Christoph Herold: songs, lyrics, poems, images and more: Paris

Paris and American Expatriate Literature in the 1920s/30s

1. Paris at the beginning of the 20th century

As in the centuries before, Paris at the beginning of the 20th century was one of the world's most important cultural centres. In painting, the Impressionist era had just faded away, but with painters such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, new styles were in abundance. In 1905/06 Rilke was private secretary to Rodin; in 1913, Marcel Proust finished his modern masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past in and about Paris. In between the wars, Paris saw the peaks of the Cubist and the Dada movement. Politically, France was in the middle of the third republic, which was to last until after the end of World War II.

Especially the Left Bank of the city, with its cafes around Montparnasse and St. Germain de Pres, was "a shifting cosmopolitan world" with an open, liberal and intellectual atmosphere, quite unrivalled anywhere else in the world, except possibly for London.

2.1 The Predecessor: Henry James and his "international theme"

One of the first wanderer between the two worlds was Henry James . Many of his novels deal with the contrast of America versus Europe. An early 20th century novel to embody this contrast between the often puritan and morally rigid US of the times and the more liberal Europe was Henry James's novel The Ambassadors (1903) in which the elderly and stiff Lamberth Strether is sent to Paris to fetch young Chad Newsome who has "surrendered" to gay Paris: the effect that Paris has on Strether is expressed in his famous speech in the garden of the American artist Gloriani, which originated in the following actual quote of James' contemporary William Dean Howells:

Oh you are young, you are young - be glad of it; be glad of it and live. Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't much matter what you do - but live. This place makes it come all over me. I see it now. I haven't done so - and now I'm old. It's too late. It has gone past me - I've lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!" (James 13 )

James develops the plot of The Ambassadors in terms of the two opposite poles of American innocence and European experience and refinement. The next generation of expatriate writers in Paris, influenced and changed by the experience of WW I, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald, were still looking for, and found, similar things in Paris, which they were missing in the US.

2.2 The expatriate scene in Paris in and around the 20s.

Looking at the names of the writers who have lived in the 20s and 30s, the list almost reads like a "Who Is Who" of modernist literature: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Ford Madox Ford and many others lived in Paris at some point during this period. But what makes this constellation so unique in the history of 20th century literature is not only the fact that so many writers of the cutting edge of literature were in the same place at the same time, but also the intricate pattern of relations and interactions in which they were all involved. Together with the general atmosphere of the city, this made the "Paris moment" ⁽¹⁾ so beneficial for the creative life of the authors involved.

One of the first to arrive in Paris was Gertrude Stein who settled there in 1903 and was to stay there for the rest of her life. The atelier in the rue de Fleurus 27 that she shared with her life-long companion Alice B. Toklas was one of the centres of the modern movement in Paris. Before WWI, Picasso and Matisse were frequent visitors to her saloon, and especially Picasso and his Cubist style of painting were important influences on her experimental style of writing, for example in her first Novel Three Lives (1909). In the 20ties, Hemingway and Pound, among others, were in her circle of friends, even though the relationship with Hemingway deteriorated after a while. In 1933 , The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , Stein's Autobiography, narrated from the perspective of her companion and written in her style of talking, appeared. In the relationship with Toklas, Stein took the male, Toklas the female part. When guests came, When visitors came to the flat, Stein almost always talked exclusively to the writers, while Toklas entertained their wives.

Once Gertrude and Alice took me for a ride into the country. (...) Gertrude did the driving, and presently, when a tyre blew out, she did the mending. Very competently too, while Alice and I chatted by the roadside. (Beach 40/41)

Another important focal centre for modernist literature was Silvia Beach `s bookshop and lending library Shakespeare and Company in the rue de l'Odeon. Beach came to Paris in 1917, and eventually decided to open an American Bookshop in 1919. Among her first customers were André Gide and .André Maurois. Beach's outstanding contribution to Modernist literature was her publication of James Joyce `s Ulysses in 1922 when publication of the book in the US and England was banned because of its sexual explicitness. Joyce had come to Paris in 1920, and stayed there for the most of his remaining life. Beach's autobiography, Shakespeare and Company , gives a vivid account of Joyce's struggle with poverty and health during the creation of Ulysses, as well as other highly fascinating sketches from the time, including one about the liberation of the rue de l'Odeon during the final days of Nazi occupation by an American officer called - Ernest Hemingway .

Hemingway, young and still unknown in the 20s, was one of Beach's most frequent customers. He lived in Paris with his wife Hadley 1920 between 1924, and was later to write about the time:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, than wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. (Hemingway 6)

Hemingway's time in Paris is reflected in two of his works: his second novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), and the autobiographical fragment A Moveable Feast , written in 1961 and posthumously published in 1964. In A Moveable Feast , Hemingway remembers the years in Paris as a time when he was poor (which was not entirely true, since they had a fair allowance through his wife) and happy, and which constituted his formative phase as a writer. A Moveable Feast is a very interesting read, even though unreliable, and often rather unmerciful on some of Hemingway's contemporaries. The only ones to receive a positive treatment are Silvia Beach ("Noone I ever knew was nicer to me" Hemingway 35), and Pound, to whom he tried to teach boxing.

