What little there is can seem larval. (…) [Kaplan] dilates on the books these women read, the plays they saw, the shifting French intellectual climate. She is forced to utter broad generalizations, like, ‘France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints.’ That’s a pleasant enough sentence, but it could be written about a summer spent with Outward Bound.”

Garner’s clearly never been a twenty year-old American woman discovering Paris for the first time. In fact, Kaplan’s book is a serious contribution to feminist historiography, unearthing– through material that is thin for obvious reasons– a parallel female experience abroad during a period which we have understood largely through male expatriate accounts.

I love this anecdote, about the way in which adopting a French identity allowed Davis to circumvent the “violent dialectic of inheritance and disinheritance” in which she grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.  When Davis and her sister were teenagers, Kaplan recounts, they proved this by going into a shoe shop in Birmingham and pretending to be from Martinique, speaking only French and broken English. The shoe salesmen treated them with deference and catered to them in the front of the store, whereas American blacks would have been escorted to the back. After keeping the ruse up for awhile, they finally burst out laughing and told the staff in flawless English: “‘All Black people have to do is pretend they come from another country and you treat us like dignitaries’” (150).

Ellis Avery, The Footsore Flâneuse

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Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude, out this week from Riverhead and set in Paris in the 1920s, went to Paris earlier this year on a sabbatical with her partner (Sharon Marcus, who has also written brilliantly on Paris) to do some research. Unfortunately, a foot injury prevented Ellis from flâner-ing around the city the way she’d hoped. Then she found she could get around just fine on a bus and a bicycle! Here, her tale of flânerie aboard public transport.

 

 The Footsore Flâneuse: Claiming One’s Own Paris on Public Transportation
 
The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka had the good fortune to live in Paris in the 1920s.  While writing about her, I had the good fortune to live in Paris in 2008.  My partner and I had the further good fortune, that sabbatical season, to be working on projects we loved.  Sharon was researching Sarah Bernhardt; I was finishing the first draft of my Tamara de Lempicka novel, THE LAST NUDE.  I was unlucky in only one area: my right foot.  I would later discover my Parisian foot trouble was just one manifestation of a literally bone-breaking but ultimately treatable form of arthritis, but at the time, I thought I had an injury that simply refused to heal.  In any case, they were scotched, my plans for long walks in my favorite walking city.

The foot injury made it easy for me to stay home and write my thousand words a day, five days a week.  Sure, but what’s Owen Wilson doing in that Midnight in Paris poster?  He’s walking through Paris.  Ever since the first gimlet-eyed flâneur strolled out of the pages of Baudelaire, cane in hand, this is what writers have done.  Bad enough, as scholars who work on the female city-stroller, the flâneuse, have pointed out, that a woman idly walking the streets is apt to be taken for a streetwalker.  (I have, even dyked out in my old-man shoes).   Far worse for my flâneurial ambitions, however, was the fact that I could not stroll.  I could gimp along, sure, the way a moth can, but every step cost me.   I could not cross the Palais Royal, change trains at the Place d’Italie métro stop, or even stand long enough to chop, sweat, and sautée an eggplant at home without needing an Advil.

But I was optimistic.  At home, in New York, where I make a discipline of distilling my urban observations into a haiku a day, the raw material is often just out the window.  (Night.  The drag queen at/the corner pauses, wonders:/ Walk home, or cab it?)  Surely this would be the case in Paris, too?

