Good Americans, when they die,” wrote the artist Thomas Gold Appleton, “go to
Paris.”
Poetically, if not theologically, he was right. Paris has been a source of
endless inspiration to Americans, especially their writers. Throughout the
20th century, no city in the world can claim to have nurtured so much
American talent.
Almost all the great writers of the post-war years seem to have had a Parisian
schooling; Hemingway, Truman Capote, Irwin Shaw, JD Salinger, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and countless others. What
had become of their Paris? One weekend, I decided to find out, and boarded
Eurostar for a 186mph kick-start to a leisurely investigation encompassing
fine food, iconic, sometimes bizarre hotels and dust-licked bookshops.
The train was as good a place as any to contemplate the literary trail. France
unrolls magnificently from the moment one is out of the tunnel: great swoops
of chalk, pink roofs and huge, angular cattle. It was a timely reminder that
this was “abroad”, a fact often lost on the writers. Few of the Americans
learnt French or understood the politics, and most got by on a sense of
abandon.
The train was also a reminder of the travails of their travel. Nowadays, it’s
an easy ride, a simple whoosh from London to Paris, all in the time it takes
to eat breakfast. The statistics of this transition are overwhelming; every
day Eurostar staff wash 36,000 glasses and 80,000 pieces of cutlery. It was
different then. Burroughs had to bum his way to Paris from a squat in
Tangiers, and Salinger arrived on a tank in 1944.
The first sign that things are different are the statues at the Gare du Nord:
enormous armed women, sportingly naked from the navel up. In Paris, sex
sells, and everything — from tickets to yoghurt — comes with a faceful of
rump. You either love this or hate it, and the Americans loved it. While the
British have always assumed Paris is a City of Love — and feel constantly
spurned — the Yanks are more realistic, enjoying it for what it is: an
adventure. As far as the writers were concerned, it also helped that there
was no McCarthyism, no prudery and plenty of hooch. “It was a silly useless
life,” wrote Harold Stearns, “and I have missed it every day since.”
I began my tour in Montmartre, just as the Americans had. In 1918, thousands
of them, mostly black, had settled there. I could see why. The 18th
arrondissement still felt like an island bobbing around several hundred feet
above the city. Almost everybody living there had exiled themselves from the
ordinary. All the dogs were dalmatians, and most people did something
baroque, such as gilding, lute-making or barometer repair. I saw a tramp
wearing a pair of headphones made of rags and wire, as if unable to bear any
further intrusion into this world of his own.
I ate at the Café des Deux Moulins, which was still raffishly arty. Most of
the customers seemed to be in the throes of either creative breakthrough or
persistent hangover. The woman next to me, a dancer, ate like a bird and
smoked like a fish. Although the air was filmy and blue, and the walls were
crusted in yellow, the food was exquisite: lemony swordfish, rocket and
chèvre.
That’s Paris’s trick, I suppose; just when you think it’s about to be
appalling, it does something wonderful and you love it all over again. Among
the first Americans to appreciate this sleight of hand were Scott
Fitzgerald, Pound and Cummings, along with their muse, Josephine Baker. She
was performing a few blocks away, at the Folies Bergère, wearing only a
string of bananas.
Miss Baker had, as it happened, stayed at my hotel on St Germain. It’s easy to
see why she’d let Paris go to her head. The Hôtel Lutetia is as zany now as
it was in the 1920s; it has stone vines wriggling up the front, and the bars
are like great caverns of art deco, with cubist chairs and surrealist
sculptures (a head of cogs and a boatless propeller). Every evening a jazz
pianist plays a bright-red grand, and every morning a sumptuous breakfast is
served up on tiny square plates. The Americans still love it, and so do the
French. One night, a woman turned up wearing what looked like a parachute
and a basket of ocelots.
But the best of the American ghosts are to be found downtown, at the Ritz.
