Classic Fictionalized Expatriate Memoir. Elliot
Paul was an American fiction writer and journalist. In 1925 he joined the expat
literary community in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris. He was co-editor of
the experimental literary journal, transition. He knew both James Joyce
and Gertrude Stein, who fought.
In the place St. André des Arts
I found myself staring with awe into a taxidermist’s window. Like all the other
citizens of France, the taxidermists of France were individualists. Even French
mothballs seemed to have slight differences, one from the other. The
taxidermist in the place St. André des Arts made a specialty of stuffing pet
dogs and cats with which their owners could not bear to part. Monsieur Noël,
the tall stuffer of birds and animals, whom I learned to know very well in
later days, made them look, if not lifelike, decidedly unique … Noël pointed
out to me that men and women, like gods, choose pets in their own image. My
friend took sly delight in accentuating these resemblances.
A Narrow Street
aka The Last Time I Saw Paris -
Elliot Paul
Elliot Paul, a reporter for the Chicago
Tribune and New York Herald, first lived on the Rue de la Huchette in the 5th
arrondissement in the summer of 1923. On the narrow street not more than 300
yards long, in the heart of Paris, parallel with the quay from the Boulevard St
Michel towards Notre Dame, Paul lived, on and off, for 18 years.
Fluent in French, Paul lived as a member of the community,
joining in the pleasures of a quiet drink and gossip and the usual feuds and miseries
of his neighbors. He was there in the 1930s as derangement over
politics undermined graciousness and tolerance, as the French establishment, to
the surprise and consternation of right and left alike, betrayed France through
sheer unseriousness. The original sin of the lightweight conception of politics
is that lightweights don't think of politics as a thing you do in order to do
government; lightweights think of government as a thing you do in order to do
politics.
I read this in a 1942 Penguin whose orange cover
indicates fiction (blue for biography, green for mysteries up to 1945). But if
this is fiction, then this hybrid is novelized memoir or fictionalized ethnography. The
preface helpfully provides a list of the 70 or so characters in the book. The
Juilliards who run the hotel. The postman George. Mme. Absalom who one day
decided to give her legs a permanent vacation and retired to bed for the rest
of her life. The goldfish man. The loud chestnut vendor. The butcher. The hardware
dealer. The bum who slept on the sidewalk.
One would think it would be hard to keep track of all
these picturesque people and their dramatic lives, but strangely we remember
them as we read and feel that they lived their lives as vividly as we do our
own. We get a candid overview of the
hard conditions under which poor and working class people lived in Paris at the
time.
Paul’s description of the fraying of civil society as war’s
destruction and chaos loom is heartbreaking because he’s so good at bringing to
life the essential decency of shopkeepers, workers, prostitutes, students,
businessman, radicals, right wingers, priests, wives, and growing children and
teenagers like the precocious Hyacinthe. Smart and talented, woman-child Hyacinthe
is forced to take an interest in politics as the threat of invasion and war becomes
more imminent. At only seventeen years of age, she realizes that her life is
going to be completely derailed.
The uncertainty and dashing of hope make you ache for her
and all young people who had to put their plans on hold. Paul makes us readers feel for quiet, heroic
people whose dreams and expectations are being wrecked, now that a big war is going
to change everything, as big wars always do.
Sure, some parts are sordid. Some anecdotes are too good
to be plausible – journalists are notorious at coming up with tales that
make the point they want to make. And French people probably won’t like the junky
old stereotypes of foul-smelling Paris where there’s a cathouse on every
corner. And we should naturally if amiably suspect a foreigner, even a
journalist who speaks the language, who has the audacity to comment on social
and political affairs of the host country.
But persuasive is Paul’s narration of how it gradually
dawned on ordinary French people that their leaders were not up to the political,
economic, and diplomatic hazards of the 1930s and 1940s and catastrophe was
going to result.