Our SabbaticalHomes.com sublet, the least expensive of a few palatable options, and, revealingly, the only one for which the owners had posted no pictures, did not offer much to see out the window.  Oh-so-Parisian windowbox geraniums, yes, but the rooftops of the postwar Thirteenth arrondissement are not known for their charm, and the drizzling sky remained the color of vichyssoise for days.  The interior of the apartment was even less inspiring: in addition to the living-room/dining-room, dominated by a couch we dubbed The Silent Killer for reasons that would become clear to each guest who attempted to find comfort in its maw, the apartment featured two tiny windowless closets—one for the shower, one for the WC—and an extremely dark bedroom, home to an aging bed whose sagging mattress was propped up, in places, with sofa cushions.  A narrow L-shaped hallway lined in cabinets and rustic-tiled counters promised to open up onto the kitchen, until we realized it was the kitchen: when we cooked, we swiftly learned, food crusted between those rustic tiles.  The day I noticed, from my spot on the floor by the Silent Killer, that the wallpaper print in the hallway matched the woven-straw wallpaper, no doubt tasteful and expensive in the Seventies, that adorned the living-room/dining-room, was the day I knew I had been staring at those wallpapers for too long.

I owe the pleasure I was able to take in Paris, despite these unpromising circumstances, to three things:

One: the elevator.  The hollow spines around which the central staircase of many an old Parisian apartment building once spiraled have since been filled with tiny, tiny elevator shafts, such as the one that housed the lift to our sublet.  One person with one large suitcase filled it completely.  “Its merit,” as a neighbor would wryly tell us in elegant French, “is in existing.”  Vive l’existence!

Two: Vélib.  Although the ball of my right foot hurt after just a few steps, my heels worked fine, and so did my legs.  Research revealed that my American Express card just happened to contain the chip that permitted me to use my Parisian all-you-can-ride transit pass, Navigo Découverte, to unlock Vélib, the city-wide free-bike system: I couldn’t contain my glee.  “You are Vélibérée!” Sharon cried.  I could borrow a bike from the rack by the bus stop, pedal it uphill to the métro stop, and leave it behind while I took the subway, and then I could pick up another bike when I got out of my train.   Or I could just ride a bike the whole way: there’s no cure like exercise for injury-related depression.

The chunky public bicycles took me to Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the Fifth arrondissement, where I joined David Barnes’s writing group, and up to Culture Rapide in the Twentieth, where I could hear my fellow English-speaking poets read alongside French and Francophone freestylers.  Culture Rapide sat beside the truly gritty Place Fréhel, a vacant lot littered with beer bottles named for a chanteuse who died in 1951.

I was glad the bicycle system could connect me with my fellow living writers, but even more grateful that Vélib could take me into the heart of my novel.  I visited Lynn Jeffress, a novelist from my writing group, at 27, rue de Fleurus, who took my picture in front of the courtyard pavilion Gertrude Stein had used as her dining room.  I found Le Sentier, the seedy garment district where a key scene in my novel is set, and slid down an alley as narrow as a drain, quixotically named Street of the Moon.  Men passed me in either direction, wheeling garment racks.  I whirred past the sullen little fortress of a columned church—Our Lady of Good News—and found myself face-to-face with a massive arch featuring mythological naked men beneath suits of empty armor: how weirdly fitting, for the garment district.  My ride through Le Sentier allowed me to describe the neighborhood without gilding it with sentimentality or tarring it with melodrama.

Vélib also brought me to the Place de la Contrescarpe, steps from Hemingway’s first Paris apartment and home to a Hemingwayesque character in my novel.  In one of the bakeries that fronted the place, I bought a flaky Breton kouign aman, asked for them to heat it up on the spot, and ate it at one of the cafés on the place while the waiter’s back was turned.  As I ate and drank, the brazier beside me rendered the evening chill decorative rather than sinister; the cup of coffee warmed my hands.  The trees and fountain at the center of the place—in the Middle Ages, a village square—lent a gracious look to the student quarter, but Hemingway’s rummies and poivrottes still collapsed here and there amid the clusters of kids in the cafés.  A yellow dog with a torn ear trotted over to beg the flaky crumbs off my fingers.  It was the best pastry I ever ate in Paris.

