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Authors: Deirdre Kelly
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otherness.
âOh, Paris isnât about the French,â trilled Danielle, one evening. She wanted to shush my complaint that we were experiencing Paris at a remove, sheltered inside a self-protecting suburb of artistic pretension. âParis is about living well in any language.â
The comment was trite and might have wafted out the open window along with the wispy entrails of our filterless cigarettes. A relative newcomer was among us that Thursday night in Danielleâs apartment, and she quickly swatted down the inanity, as if it were a bothersome fly to jerk and sputter on the living roomâs shag-rug floor.
Lucy was a genuine expat, with more than twenty yearsâ experience living and working in Paris. This made her altogether too jaded for our Thursday gathering. An American who taught American literature to American students at the American academy in Paris, she reminded me of one of those nested wooden dolls that can be reduced to a tiny kernel of the thing itself, except she was bursting at the seamsâa big blonde from the Midwest with a too-tight skirt and a mole at the side of her mouth that she had touched up with a pencil to rekindle a fading allure.
âNone of you has ventilated an original idea all night,â Lucy said, a little too loudly. She threw her head back to exhale the smoke from a stubby Gitane in a long train that stretched to the ceiling. âYou,â she said, looking at Danielle, âare full of shit.â
I regarded her as a woman of unusual dignity.
I went over to her, sprawled in a chair, and asked her about her teaching. The conversation segued into American modern literature, her specialty. She said she loved F. Scott Fitzgerald because in his writing he identified moral decay as the symptom of a life lived too sweetly on the fruits of material gain. I nodded and, perhaps because I had been drinking myself, blurted that that I would be a writer, too. Might she recommend me for a teaching job at her college to help me stay in Paris? She said sheâd do better. She took out a pen from her purse and wrote down the address of Shakespeare and Company, where she said writers could live for free. âThe guy who runs it, George Whitman, loves artists, and if you say youâre a writer he might let you stay there. Tell him I sent you. And get yourself out of this den of phonies, and fast.â
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON of a sun-dappled day in May when I first arrived at Shakespeare and Company, located directly across from the Notre Dame cathedral, on the banks of the Seine. The bookstore at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie was quiet, despite the steady stream of visitors. Pilgrims in blue jeans shuffled solemnly down the aisles, every step retracing the path of a literary past. I thought, this is where Hemingway pontificated on the black poetry of the bull, where Pound sat hunched on a stool reading and rereading Homer in preparation for his own epic poems, where Fitzgerald and Canadaâs Morley Callaghan nodded their hellos while reading the papers from back home. I peered into the dark interior and imagined all the artists who had come there, once upon a time, before me.
Except this wasnât where they had really congregated. The place was a facsimile. The original Shakespeare and Company had been located around the corner on the Rue de lâOdéon, serving as bookstore, lending library, and social hub for expat writers between the wars. Its founder and sole proprietor, Sylvia Beach, a transplanted American, made literary history when in 1922 she published Joyceâs Ulysses through Shakespeare and Company at a time when no one would touch it, thinking its experimental prose style incomprehensible and, in places, pornographic. But not even that claim to fame could save Beach and her bookstore from ruin. In 1941 , just before the Nazis imprisoned her for six months in an internment camp at Vittel reserved for American and British citizens, Beach closed
âOh, Paris isnât about the French,â trilled Danielle, one evening. She wanted to shush my complaint that we were experiencing Paris at a remove, sheltered inside a self-protecting suburb of artistic pretension. âParis is about living well in any language.â
The comment was trite and might have wafted out the open window along with the wispy entrails of our filterless cigarettes. A relative newcomer was among us that Thursday night in Danielleâs apartment, and she quickly swatted down the inanity, as if it were a bothersome fly to jerk and sputter on the living roomâs shag-rug floor.
Lucy was a genuine expat, with more than twenty yearsâ experience living and working in Paris. This made her altogether too jaded for our Thursday gathering. An American who taught American literature to American students at the American academy in Paris, she reminded me of one of those nested wooden dolls that can be reduced to a tiny kernel of the thing itself, except she was bursting at the seamsâa big blonde from the Midwest with a too-tight skirt and a mole at the side of her mouth that she had touched up with a pencil to rekindle a fading allure.
âNone of you has ventilated an original idea all night,â Lucy said, a little too loudly. She threw her head back to exhale the smoke from a stubby Gitane in a long train that stretched to the ceiling. âYou,â she said, looking at Danielle, âare full of shit.â
I regarded her as a woman of unusual dignity.
I went over to her, sprawled in a chair, and asked her about her teaching. The conversation segued into American modern literature, her specialty. She said she loved F. Scott Fitzgerald because in his writing he identified moral decay as the symptom of a life lived too sweetly on the fruits of material gain. I nodded and, perhaps because I had been drinking myself, blurted that that I would be a writer, too. Might she recommend me for a teaching job at her college to help me stay in Paris? She said sheâd do better. She took out a pen from her purse and wrote down the address of Shakespeare and Company, where she said writers could live for free. âThe guy who runs it, George Whitman, loves artists, and if you say youâre a writer he might let you stay there. Tell him I sent you. And get yourself out of this den of phonies, and fast.â
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON of a sun-dappled day in May when I first arrived at Shakespeare and Company, located directly across from the Notre Dame cathedral, on the banks of the Seine. The bookstore at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie was quiet, despite the steady stream of visitors. Pilgrims in blue jeans shuffled solemnly down the aisles, every step retracing the path of a literary past. I thought, this is where Hemingway pontificated on the black poetry of the bull, where Pound sat hunched on a stool reading and rereading Homer in preparation for his own epic poems, where Fitzgerald and Canadaâs Morley Callaghan nodded their hellos while reading the papers from back home. I peered into the dark interior and imagined all the artists who had come there, once upon a time, before me.
Except this wasnât where they had really congregated. The place was a facsimile. The original Shakespeare and Company had been located around the corner on the Rue de lâOdéon, serving as bookstore, lending library, and social hub for expat writers between the wars. Its founder and sole proprietor, Sylvia Beach, a transplanted American, made literary history when in 1922 she published Joyceâs Ulysses through Shakespeare and Company at a time when no one would touch it, thinking its experimental prose style incomprehensible and, in places, pornographic. But not even that claim to fame could save Beach and her bookstore from ruin. In 1941 , just before the Nazis imprisoned her for six months in an internment camp at Vittel reserved for American and British citizens, Beach closed
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