The Boston Globe Magazine:
“Literary Déja Vu in Paris: a new crowd of New England expatriates is homing in on Paris. But the rules have changed since Hemingway burned his furniture to keep warm”
- June 9, 2002
1.
Cadavres, they’re called, when empty, these bottles of cheap Bordeaux we continue to order at a wine bar not far from Place de la Bastille. We’re all crammed around a long table: three poets, two novelists, an opera singer, two other hangers-on of unknown pedigree. Comrades, hastily assembled, because George is moving to Brussels and we’re all tipping a glass of rouge to wish him well. Cigar and cigarette smoke. Someone orders a plate of goat cheese and bleu d’Auvergne. More guests—a journalist, an African dance student, a translator—more wine glasses. How’s the work going? Talk of the latest project: the novel, the audition, the pathetic French lessons. Someone got laid off. Someone got a poem published. Someone had too much to drink. A few folks depart, two more bottles arrive. The wind picks up outside. 12:45am—last Métro. Bon voyage, George. One less poet in Paris.
“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, a recollection of what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. “I walked down past the Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon … until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel. It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.”
It’s 2002, the groggy dawn of a new era. Tucked away in our neighborhood wine bar, characters like us—writers, artists, singers, actors—do keep coming to Paris. Like the Lost Generation (1920s-30s), the post-WW II group (1940s-50s) and the lesser-known ‘Third Wave’ (1980s), once again a sizable English-speaking artistic community has abandoned America (and Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere) because Paris remains a place where things are happening. It seems everyone dreams of being here, and writers, perhaps more so than other expatriates, are drawn, like moths, to the City of Light’s promise of inspiration. Boston-area exiles in particular help lead the rejuvenated literary scene.
But few of us remain starry-eyed for long. Nor do we labor under the illusion that a better novel can rise from the streets of the Latin Quarter than, say, Jamaica Plain. We can’t escape who we are, only our surroundings. Both reverent and skeptical of the city’s romance, we could care less about recapturing some golden age. France isn’t the center of intellectual freedom and avante garde anymore. Paris didn’t purposefully abdicate the throne to another urban hot-spot (though Prague and Seattle attempted to crown themselves in recent years). Rather, it seems no single city can any longer command the cultural zeitgeist. There’s no one place to be anymore.
None of this means the phantoms of James Joyce, Henry Miller and James Baldwin have completely abandoned us. It just means the mythologies and Muses have adapted to endure. Paris still welcomes starving artists, but beware: it’s three Euros for a café au lait (now called café crème, and don’t even think of calling the waiter garçon). Perhaps the mark of ‘post’-post-modern identity is the freedom to choose why Paris draws you, even though the rules have changed since Hemingway burned his furniture to keep warm.
2.
Tired of our routine in Brattleboro, Vermont, when my wife Isabelle and I arrived here in December of 1999, we weren’t fleeing political or artistic oppression, but boredom. Lifelong New Englanders, but experienced travelers, the idea of living abroad had held us under its spell for most of our 14 years together. We’d met in the Pioneer Valley in the late 1980s—I went to Hampshire College and she to UMass-Amherst—and after traveling separately around the world and together to France, we felt the electrical charge that two weeks in Provence or Paris could deliver. What if that adventurous jolt could be extended? We weren’t getting any younger. We had no mortgage or children to feed. And we knew a little French. Within three months of deciding, we’d quit our jobs in higher ed administration, sold our rusted-out 1985 Saab, and compressed our apartment into boxes.
Looking back, I see that decision as an insane leap of faith. Booking two cheap seats, one-way, to Paris! Renting an apartment, via the Internet, for three months in an obscure neighborhood of the 11th arrondissement! Knowing no one, other than the phone number of a friend of a friend! What we were thinking? Paris was a complete stranger. Fortunately, we had no clear hopes or goals beyond a vague sense of escape. Unsure how long we’d stay or whether we’d find work, our first gray winter months were spent searching the boulevards for cheap thrills and counting our francs. Isabelle enrolled in French language and West African dance classes. I wrote poems. If things didn’t work out after six months, or if we drained our checking account, we told ourselves we could retreat home without shame.