Three: the bus.  Sometimes it hurt too much even to ride a bicycle.  As the autumn deepened, it began to grow too cold and wet to ride.  My nearest métro stop, Place d’Italie, was unwalkably far, but it wasn’t long before I could spot the insignia of the boxy mint-green bus that stopped near our apartment building from several blocks away: a black 67 emblazoned on a pink square.  In order to announce their alternate, nighttime schedule, many Parisian buses bore spooky, Halloweeny lettering, proclaiming, Le soir, cet autobus devient noctilien!  In the evening, this bus becomes nocturnal!  I savored the reptilian word noctilien, so much more sinister than its English counterpart, as I watched the wrong 67, not mine, approach from the wrong direction, stop, disgorge passengers, and swish away in a wash of pneumatic hiss and prerecorded chime.

The “wrong direction,” for me, was out toward the stadia that lay between the city and its beltway, the Périphérique: the 67 terminated at the Stade Charléty.  The “right direction” brought me closer to the city center, first uphill to the charming Butte aux Cailles, where thickly-planted chestnut trees lobbed their buckeyes at passers-by.  I could follow the example of the old ladies in the neighborhood and fill a plastic bottle with water from the artesian spring at the heart of Place Paul Verlaine.  Or I could buy a delicate, buttery quiche Lorraine from my favorite bakery, Legendre, and limp it down the street to check out stark, tile-lined Place André Masson, named for a painter who had died in 1987.  “That place was like the drain of an abattoir,” I reported to Sharon that night.

“Once you see his work, you’ll know why,” she deadpanned.  I realized that even if you’re worthy of commemoration by Parisian city planners, the more recently you’ve died, the more remote and crummy your place will be.  Poor Masson.  Poor Fréhel.

Farther north, and deeper into the heart of the old city, the bus let me off at the end of the linden-lined Île Saint-Louis.  I could stand at the easternmost tip of the island and look down to where, just feet below, the seventeenth-century breakwater split the river like the prow of a ship.  The bus route turned west from the Pont de Sully, traversed the rue du Rivoli, and brushed past the Louvre, where I could either pick up another bus or limp my way west toward the Palais Royal.  I could rest at Le Nemours and nurse a café crème while surveying the expanse of paving-stone outside the Comédie Française.  This is where I developed my Principle of Perfect Parisian Places: I’m sitting outside with my coffee, and I’m looking out at people, not cars.

Well, that just about covers most of Paris, huh?  Au contraire, this experience is harder to come by than it sounds.  To offer a few clarifying corollaries to this simple expression of pleasure:

1)    Cars aren’t driving past me.
2)    My sightline isn’t blocked by a parked car.
3)    Nor is it blocked by a plastic hedge.  (Why, Les Deux Magots?  Why?)
4)    I’m at a café, not a restaurant: no one is bullying me to order food I don’t want.

Place Saint-André-des-Arts hits all these marks gracefully, as do Place Stravinsky and Place de la Sorbonne.  From my café perch overlooking Place Colette, I could watch well-dressed Parisians cross under the plane trees, pause to listen to an open-air chamber orchestra, gape at the acrobatic skateboarders, or pass through the fanciful spun-glass arch marking the Palais Royal métro entrance.  I grinned.  I was a cane-chair flâneuse.

If I stayed on the 67 bus, it headed north from the center of Paris, out past the old city walls and into the Pigalle, home to the Moulin Rouge and other schlocky monuments to the skin trade.  From there, I could take the squat little Montmartrobus up absurdly charming streets, coiling past an unlikely vineyard and windmill before reaching the foot of the massive Sacré Coeur, that domed white-wedding-cake folly of the Belle Epoque.  From there I could drink in some of the best views of the city before taking a funicular back down the hill to Place Saint-Pierre.  I could curl up with another crème at one of the brazier-heated cafés and listen to an all-girl brass band on Place Suzanne Valadon beat the air into a giddy Cajun froth.  It hurt to dance, but I felt so grateful to Paris, and so blessed: my Navigo pass had brought me this far. –Ellis Avery

On George Whitman, 1913-2011

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George
George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop (in its current incarnation), has died. He was 98 years old. For those close to the shop, it was no surprise, as George had suffered a stroke two months ago. Even for those not close to the shop, to die at 98 is no surprise. But none of that mitigates how heartbreaking it is to see him go.

