Last summer I visited Paris. My memories of those ten days are like cherished postcards from another life: Strolling hand in hand with my husband on the wide, neat, limestone avenues from the 1700's; resting on the lip of a marble fountain in the verdant Luxombourg Gardens; silently moving amongst the devout in the hushed and cavernous churches; drinking in the fragile beauty of the sun as it lights up the petals of the white lilies in the Jardins Des Plantes. With my feet complaining, I would take celebratory rest stops at little cafes, sitting face-out and watching the assortment of life stroll, ride and drive by my little window on the world, as I sipped thick & delicious cafe crèmes and savoured the fresh butter layers of air that are the Parisian croissants. I was deeply impressed with the history and the beauty that surrounded me, and the contradictions that exist simultaneously in this otherworld.
One of the most impressive angles of Paris' beautiful face is the multi-layered literary world. This is her secret jewelry box to a fanatical reader like me. I walked dreamily (and somewhat disbelievingly) along her oldest streets and sponged up all that I could. I walked daily up the narrow Rue Mouffetard, a very old, narrow Roman road that climbs uphill in a bustling district. It narrowly escaped the blasting out of Baron Haussmann's redevelopment during the reign of Napoleon III. This was the area that I stayed in with my husband while in Paris. We rented a small run-down apartment (as the ad said, with a terrasse!) near the Pantheon on the Left Bank, so named for the leftist thinkers who jammed the cafes and lived in the tiny accommodations there. Like everywhere in Paris, this area was overloaded with interesting sites and smells and little plaques annotating the life of yet another famous writer who lived there. Literally every corner of Paris is stamped with the imprint of its writers and artists. Off the Rue Mouffetard was tiny Rue Rollin, a side street where Descartes lived. Only a humble plaque next a large, rustic door clued in the observer that this was his home. Another home on this tiny street was occupied by Pascal in the 1600s. Two doors down, another small plaque stated that the occupant in this home, a professor, had been dragged forcibly by the Nazis to a death camp. Impossible to imagine those green-grey uniforms marching along the tiny streets of one of Paris' oldest and liveliest neighbourhoods. Hemingway wrote on the top floor of the apartment diagonally across the street, bordered by little awnings over cafes. George Orwell, Verlaine, James Joyce, Jean Valjean and Balzac all lived in this tiny district near the Place de la Contrascarpe.
Since entering this world of the ultimate immersive library, I have been reading books about Paris, set in Paris, written by ex-pats and Parisians’, and anything I can get my hands on about Paris. I read That Summer In Paris first, Morley Callaghan's detailed defense about his time spent in Paris as a young man in the 1920s when he was boxing with Hemingway and still chasing the elusive James Joyce, when he was poor enough to be dropping in on credit to Shakespeare and Company bookstore and spending hours strolling along the Seine. Morley was an amazing writer, deft and sure handed. I knew nothing about the drama between himself, Hem. and F. Scott Fitzgerald until reading this memoir.
Simone de Beauvoir's ghost still lives in these Paris cobblestones and streets. Her famous romance with Jean Paul Sartre is evident around every corner in Paris, from her and Sartre's shared lonely grave in the cemetery of Montparnasse; their grave is covered with rocks, flowers and letters that are stacked precariously from grieving pilgims. There are statues and streets named in their honour, famous cafes where they worked. As a supposedly well-read traveler I felt unschooled. I hadn't yet not read any of Simone's work. I promised myself that as soon as I got home to Calgary I would read all I could. I started with A Very Easy Death (Une Mort Tres Douce), a precisely written testimonial to her mother and her slow death. Her beautiful phrasing: “facing the black sun alone”, “living prattle at the bedside” and her unflinching description of the toll of illness on her mother’s body turned me into a follower overnight. I also read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Second Sex. Her writing is dense and philosophical, I had to re-reading passages to get the most out of her writing. Sometimes I found her direction difficult to follow. However, her influence is immense and her writing made me realize how infantile my own supposedly "enlightened" undergraduate eduction is in comparison: who am I but an auto-didactic, urban Canadian reader, with a shaky hold on existential philosophy and only a slightly firmer grounding in women's studies?
Next I was into Franz Fanon's classic, The Wretched of the Earth. Banned in bookstores in France upon publication, this was a vastly influential work and an interesting socio-politial document for me. It laid a path for the anti- Colonialist struggle, especially in Africa.