Despite being a dedicated, struggling writer (dedicated to struggling, anyway), I didn’t know much about Hemingway and was only vaguely aware of the rich legacy of exiled writers, dancers, and painters who used to decorate the city. But as soon as I'd studied up on my émigré forbearers, it seemed Paris offered both encouragement and threats. Yes, perhaps the city could turn me into a writer. But the gravity of its literary history began to weigh on me—here is the apartment where Voltaire drank a dozen cups of chocolate a day, there is the café where Sartre argued. To add to pressure, friends and family assured us we were living not only our dream, but theirs too. “I’ve always wanted to move to Paris and write my novel,” they kept telling us—in their subconscious, they were already busy at work in a garret apartment overlooking Nôtre Dame. Imagine my humiliation if I fled for home having never tried on the ‘real’ expat lifestyle for size, clichés and all. But I just wanted to write, and not feel judged against literary history. “You can’t look in the rear-view mirror and drive at the same time,” Thad Carhart recently warned me. A writer from Amherst, Massachusetts—a town with its own intimidating literary pedigree—Carhart lives in a cobblestoned Paris neighborhood imprinted with Hemingway’s footsteps.
It’s natural for strangers in a strange land to seek out their own. I found myself befriending writers from my neck of the woods—“Really? Where in New Hampshire are you from?” But learning about well-known poets and novelists who hailed not from New York or Chicago, but Cambridge and the Back Bay, was an even greater comfort. Everyone begins somewhere. Henry James was a Harvard Law School dropout before pausing in Paris on his way to writing novels that popularized the idea of Americans abroad. Gertrude Stein got her start at Radcliffe before departing in 1902 for a lifetime in France. Kahlil Gabran, the poet and artist, arrived for a short stay in 1908; T.S. Eliot and John Dos Passos arrived soon after with Harvard classmate and Cambridge native e.e. cummings, who didn’t let a few months spent in a French POW camp during World War I sour his affection for the French. Freed, he returned to hang with Hemingway in the 1920s.
There’s a reason cummings and company only lasted a few years before hightailing it home: it’s hard to make a permanent move. Unless they’ve stitched together a patchwork of freelance work (or sit on a nest-egg of savings), most expat writers tend to disappear after the first six months to a year, once the initial glow has faded. My MFA degree in poetry writing, as well as my experience as a bookseller, public relations director and odd-job freelance journalist, provided a basic foundation. But I soon discovered establishing a writer’s life here would involve loads of grunt work: schmoozing for the better part of a year, taking on work for no pay in hopes of making connections rather than money, all the while enduring countless rejection, trying to get my first book of poems published, and butchering France’s courtly social etiquette while buying blue cheese and broccoli at my neighborhood open-air market.
Somehow, by osmosis, or dumb luck, I gradually became a Paris by-product. With a creatively-tuned C.V., I began pitching myself as a movie critic, restaurant writer, book reviewer, literary editor, and Paris “expert.” Isabelle found work. After two years, we’re still here, scrimping, exploring, and consider France as much our home as New England. I can now stumble my way through a French interview. After reviewing more than a hundred bistros and brasseries, I’ve proudly shed my vegetarian skin. My ambitions as a full-time poet have been clouded by fiscal realities, but I give regular readings and my manuscript is still making the rounds. While I don’t smoke—yet—the mighty espresso has me hooked, and you’ll sometimes find me belly to the bar of my corner café, sipping a cup with the rest of Paris, refining my blasé facial expressions.
3.
“A lot of people say a lot of stuff about how wonderful we are,” George Whitman says, looking around his cluttered bookshop that’s still ground zero for young writers and students, as well as older dreamers working through mid-life crises. “So I'd like to apologize in advance for the general shabbiness.”
Whitman is not a writer per se, but he spans the gap between the various generations of bohemian immigrants. Salem, Massachusetts born and graduated from Boston University, Whitman began a Master’s program at Harvard, then served in World War II before setting sail for France on the G.I. Bill. Once in Paris, he established a small bookshop he later relocated and renamed Shakespeare and Company. Today, Whitman, at 88, is an unstoppable presence, and still invites itinerant strangers to sleep amongst his shelves, read poems on Monday nights and produce the next generation of literary magazines. The store celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, alongside San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore (founded by former Paris expat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti). The two will hold intercontinental birthday bashes this summer, including a June 24 poetry reading by Ferlinghetti himself in Paris. The anniversary will also be marked by the arrival from London of Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman (named after the founder of the original Shakespeare and Company) who, fresh out of college, will help her dad manage the shop.