I will skip the personal reminiscences because they’re not that interesting, and other people will do that better; I met first met George in 1999 and met him again over the years, but my more profound relationship was with his shop, and with the literary legacy he carried out. I’ve used different words at different stages to describe my interest in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company: first I was seduced by the myth of the Lost Generation; later, as a scholar of transatlantic modernism, I came to see the shop in sociological terms as an important nexus in the sustaining of an epoch-defining literary hub. The present-day shop borrows from both categories: it gestures at this illustrious history and extends it through the 1950s and the Beat Generation on to the present moment, when it has once again, under the guidance of George’s daughter Sylvia Whitman, assisted by Jemma Birrell, David Delannet, Hilary Drummond, Thomas Collard, Terry Craven, and Linda Fallon (my apologies to the others I’m probably leaving out, not to mention the volunteers, interns, and Tumbleweeds), become a meeting-point for a group of expatriate writers, as well as an impressive array of Anglophone literary luminaries as they pass through town.

Though– let’s be honest– none of us who hang around it can claim to be a Stein or a Hemingway, our Shakespeare and Company does play a similar role in the Anglophone community. No, they don’t lend out their books, you must buy them, but they will buy your old ones, or let you trade them in for something of equal value. You can attend readings, and have a glass of wine on the house; and you can sit in the upstairs library (The Sylvia Beach Memorial Library) and treat it as your own reading room. On a recent visit to the shop for a reading, I sat, antisocially, in the upstairs room, where the speakers’ voices are piped in via the sound system. My mind wandering from the reading, I made a catalog of the books on the wall next to me. Here they are:

The Pig in the Barber Shop
The Bishop’s Jaegers
I Capture the Castle
Herrold’s Leap
Topper Takes a Trip
Rain in the Doorway
Shelter Bay
The Stray Lamb
Peregrine Pickle (volume 1)
Humphrey Clinker
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
The Conscience of the Rich
The Mandelbaum Gate
These Lovers Fled Away
Wolf Solnet

This list, for me, testifies to George Whitman’s most salient qualities: he was a generous and eccentric hoarder. Judging from the contents of the library, no books are turned away (expect, perhaps, for books about the shop, of which I can think of at least one that was banned when it first came out). George’s Shakespeare and Company goes beyond the standards of a “good bookshop,” the defining aspects of which, for me, include being well-curated, able to surprise me with the right book at the right moment; reliable, with a solid backlist; and not outrageously expensive. George’s vision for Shakespeare and Company was to make all of this readily available in his "rag and bone shop of the heart." But because of his particular genius, he created a space that was so much more than just a shop: it was an experience. Many people today are quoting the lines that are prominently displayed in the shop: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” A self-proclaimed “tramp,” George Whitman welcomed all those who tramped through his doorway. He presided over a community, and we are sad to see him go.

And what has gone with him is another connection to our literary heritage.  It is not through nostalgia or sentimentality that I say that I sometimes have a difficult time moving forward, leaving people trapped in the fabric of the past. This is as much an intellectual difficulty as a personal one.  George is said to have met Sylvia Beach after the war, to procure her blessing on borrowing the name of her shop, and is even said to have taken some of her stock with him to the new shop. (I have never really tried to verify this. NB: I have been told in the comments that apparently George was too shy to actually ask for permission to use the name, in case Sylvia Beach said no. And then Jeanette Winterson claims that Sylvia Beach came to the shop with Lawrence Durrell in 1958 and formally bequeathed George the name. Who knows what's true? George would often embellish for effect.) By virtue of having met Beach, and Anais Nin, and Henry Miller, and many others, he symbolized a link with this storied past, when even if the plumbing was sketchy, the exchange rate was favorable, you couldn’t cross the Boulevard Montparnasse without tripping over a Russian painter, and the Left Bank was cheap enough for artists. It was meaningful to have, upstairs at Shakespeare and Company, the living link to that period. The literary modernist era is said to have ended in 1941, with the deaths of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But in fact, it ends today, with the passing of George Whitman. I'm sure I speak for all of us when I wish Sylvia and David and everyone at the shop my deepest sympathies.

