An American in Paris

Paris has long seduced – and nurtured – cultured and educated Americans, as the broadcaster, journalist and writer Charles Glass knows from experience

It [Paris] pre-existed in the memory, somehow, so that it began by being familiar even to those who had never seen it before. It was a patrie of the imagination. Vincent Sheean, In Search of History (1918-1930), Hamish Hamilton, 1935

Vincent Sheean, a 32-year-old almost-graduate of the University of Chicago, arrived in Paris in 1922. In that year, Paris played midwife to two of the three books that, as Edward Said observed in a lecture I was fortunate to hear in 1972, brought the novel, the poem and the myth into the new century. The masterpieces were TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses and TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Ezra Pound knocked The Waste Land into shape for Eliot in Paris. Ulysses, begun in Trieste, was completed in Paris and published in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in the rue de l’Odéon. Only Seven Pillars had no Parisian connection – although it would play into a French illusion, as calculated as Britain’s was and as America’s became, of Western dominion and betrayal in the Orient. Pound and Miss Beach were American. Via their influence on the young Americans discovering Paris in 1922 – Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Elliot Paul, Sheean himself and scores more – the city has seduced literate Americans ever since.

Sheean discovered in Paris a carnival of eccentricity, sex and drinking, three phenomena banished from the American heartland by the Prohibition on alcohol (16 January 1920 to 5 December 1933, RIP) and all it represented. Artistic expression, progressive politics (curtailed by the Palmer Raids, the expulsion of radicals and the violent suppression of trades unions) and rational education (whether or not it conflicted with Holy Writ) flourished in Paris. Demobbed American veterans of the First World War, white and black, stayed in Paris rather than return to a sterile existence that no longer satisfied them. The answer to the musical query, “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” was: “You can’t.” Back home, no one understood why sons, brothers and uncles were spurning the homestead and the plough for a land of pansies.

Among African-Americans, the reason was obvious: for the first time in their lives, white people treated them as equals. American war heroes such as Eugene Bullard (history’s first black combat pilot, who flew for the French when the Americans would not have him) played jazz to mixed-race audiences unknown in Bullard’s native Georgia. Bullard, like the flamboyant Ada “Bricktop” Smith, owned a nightclub that, in the United States, he’d have entered only through the kitchen. (The Ku Klux Klan sent emissaries to Paris to warn Frenchmen and women against racial mixing with American “Negroes”. France’s press and political establishment sent them back to the South in a rare instance of European resistance to American interference in their way of life. The American newspapers in Paris, owned and edited by white gentlemen, supported the Klan.) White and black Americans in Paris, unlike their compatriots in the land of the free, made love without the consent of Church or State (even, God forbid, to members of other races or of their own sex), read what they wanted without Puritan censors and dodged Babbittish conformity under Harding and Coolidge.

In the year before Sheean left his native land, Hollywood had anointed former Postmaster General Will Hays, in HL Mencken’s words, as America’s “moral dictator”. Hays promptly banned from silent film captions the words, listed by Mencken, “broad (for woman), chippy, cocotte, courtesan, eunuch, fairy (in the sense of homosexual), floozy, harlot, hot mama, hussy, madam (in the sense of brothel keeper), nance, pansy, slut, trollop, tart and wench and, of course, whore”. US courts convicted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of obscenity for publishing sections of Ulysses in their Little Review. In Miss Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, neither words nor books were censored. Young, aspiring writers from France, Britain and America made it what Janet Flanner, another vintage 1922 American transplant, called “their club, their mail drop, meeting house and forum”. On her shelves, they found books that had to be smuggled into the United States and sold in brown wrappers: Fanny Hill, Havelock Ellis, Oscar Wilde. Here, Hemingway met Joyce, Joyce met Paul Valéry, George Antheil met everyone. Joyce called Sylvia’s world “Stratford-on-Odéon”.

By 1922, an outline of jazz-age Paris was forming: Sylvia Beach’s and Adrienne Monnier’s bookshops on the Left Bank, the black jazz clubs in Montmartre, the literary cafés of Saint-Germain and Montparnasse, the boîtes of the Latin Quarter where Elliot Paul and Ernest Hemingway pitched their tents. Hemingway had arrived at the end of 1921, with wife Hadley in tow, to find a room at the Hôtel Jacob (now Hôtel d’Angleterre), take his first drink at the Dôme and rent a third floor walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine that had a Turkish toilet on the communal landing. Paul, one of the unsung geniuses of the era, was as broke as Hemingway and found refuge nearby in the then depressed and non-touristy rue de la Huchette. A young prostitute named Suzanne took him to a dungeon below the Hôtel du Caveau for a sandwich. “The place appeared less likely to produce a sandwich than any I had seen in my life,” he wrote in his masterpiece, The Last Time I Saw Paris. “There I found Paris – and France.” Hemingway, Paul and Sheean all worked in Paris as ad hoc newspapermen – Hemingway as a freelance writer for the Toronto Star, Paul and Sheean at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Tribune – in addition to publishing a Paris edition – stationed two full-time correspondents in Paris, one to cover the news, the other to report on developments in literature and the arts. Paris, more than any other city outside the United States, mattered to literate Americans.