Cheek by jowl with Whitman’s bohemian crowd is John Kliphan, superficially fitting the American poet in Paris stereotype. Beret faithfully gracing his graying head, sipping Guinness at his favorite Irish pub, Kliphan is a former Boston lawyer gone native. Involved in the 1950s jazz and Beat scene, he was lured abroad in 1984 by a French wife he’d met in San Francisco. Divorced, she moved back to the States, and he remained in Paris to teach business English and found the Live Poets Society, a monthly reading series that’s featured nearly 100 poets over its 11 year history.
“I see a rebirth now, in the past two or three years,” Kliphan says, from his nearly two-decade perspective on the scene. “There’s a new vitality.” Older, dedicated souls like Whitman and Kliphan have helped nurture the current literary Renaissance that’s blossomed over the last couple of years—half a dozen new English-language literary magazines, alongside several popular reading series—much of it lead by younger, manic idealists from New England. Making a big splash last year was Kilometer Zero, a collective hatched at Shakespeare and Company that publishes a magazine and runs literary cabarets that turn into dance parties. Upstairs at Duroc, run by Mount Holyoke College graduate Jennifer Dick, is also full of local poetry, prose and art. Two newer arrivals, Double Change, a bilingual on-line magazine, and Van Gogh’s Ear, a poetry review, join David Applefield’s Frank magazine (transplanted from Boston 20 years ago, when Applefield was a grad student at Northeastern), the longest-running English-language lit mag printed in Paris since The Paris Review.
This fresh cadre of magazines proves the endurance of innovative, expatriate publishing, a tradition begun in the 1920s with Bostonians Eliot Paul, an editor of the influential transition, and Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press, which published Joyce, Eliot and other risqué authors. These days, writers and editors don’t sweat over censorship but they might require blinders. With more literary events in a week than my old hometown could muster in three months (Jennifer Dick sends out, gratuit, a monthly e-mail newsletter listing on average two dozen Anglophone readings and author visits), Paris can be a distraction from the inspiration at hand. Ironically, in a city known for lonely walks, writers seeking social isolation need to work hard to keep their eyes on the page, or the computer screen.
4.
Legend has it that writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald sought in France freedom from moral judgment, racism and censorship. This was partly true: historically, whenever the States were hostile to unconventional thinking, writers fled abroad. But in 1925, the U.S. dollar was triple the present foreign exchange rate. While the States were dry due to Prohibition, liquor flowed plentifully in Paris. It’s discouraging to think booze and easy money helped fuel a literary revolution.
Reasons why the current crop of 100,000 or so Americans have relocated to Paris are complex and contradictory. Quality of life is a plus. With an embarrassment of riches, Paris is not only the historic center of the Enlightenment but a city of villages. Manageable. And friendly, if you know your way around a few Merci Madames. But while economics can still be an explanation— “Being poor here is doable, not shameful, as it may be in the States,” says Dick—the myriad forces that enticed writers during the 20th century hardly come into play anymore. That said, attractive French cultural factors, such as an appreciation for the arts, history, lively debate and sensuality, still remain in sharp contrast to America’s profit-minded society. “In the States, they say ‘You’re a writer? We’re so sorry.’ Here, it’s a path in life that’s acceptable,” says Carhart who, since publishing his acclaimed memoir The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, now benefits from the status of being a writer.
But as an American, you will be an outsider no matter how impeccable your French is. While isolating, this condition also invites a healthy reflection on one’s home culture. “Geographic distance from one’s place of origins doesn’t mean a detachment from it, in fact, often, quite the opposite,” explains poet Ellen Hinsey. “Living in Paris has this power—allowing you to look from a distance, to engage in a deep meditation on one’s society and what one has lived.”