Her Royal Majesty, issue 11

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… publishes today! And I'm proud to have a short story in this issue, called "A Naturalist in the Family," which is about technology and humanity, success and failure, and ends with a duel in Les Halles. Ordering information here.  

The rocking cover (all queens!) was drawn by Badaude.

The issue also features art and reflections on art by James Franco. (Because he's everywhere else– why shouldn't he be in Her Royal Majesty?) 

For those of you here in Paris, you're warmly invited to the launch party tonight at Le Carmen. No word on whether James will show up.

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Anne Marsella at Her Royal Majesty

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Her Royal Majesty has just published a wonderful interview with the Paris-based writer Anne Marsella, author of Remedy and The Baby of Belleville.  An excerpt:

Both of your novels are set in Paris. What about Paris interests you as a writer? Is your Paris different from the “written Paris” you have inherited?
Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Baby of Belleville comprise my Parisian trilogy with Remedy and Patsy Boone working as mirror narratives, the first written in English, the latter in French. All three novels depict Paris as a city of overlapping, multiple worlds where Muslim matriarchs, French aristocrats, immigrant plumbers, Catholic nuns, American expats and a host of others entwine destinies in unexpected ways, and this fictive world, as strange and “whimsical” as it may seem to some, does in fact reflect the “real” Paris where I’ve resided for many years.  In Remedy I play with stereotypes of the American in Paris and displace them, so that they are no longer quite recognizable. The romanticized Paris played up in books like Adam Gopnik’s beautifully penned Paris to the Moon, simply does not seem real to me. I often think the myth of Paris is held too dear and to the detriment of seeing what is really going on here. I wonder how one can write a book about Paris and France in general without exploring its colonial past or lending an ear to its immigrant populations which have largely brought the country to its current prosperity. My imagination has been naturally drawn to these immigrant communities in the north-east of Paris, perhaps because I am an immigrant as well, and the question of exile and how it places one at the crux of myriad contradictions interest me: how can one make a home where one is not at home (and constantly harassed as with the sans papiers)?; what does it mean to be oneself, when one is perceived as other, particularly as an unwanted Other?; but also because in a city so groomed and polished, it is through the cracks and fissures of these more neglected neighbourhoods that my imagination has been able to make its entry. Right now France struggles to uphold its ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité against the winds of a growing xenophobia. My novels are not political in any obvious way, but they touch upon these current realities of French life.

This, to me, is the kind of writing about Paris that I can get behind. Read the full interview here. And you can read my 2008 interview with Anne here.

Wake in Progress

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At the reading last week to celebrate Shakespeare & Company's inaugural Paris Literary Prize I found my attention wandering repeatedly to a pair of prints hanging over the till. Riverrun, I read, past Eve and Adam's, why does this sound so famil–

Although any self-respecting modernist would have made the connection as soon as they read the word "Riverrun," I blame my delayed reaction on the fact that I was simultaneously listening to one of the three short-listed authors reading from their work.  I was, of course, looking at the first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is also a continuation of the last sentence of Finnegans Wake ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the").  

As it turns out, the prints I was looking at were part of Stephen Crowe's project "Wake in Progress," in which the artist is illustrating every page of Joyce's late masterpiece. In honor of Bloomsday, they were on display the previous night at the party where the winners were announced, but I had apparently had too much champagne to notice what was on the walls of the Société des gens de lettres.