The lost generation, as Gertrude Stein dubbed them, of American writers, artists, composers and photographers in Paris, were not the first Americans to discover the French capital’s wonders. Sheean himself was aware that his intellectual forebears had trodden the quais along the Seine before him. It was the city to which the new country sent its finest statesmen – Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris and James Monroe. (There seem to be more statues of Franklin, Jefferson and Washington in Paris than of any French king or president.) The legitimising presence in Paris of Adams and Jefferson contributed to the notion that Paris rounded out otherwise gauche, if well-bred, Americans. (Jefferson brought back, in addition to a little polish, barrels of wine and thousands of books that became the core of the Library of Congress.) Walt Whitman wrote gleefully during his tenure beside the Seine, “I am a real Parisian.” There was no contradiction between being a “real Parisian” and a “real American”, even if an American could never be – did not need to be – French. Janet Flanner noted in the early 1920s that Paris had the largest American population in Europe, a figure that the diplomat Robert Murphy put at 30,000 on the eve of the Second World War. So well established was this outpost of expatriates that they had their own hospital, two churches, two daily newspapers, a library, a school, a half-dozen university alumni clubs, an American Legion post, a gentlemen’s club, a fluctuating number of literary periodicals, charitable societies and social associations – including, lest the aspiring bohemians thought they had made a total escape, the Kiwanis and Rotarians.

Paris educated the rough frontiersmen of St Louis and Chicago, but Americans became an energising component of Paris life. Their contributions were not inconsiderable – the dancing of Isadora Duncan, the voice of Josephine Baker, Henry Crowder’s piano, Sidney Bechet’s clarinet, Aaron Copland’s compositions, the photographs of Man Ray and Lee Miller, the pens of Scott Fitzgerald, Julien Green and Henry Miller. Miller, who lived in Paris before and after the German occupation, navigated the city’s sexual shoals and managed to shock some Parisians with his freewheeling discourses on sex. James Baldwin came to Paris in 1948, but he was less interested in the African-Americans of pre-War Paris than in Henry James and the Paris he had known with Edith Wharton. In Paris, Baldwin wrote, “I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use – I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle and the tribe. I would have to appropriate those white centuries, I would have to make them mine.”

Paris produced in Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris distrust of the mob and of radicalism that influenced the American republic’s constitutional limits on popular liberty. Yet Paris made Sheean and Hemingway into radicals in the tradition of another adopted Parisian, Thomas Paine. Both ended up in Spain on the Republican side, and neither had any stomach for Maréchal Pétain, Pierre Laval and Vichy. In 1944, Hemingway, though officially a war correspondent, fought his way back to Paris with a ragged gang of résistants. When he arrived at the outskirts, “I couldn’t say anything more then because I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was the city I love best in the world.” The first thing he did was rescue Sylvia Beach from snipers before heading to The Ritz to liberate its cellars.

Nowadays, politics is dead in Paris. The passions that inspired the Commune of 1870, the brutal épuration of 1944 and the anti-imperial riots of the 1960s died in a generation preoccupied with consumer goods and celebrity more than justice and liberty. Politicians, despite Gaullist and Socialist labels, are as apolitical as pitchmen for ketchup bottles or perfume. The market, its evident shortcomings revealed yet again over the past two years, sets the parameters of debate. Ideas are dead. Self-described philosophers preen and practise their bons mots for television game shows and populist books. Their influence on American expatriates is less than the American dream of unlimited wealth is on them. Paris is not alone in having abandoned politics and philosophy, but that is more grievous in a city that inspired expatriates from Ho Chi Minh to Frantz Fanon.

Seven years ago, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and Norris Church, Mailer’s wife, did a reading at the American Church in Paris of the play Plimpton wrote with Terry Quinn, Zelda, Scott and Ernest. At the end of a rousing performance, Plimpton invited questions. One woman directed hers at Mailer: why did Americans in the Twenties have to come to Paris to write? Mailer mused for a moment, then answered, “I guess they got tired of being around a lot of stupid people.”

Despite the love affair that Americans of many eras had with Paris, whipping up anti-French hatred in America – or anti-American venom in France – has been surprisingly easy. George Bush did it when the French government refused to join his war against Iraq. Lyndon Johnson did the same in 1966, following Charles de Gaulle’s withdrawal from Nato and expulsion of American bases. Just as Americans dumped French perfume down lavatories in 1966, their children ate “freedom fries” in 2003. When peasant crusader José Bové took his axe to McDonald’s, most of his countrymen cheered. (That did not stop them from eating hamburgers.) The two republics born of the late-18th-century Enlightenment have been friends for most of their history. Seventeen thousand Frenchmen volunteered to fight for American independence. Americans landed in France in 1918 and 1944 to pay with their lives for France’s liberty from Germany. What makes the “stupid people” on both sides of the Atlantic hate each other now?

Charles Glass is the author of Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation (Harper Collins, London; Penguin Books, New York; and Editions Saint-Simon, Paris, 2010)

• The Good and The Great
• The City of Light
• Stardust Memories, Future Dreams
• Mini-break

Tags: Charles Glass, Elliot Paul, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Paris, TS Eliot

Would you like to comment on this article?

You must be logged in to post a comment.