While some writers attend nearly every event that promises free wine and never refuse an opportunity to read their work in public, Hinsey leads a more monastic life, taking her role as a poet seriously. Born and raised in the Boston area, Hinsey holds degrees from both Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the University of Paris. Active in the Boston literary community, she helped read manuscripts for Ploughshares magazine before moving to Paris in 1987 as part of the Third Wave, before the Internet, before the wider acceptance of Anglophone culture. In lieu of money or a job, she brought with her strong convictions about why she came—radical reasons, in her view, both artistic and aesthetic, that would involve sacrifices for art. She lived in a cold water apartment and ate a lot of rice that first year, she recalls, building a spirit of dedication that continues to sustain her 15 years later.
Today, when she’s not teaching writing and literature for Skidmore College’s Paris program and the French graduate school L’Ecole Polytechnique, Hinsey works on her poetry. “Poets need sufficient time and silence,” she says, remarking that seven years passed between her first and second books. “Being in Paris, away from the literary business of the U.S., blocks out the ‘noise.’ You’re thrown back upon yourself and your relationship to your art.” Shouldering the burden of a new vocabulary also creates “laboratory for language,” renewing her attachment to her native tongue, Hinsey says. “There’s nothing like being in a city where you don’t speak the language, at least at the beginning.”
Her first book, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award-winning Cities of Memory, links contemporary life to European history. Her latest, released this May by Wesleyan University Press, is The White Fire of Time, a book-length sequence of introspective, metaphysical poems that consider daily life, the body and its place in time. Hinsey is already at work on her third book which will address history again, but draw on both European and American sources.
“Paris is a center for exiles and continues to be,” Hinsey notes, bringing to mind deposed kings and deported revolutionaries who’ve sought refuge in Paris’s arms. “It has also been an important crossroads of many cultures. Sooner or later, everyone comes through Paris.”
5.
The nature of community is at a turning point. If the Roaring 20s crowd were ‘Lost,’ today’s cadre of younger, market savvy expats can be found any number of ways: e-mail, short message service, global positioning system. Due to market forces that continue to devalue literature and art, by necessity exapts have become more savvy and sophisticated than their predecessors. New technologies also make it possible to live in Paris and work globally. Flexibility is the up-side of labor’s otherwise gloomy cold front: an itinerant, short-contract, unstable work force. Exiles in 2002 are armed not with surrealist manifestos and fountain pens, but high-speed Internet lines and portable phones.
But as the world is further wired, a question remains that, at present, Paris seems unable to fully answer: will any literary community remain rooted to a single geographic location, and if not, what threatens to be lost? We’re entering an age of freedom of place, even as the significance and preservation of place is diminishing. Traveling abroad is a mere mouse-click away, even as the supply of “foreignness” shrinks from the colonization of cyberspace, and everywhere else, by the English language. The good news is that we’re more aware of our global writing comrades, and enriched by the potential for dialogue. Shakespeare and Company still has no telephone, but they do have a website. And despite the Internet, I’m comforted to see people still craving a tête-à-tête over coffee to instant e-messaging. Writers tire of staring at their computer screens, so they meet at bars and cafés and bookstores. They logout, unplug and head to the 4th arrondissement to shop for fine stationery. For the moment.
France, more so than the States, embodies the crux of this technological contradiction—a modern land with computers but clinging to her grid paper and historical past, obsessed with U.S. culture while desperate to preserve her own. Take the preservation impulse too far and you get extremism. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s recent rise as Presidential material reminds us not only of the dangers of cultural mythologizing, but also how international we’ve all suddenly become. If potential expats consider fleeing Bush’s isolationist policies and post-9/11 privacy threats, here comes France to remind them that, in the era of free trade and the Euro, racism and xenophobia cannot be contained by national borders.
Despite ignorance cross-pollinating with politics at will, writing survives, as it must. Paris goes on dangling its fantasy in front of American noses, as it should. From my seventh floor flat, I look out over the city like a literary Captain Kirk on the bridge of the USS Expatriate. I tip back in my creaky chair at my Command Center (desk, laptop computer and modem), communicating 24/7 with editors and friends back in North America who, I sometimes convince myself, live on distant planets. I dream over the chimney pots, and procrastinate over the next deadline. I realize that Hemingway’s memory of Paris in A Moveable Feast was probably sweetened by the 35 year lag between living here and writing it down. But half a century from now, I’ll probably do the same. For the moment, when people ask me where I live and what I do, I reply, “Paris. Writer.”
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