According to Crowe, "Joyce’s final work is a giddy, disorienting dream that dramatises the internal conflicts of a sleeper's unconscious through a wild, satirical mash-up of history, myth and tall tale-telling." Crowe honors "the book's playful miscellany by plundering the history of the visual arts, from Medieval illuminations to cartoon strips."

The prints will be up at Shakespeare and Co until June 30th. For more information on the project, visit Crowe's website. And don't miss this short reflection on "Why Finnegans Wake is Better than Ulysses."

 

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Q&A

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Talking about the weird search terms that lead people to your blog is a tradition in the blogosphere, but before today I haven't indulged. (You don't really want to hear the kinds of Google searches that include the word "Maîtresse.") However, after I posted Keri Walsh's guest review of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," I feel inspired to answer a few of the questions that people type into Google that lead them to my blog, where prior to now, they won't have found the answers.

Question: To the person in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who wondered "In Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris,' who is the author Gil Pender talks to who wrote about guests who can't exit and are turned into animals?"

Answer: That would be Luis Buñuel, the Spanish director. The film Gil is pitching him is Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962).

Question: To the reader in Winstead, Connecticut, who queried "Did Modigliani have a mistress named Adriana?"

Answer: Maybe. I don't know. But the Adriana in the film is fictional.

Question: To the person from San Bruno, California, who asked "Who painted the fictional mistress of Adriana in 'Midnight in Paris'?"

Answer: It's supposed to be by Picasso, and they're at the Orangerie when they see it, but I have no idea if it's a real Picasso. I hope you had more luck researching this on the internet than I did.

 

And the winner is

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Shakespeare & Company announced the winners of their first ever Paris Literary Prize last Thursday.

Awarded for a novella (the perfect form, some say– more room to develop than a short story but leaner and trimmer than a novel*), the judges included Erica Wagner, Breyten Breytenbach, Darrin Strauss, and Denis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who will be publishing the winner.

Rosa Rankin-Gee (she of Le Carmen Book Swap and A Tale of Three Cities) took top honors for "The Last Kings of Sark," while Adam Biles and Agustin Maes were the runners-up. (Bios here)

Shakespeare & Company held a reading the next day where we got to hear the three of them read a sample of their work. Here's Adam Biles reading from his novella, "Grey Cats."**

 

 

*Novella fever is everywhere– my second novel is actually two long novellas which take place in the same apartment 30 years apart.

**The cafe Biles mentions is Le Select, where I'm often to be found, and yes, the cat is still there.

 

 

Guest Post: Keri Walsh on “Midnight in Paris”

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Midnight-in-paris-poster When last we heard from Keri it was during a three-way Bloomsday chat with Keri, Sylvia Whitman, and yours truly. Now Keri's back to give us some thoughts on Woody Allen’s new film, "Midnight in Paris." Take it away, Keri!

Woody Allen’s "Midnight in Paris" asks a simple question: was Paris in the Twenties really so much more glittering than the present?  The answer, inevitably, is no: Allen knows that nostalgia has a vanishing horizon, with every generation yearning for the golden age before it.  But then again, within the lustrous charm of his Jazz Age scenes in "Midnight in Paris," the answer seems to be yes: once upon a time, there was a charmed decade in which Americans lost their inhibitions and found their prose styles.

The film’s protagonist Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) is a jaded American screenwriter who gets a magical opportunity to test the charms of expatriate Paris first-hand.  While on a Paris vacation, he finds himself mysteriously transported. When the clock strikes midnight, he is picked up by a jazz age automobile filled with a tuxedoed, champagne-swilling menagerie.  "Midnight in Paris" is a variation on the Cinderella fable, but in this case the enchantment begins at the stroke of midnight.  And the modernist car, rather than turning back into a pumpkin, takes him on a journey to a land of artistic mentorship and sexual fantasy.