Next read was A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s fantastic memoir, written when he was across the street from our little apartment on Rue Mouffetard. Hemingway wrote extensively and critically of my beloved Fitzgerald in this book. I was fascinated. I had always felt that reading a writer's words was the most intimate relationship someone could have with another person (beyond falling in love), but after reading Hem’s book I realized that reading an author’s work is only like looking at a writer through a pane of mirrors and stained glass, the very glass itself coloured by the writer’s past and his or her impression of himself. His alleged self. In another way I suppose this is a kind of intimacy. Reading Hemingway's words on Fitzgerald gave me another view of the proverbial elephant in the dark room. Hemingway's tendancy to use language that is hard and perfunctory exaggerated his point. I think that Hem was very hard on Fitzgerald and I sense a contempt for Fitzgerald that is hardened into aggression and pride in some of his other work, like Old Man and the Sea and Death in the Afternoon.
“(Fitzgerald’s) talent was as natural as the pattern that was made on a butterfly’s wings. At one time, he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could remember when it had been effortless” A Moveable Feast
A lot of the decline of Fitzgerald, in Hemingway’s view, seemed to be the because of Scott's love and obsession with his wife Zelda. That Scott lost his way from his art. An interesting view of love, if my interpretation is correct, as Hem mentions no love of such magnitude in his own life. And I think this capability to lose himself to love is actually what made Scott such a beautiful writer.
Next read: Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris, a hilarious and contemporary account of life in Normandy. Sedaris is smart and funny! A releif from all the author bashing that went on in the 1920's memoirs.
After that I went through a period of reading Nancy Mitford, the English socialite and social critic who lived in Paris. Something in Nancy connected with me on a level that surpassed class, temporal distance and geography. I read her biography first, oddly: Life in a Cold Climate. This book conveyed her charm and wit, her sweeping intellect and her strong individuality. It immediately convinced me to read her novels. I read Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate and found them witty and fun to read. But beneath all this cutting humour I could clearly see a lurking woman who was desperate to be swept off her feet. It reminded me of myself and all the liberated women that I know, even now 40 years after the crescendo of the women's movement. My generation who, after coming home from our successful careers, managing our own bank accounts, scheduling in our gym and yoga retreats on our computers, after we pick up the kids from their play dates- if we were to pick up our diaries and confess our deepest secrets, we would not be so very different from poor, romantic, lonely Nancy, except we would probably know a lot less about politics and have less of a sense of humour.
In Nancy’s own tightly written and cleverly plotted novel the Pursuit of Love, she writes as Fabrice “One’s emotions are intensified in Paris, one can be more happy, and also more unhappy here than in any other place”. With this little reference, she has captured something else I can relate to. In Paris I felt a happiness beyond all measure: free of petty worries, not oriented towards buying silly things and looking or acting a certain way as we often do at home in Canada, not caring about money or television or email, or even how much I was spending. It was refreshing to be relieved of the burden of hating our human development, I didn't see a single "power mall" to remind me of our wretched state of modern life. It was a relief to temporarily press the pause button on the guilt that I feel when I see us raping the environment to built yet another mindless, artless suburb. The only things I thought of in Paris were simple pleasures, and great ideas. Books, the role of the state & democracy; cheese, pastries, baguettes; Human rights, divine union, and wine (and scarves!). Being alive and human was the only real preoccupation. Instead of billboards and concrete and glass, endless mazes of identical boxes that we call homes, when I looked up in Paris, I saw keystones of limestone arches, enormous doorways to apartment courtyards that could accommodate a horse and carriage. I saw the gigantic and astoundingly beautifully symmetry that is La Tour Eiffel; stylishly designed art deco entranceways polished to a gleam; huge chestnut trees and pretty window boxes on every street; perfectly arched bridges with faces of gargoyles watching over the water. All the good that we as a species have contributed to our current world was at every turn. All this glorious light as humans. Paris was my city of light, it made holy all the things of my religion: the bounty of human ideas, the glory of nature, the beauty of simple pleasures. I spent ten days in the temple of my gods and it was a holy experience.
I continue to read and have a few more books on my list: I am reading Memoirs of Montparnesse by John Glassco and Writers In Paris by David Burke. Also on my list is Time Went Softly There, a memoir about life at Shakespeare and Co. bookstore (a fantastic store, that I recommend to all readers), Samuel Beckett's novels, Les Miserables, A Sport and A Pastime, and the novels of Marcel Proust. An ongoing list of books relating to Paris is ever growing and the more I read, the more I need to read!
And, hopefully, at first opportunity, I shall return to my city of light to drink at the feet of my gods and go back to the best bookstore I have ever seen in my travels. And get a new scarf.
No comments:
Post a Comment