Reading Those Classics #11

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.