In the film’s first Jazz Age sequence, Gil finds himself raising a glass with the Fitzgeralds while being entertained by Cole Porter on the piano.   He sits across a café table taking advice about “Courage” from a vainglorious and punchdrunk Ernest Hemingway (wonderfully played by Corey Stoll).  The rest of the American crowd of the Twenties is there too.  Alison Pill feels just right as Zelda Fitzgerald, a party girl always on the brink of tragedy.  The film’s spoof of F. Scott, on the other hand, doesn’t quite come off.  He calls Gil “old sport,” but other than that, he doesn’t have much to say for himself.  Kathy Bates plays Gertrude Stein with firmness but kindness.  If she turns Stein into a bit more of a den mother than would really have been her style, at least Bates avoids the worst possible caricature of Stein as wannabe, fawner, and bitter, manipulative bitch. 

But Gil’s most transformative encounter with the past comes in the form of a woman named Adriana (played by Marion Cotillard).  Her role in the film is to be an allegory, both of Paris and of the past.  Allen has romantically blended women and cities before (in "Vicky Christina Barcelona," for instance).  In Midnight in Paris, Adriana has no direct historical referent, but she is a variation on the women of modernist Paris who became synonymous with the city—from Breton’s Nadja to Man Ray’s Kiki de Montparnasse, from Gala Dali to Lee Miller to Nora Joyce.  Such women, whose real-life roles varied from wife to housekeeper to model to protégée, provided the sexual inspiration that drove the modernist avant-garde.  Midnight in Paris’s Adriana is an artist’s model and mistress who, having changed hands from Modigliani to Braque to Picasso, now finds herself falling for the charms of this slightly hapless American from the future. 

Midnight in Paris proposes several different possible relations between male artists and their muses.  First there is Gil Pender’s fiancé, a thankless part for Rachel McAdams: her job is to hate Paris, have an affair with a blowhard, and keep Gil from his writing.  Gil also finds female guidance in a tour guide at the Rodin Museum (played by Carla Bruni).  She knows all about Rodin’s relationship with Camille Claudel, and she translates for him when only a knowledge of French can give him the key to the past.  The Twenties men have a spectrum of relationships to women too.  Picasso is a ruthless womanizer.  Hemingway sees women only as versions of himself, proclaiming that they can be “equal in courage” to men (though he only appears in the erotic companionship of the dashing matador Juan Belonte).  F. Scott seems willing to follow Zelda to the ends of the earth, but then is nowhere to be found when she is trying to throw herself into the Seine.  Three Surrealists— Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Luis Buñuel—turn up to reassure Gil that his love for Adriana, a woman from a different century, makes perfect sense.  The Surrealists offer a revamped version of courtly love that elevates women to positions of transcendence, theoretically places no limitations on the erotic imagination, and doesn’t bat an eye at Gil’s unconventional romance. 

The Adriana character is Allen’s variation on (and near anagram of) Gradiva, the classical girl carved into a Roman wall.  In the 1903 novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (best-known from Freud’s commentary), a young man falls in love with the figure in the bas-relief, but becomes persuaded that ancient though she is, she herself is out-of-place in the Roman city in which she was carved: she belongs in Pompeii.  In dreams, he follows her to the volcanic city, but when he calls out to her in Latin, she insists that he address her in German.   For the Surrealists, Gradiva, “the woman who walks through walls” of time and space, became a figure for the simultaneous existence of the marvelous and mundane (it was the name Dali gave to his wife Gala in several paintings).  In Allen’s film, Gradiva becomes Adriana, a Kiki de Montparnasse who longs to be a Jane Avril.  The Golden Age for Adriana is the Belle Epoque, time of can-can dancers, courtesans, absinthe, and bohemian tuberculosis. She longs to return to that stretch between the late-nineteenth century and World War I when—so she imagines—the champagne was flowing, the avant-garde was thriving in painting, suffering was romantic, and artists lived for their muses.  With Gil, she steps back in time to the Moulin Rouge.  She approaches Toulouse-Lautrec, who is sketching at a nearby table, and is offered a job as a costumier.  Gil tries to persuade Adriana of the folly of her historical sense—this is a time without antibiotics!—but she decides to stay and live out her fantasies: “it’s Paris, and the Belle Epoque is just beginning…” she tells him with stars in her eyes. 