This is the sublime end of the hospitality spectrum. With its gold light
switches and swan-shaped taps, the Ritz fits neatly into the
love-it-or-hate-it debate. In 1944, it was “liberated” by Ernest Hemingway,
who immediately bought dry martinis for his 50 guerrillas. It wasn’t long
before the others joined him: JD Salinger (enjoying his “best few minutes of
the war”), Robert Capa, Irwin Shaw (who wrote The Young Lions) and Marlene
Dietrich, who sang on the edge of Hemingway’s bath, until she tired of his
language and changed hotels.
There’s still a bar, reverentially Hemingway-esque and decorated with fishing
rods and sharks’ jaws. It’s a good place to nurse a cocktail, taking it
gently at a euro a sip. Hem had taken nothing gently and behaved appallingly
most of the time; he tried to bed Simone de Beauvoir, composed a loud song
about his wife Martha Gellhorn’s vagina, punched Malraux (France’s future
minister of culture), drank six bottles of scotch with Sartre and gave
Picasso a spattered shirt from a German he’d killed. When his new mistress,
Mary Welsh, tried to curb his drinking, he ordered the barman to invent an
odourless cocktail. It was clearly a success. “Bloody Mary,” he told the
barman, “didn’t smell a thing.”
NOT ALL Americans like the Ritz. I once heard a fashionista say it needed a
swipe with a baseball bat. Even Hemingway was given to moments of overload,
and once — after a skinful — machinegunned his bathroom.
Like most of the American writers, I usually found myself gravitating back to
the Left Bank. It’s more spontaneous than elsewhere, with its lime trees and
crooked streets and views over Notre Dame. There was a cluster of literary
bars near my hotel: Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp and the Café de Flore.
People still squash inside, in the hope of seeing a writer, but at £15 a
salad, these days it’s mostly mink and parachute. Things were different in
the 1950s, when, according to Capote, it was quite usual for a budding
writer to find himself face down in a cafe. “Despite the waterfall
hangovers,” he wrote, “I was under the impression I was having a damn good
time.”
Continued on page 2
()As I wandered happily into the Latin Quarter, it occurred to me how little
the Americans had taken away. Paris was food for the mind, a treat for the
senses, but seldom gave them a plot. Perhaps, like all outsiders, the
Americans could enjoy the surprises, but couldn’t assemble it all as a
whole; the cyclists with ladders, drunks covered in pigeons, the abundance
of sex. Few ever wrote about Paris, whether in fiction or memoirs. James
Jones wrote his Pacific War classic The Thin Red Line (1962) on the leafy
Ile St Louis, while Richard Wright and Chester Himes wrote about the
predicament of the American black. The “beatniks”, meanwhile, wrote about
little that made any sense at all.
It took me a while to find their dive, the Beat Hotel. The old alleyway
Gît-le-Coeur is now clean and cobbled, and the little hotel gleams with
polish and brass. Around its ochre walls are old pictures of Ginsberg,
Burroughs and Gregory Corso. During the 1950s, they represented the new
generation of American writer, drugged, marginal and thrillingly weird, and
lived here in conditions of exorbitant squalor. They had one cold tap
between them and boiled mussels in their room, horrifying their French
visitors by peeing in the sink. Somehow, despite the stink, they’d produced
The Naked Lunch and a few oddities for our language (such as “flower power”
and “heavy metal”). Then they left and the place was redeveloped. I noticed
from the visitors’ book that Ginsberg hadn’t returned for 40 years: “Gone
are the rats,” he wrote, “and so are we.”
A few streets away, on Rue de la Boucherie, is a bookshop that marks the end
of this literary trail. Shakespeare & Company is an odd place, with beds
among the books. (Any wandering soul can sleep here, in return for a few
hours at the till.) The owner, George Whitman, is 91, and lives in the
attic, where he singes his hair and writes tracts for his “Rag and Bone Shop
of the Heart”.
He arrived in Paris 60 years ago, and remembers most of the writers since
then. (According to George, when Burroughs read out his work, people didn’t
know whether to laugh or be sick.) Has it been a love affair, his life in
Paris? The city is more like the set for Romeo and Juliet, he said, forever
young, “but I have become like King Lear, slowly losing my wits”.
- John Gimlette travelled with Eurostar. He is the author of Theatre of Fish
(Hutchinson £16.99)
