The other day I decided to take a quick peek at the book reviews section of the New Yorker. This turned out to be a mistake.
I saw a post titled "Paris was Theirs."
Regular readers of this blog - there are about 1.5 of you - probably know that I'm a bit insecure about the fact that I've never been to Paris. Sure, Madrid is sunny and Venice is romantic, but Paris is ephemeral, Paris is literary, Paris is everything European, the antithesis of the clanking, sprawling, falsely-whitewashed American suburbs. A life in Paris is a life fully-lived and frequently written about. Everyone is fashionable. You can eat all the baguettes you like, because French women don't get fat (The publisher must have rejected the title "French women don't obey the laws of thermodynamics.")
Witness a Vanity Fair profile of French first lady Carla Bruni. Bruni's description in American media combines all the stereotypes of the romantic Parisian, who is simultaneously liberated and restrained.
"Bruni has helped bring Sarkozy to his senses...she made him get rid of his big gold Rolex and replace it with a sleek Patek Philippe...he no longer creates a ruckus by jogging in the Bois de Boulogne, the public park on the western edge of Paris - not since it became clear that the French were horrified to see pictures of their President sweating."
What American could forget the infamous photo of Obama, sweating in the Hawaiian surf, that all but won him the election?
Of course, Vanity Fair is the type of magazine that uses the word "nude" to describe what the rest of the Internet refers to as Carla Bruni's "naked photos," so.
But Paris. What would Ernest Hemingway have been if he hadn't spent so many years in exile in Paris, letting time heal his war wounds and enjoying the company of people like Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso?
I remember a high school English class where the teacher - she looked like a librarian but had the heart, apparently, of a bygone Paris bohemian - had all us pull our desks up in a circle and read aloud from "Farewell to Arms." I remember a description of a nighttime meeting between the two doomed lovers, Henry and Catherine. They meet by a lake. There are many references to water, as well as beds, boards and stiffness.
My English teacher raised her eyebrows after we were done.
"What is this passage about?" she asked us. I thought the class was silent because they had no clue, but in retrospect, that might not have been it. Bursting with knowledge, I raised my hand and had a go.
"They've just met and feel very safe, the tone of the passage is one of coziness," I said.
The teacher sighed and shut her book.
"That's one interpretation," she said politely. "But it is wrong."
It turns out that the passage was something else entirely. My teacher's tone suggested that Paris, as they say, is for lovers, and I should probably accept that I'd spend my adult life vacationing in the Dakotas, eating food bought from fast food drive-thrus.
Paris also liberated (maybe a better word here would be "unleashed") Henry Miller. According to one biography, "Miller didn't just live in Paris, he devoured it." Anyone who has read Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn, the books he wrote while he was there, will be treated to a perhaps too detailed account of what exactly Miller devoured while on his Parisian prowl.
Of course, it's gauche to talk about this, but it appears that both Hemingway and Miller were drawn to Paris for the most mundane of reasons: the city was dirt-cheap, and they were poor.
In fact, a profile of Hemingway's Paris years opens by describing the bathroom in his apartment as "basically a closet with a slop bucket inside." Miller's account of his years in Paris includes the phrase "Everything comes back to me in a rush -- the toilets that wouldn't work." He was a "bewildered, poverty-stricken individual" at the time.
Maybe the fantasy that these authors inhabited had nothing to do with Paris at all. Maybe it was all about glossing over things like poverty and non-functional toilets. Paris is a mood, sure, but maybe also a set of socioeconomic circumstances.
In "Paris Was Ours," a collection of Parisian memoirs by today's writers, this lesson is completely absent.
The very first story in the anthology is "L'Argent is no Object," the title of which suggests that Parisians, unlike others, have managed to free themselves from the constraints of needing a medium of exchange. (Perhaps they have - what else could explain the 30-hour work week?)
Anyway, the female author is on her way out of a marriage and finds herself in need of financial advice. This is hard to find in Paris, where people live on love alone. Eventually a friend refers her to an accountant, whom the friend only knows because he "happens to be one of her former lovers." Well, thank God for that.
The author's Parisian prowl contains echoes of Miller. Of that first accountant she says, "he was the first of a string of expensive accountants I consulted subsequently, each one more attractive than the one before."
Clearly, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore. What sort of city is Paris, anyway, where even the accountants are good-looking? If the author is even talking about accountants - as we all know by now, I'm hopeless at interpreting any literature set in or inspired by Paris.
It's easy to say that modern American writing about Paris is meant to explode stereotypes, but instead it relies upon them. Can you imagine "Kuala Lumpur was Ours" or "German Women Don't Get Fat"? I wish I could, but I can't.
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