Cotillard is magnetic.  We meet her in Gertrude Stein’s drawing room, and from there, she draws Gil into her web by moving her into a nearby room in solitude.  She is filmed in a long close-up, wearing vampish flapper black, looking lovely in a Twenties headdress, sequins and lace.  When she has captured Gil’s attention, she confesses her sad story: drawn to the capital to study design with Coco Chanel, she has instead ended up on the path of the courtesan.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, she falls instantly in love with the bumbling Gil Pender.  Cotillard’s costumes throughout the film highlight her changing personae.  She moves from the role of the decadent vamp (the black dress of the first scene) to a sailor get-up more reminiscent of Colette or of the Surrealists’ “femme-enfant.”  Finally, as she enters the Belle Epoque, she appears in a shimmering silver and gold flapper’s sheath, which gives off shades of Busby Berkeley, shades of gold-digging.  Its glow suggests Adriana’s transition from her own silver age to the one she imagines is golden.

What makes Adriana a Belle Epoque model rather than a modernist one is that she is never itemized in this way of the Surrealist muses, never shown just with her eyes brinking with tears, never shown just as a torso, like Lee Miller’s breats illuminated by Man Ray’s process of solarization.  Rather, Adriana is a muse in the style of an earlier age, and Allen’s film suggests that she is a siren singer luring Gil back to a time in which his art will fall prey to saccharine nostalgia and irrelevance.  He is taking a stab at writing the Great American Novel.  The film takes an anti-Hollywood stance, with Malibu (where Gil and his fiancé will live) presented as the anti-Paris: the land of material comfort and spiritual deadness, in contrast to Paris’s bohemian attics and suffering for art. The main character of Gil’s novel works in a nostalgia shop, and the film is a cautionary tale about the perils of fully indulging the temptations of the past.  But still, and this is one of its chief pleasures, Midnight in Paris is shamelessly indulgent of audiences’ endless appetite for the Paris of the 1920s.  If there is an artistic lesson here for Gil, it is one Allen himself has rarely needed to learn.  At his best, he has often achieved a seemingly effortless reconciliation of nostalgia and relevance, of vintage charm and satisfying satires of the present.  "Midnight in Paris" is like a trip to Madame Tussaud’s or a carnival ride: it is a tour through a wax fantasy version of the past, a film that is itself a nostalgia shop.  And as usual, Allen engages his fantasy past— its music and pop culture, its creative and sexual ideals—with a textured, humorous and self-aware romanticism.  

This is why the film’s ending seems unnecessarily self-denying.  Gil Pender pulls himself away from his dream world and returns to the imperfect present to begin a new life in Paris.  Like the modernist artists of the twenties, he has learned that he must find his art in the jumbled, chaotic materials of the present.  His new muse will be a woman he has met on his rambles through the city.  Her job echoes that of his novel’s nostalgia-purveying protagonist.  She sells old Cole Porter albums out of crates along the street.  She is lovely, but with the awkward loveliness of real life, not the transcendent loveliness of his dream woman.   But what we really yearn for at the end of this film is for Gil to encounter his Gradiva on the streets of modern Paris, for Marion Cotillard as Adriana to emerge from the Belle Epoque in modern clothes, having sought him across the centuries.  Allen refuses this opportunity for romantic satisfaction.  His modern artist will be deprived of the consolations of the wise,  sad, and transcendently beautiful muse-mistress.  Woody Allen’s characters rarely get the girl, at least not the one who matters most.  But in the infinite substitutions of the muse, there’s always another one just around the corner…

Keri Walsh is the editor of The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  She is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University in New York.