"Ezra wanted me to teach him to box, and it was while we were sparring one late afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis. Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew (...) It was all just basic moves. I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook and to teach him to shorten his right was something for the future. (Hemingway 96/97)

During his time in Paris, Hemingway was a deputy editor of the Transatlantic Review, a literary magazine published by Ford Madox Ford , author of The Good Soldier , (1915)and later on, the Parade's End tetralogy. Amongst others, they published works by Pound, Cummings, also in Paris at the time, and Jean Rhys, one of the few female voices of the modernist movement.

Ford, by then in his fifties, was a big, slightly eccentric man, always open to support young writers when he recognised talent. Hemingway, although Ford, as well as Pound, actively supported him, developed a strong antipathy towards Ford, resulting, for example, in his savage portrait of Ford in A Moveable Feast .

Ford, even though he was living with Stella Bowen at the time started a relationship with the young Jean Rhys , which, although only short, ended up effectively destroying both their marriages. Rhys, whose French husband was in prison at that time. portrayed Ford in the autobiographical Novel Quartet (1929). Her novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) can be interestingly compared to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1931).

One of the most glamorous figures of the twenties in Paris was F. Scott Fitzgerald , who lived on and off in Parisian hotels during that time. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was mentally unstable, and in order to finance their extravagant lifestyle, Fitzgerald had to write almost continually for magazines. Fitzgerald's marriage, and his personal decline, are hauntingly portrayed in Tender Is the Night (1934), in which Paris is also a major location.

Ezra Pound` s major contribution to modernism during his Paris years, aside from his continuing work on the cantos, was his extensive editing of Eliot's Waste Land (1922), which so much influenced its final shape that, by many, it is seen as a joint work of Pound and Eliot.

Like Hemingway and Silvia Beach, most of the writers involved have given autobiographical accounts of their time in Paris and it is interesting to compare these different accounts, as well as the often very autobiographical works of fiction dealing with Paris by the individuals involved and to try to find the motives behind the often contradictory accounts. But no matter how contradictory they often are, they all agree with Ford's statement that " there was never a day so gay for the Arts as any twenty-four hours of the early twenties in Paris"(Bradbury 176).

3. Mythical Paris: food, sexuality and artistic creativity

Besides its real life existence, Paris assumes a mythical quality for the writers present, in the autobiographical works as well as the works of fiction. For Henry James, Paris symbolises the entire complex of what he considers the European way of life, full of artistic and sexual energy. For Hemingway, as Pizer notes, it means all that and more, as far as his development as a writer is concerned:

"Hemingway as the author of an autobiography concentrating on a writers relationship to a place, makes the specific characteristics of that place metaphoric equivalents of his developments as a writer." (Pizer 8) For Hemingway, according to Pizer, Paris is an Edenic Garden, that one can avail oneself to, and that, when used in the right way, nourishes the aspiring writer. However, it the shifting character of Paris can also enhance character flaws: Hemingway sees this happen in Fitzgerald, whose personality and creativity are made "impotent" by his neurotic wife, or the lesbian relationship of Stein with Toklas.

Nourishment, nutritional as well as sexual is also a recurring theme in Miller's Tropic of Cancer .

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil (...) Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. (Tropic of Cancer 35/36)

"Miller in Tropic of Cancer fills a space rather than tells a story. The space is Paris, and he is its perceiving consciousness. Since his response to the city is emotional, and since the city in its varied and fragmented character occasions many different emotions - from wonder to despair - chaos is almost inevitably the operative aesthetic of his spatial form." (Pizer 125)

In Pizer's view, Miller fuses both strands, Paris as a feast for the creative mind and Paris as a dangerous place for the vulnerable, because he can accept, and enjoy, the entire range of human emotions in his merging with the flow of life.

4. A female voice: Jean Rhys

Among the interrelated group of writers that lived in Paris during the twenties and thirties; Jean Rhys is the only female novelist and her portrayal of female characters contrasts interestingly with that of male authors such as Hemingway or Miller. The comparison of the female perspective of the Paris cosmos in Good Morning Midnight (1939), a novel about the mental disintegration of a fragile woman in Paris, with its disparate and associative narration, with Miller's male view in Tropic of Cancer , is very interesting. What is very attractive for Miller, the existentialist freedom of being down and out, just enhances the feeling of abandonment and utter disorientation for Sasha Jensen, Rhys's main character.

I have no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don't belong anywhere . (Good Morning Midnight 38)

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive . (Tropic of Cancer 9)

5. The expatriate theme

The notion of Paris as a continually shifting place is enhanced, and all vision sharpened, by the expatriate situation of the writers mentioned. With the "exoskeleton" of the home country, its familiar atmosphere and customs, gone, the individual is far more susceptible to its surroundings, which on the one hand can heighten the sense of Paris as some kind of Garden Eden, as it is with Hemingway or Miller, but also makes the individual more vulnerable, as can be seen in Rhys. The expatriate situation, as well as the situation of the solitary individual in a big city (starting with Baudelaire) certainly sharpens the awareness for the question of one's identity, one of the chief issues of modernism and the modernist condition humaine, making a city like Paris a natural choice to live and to use as a location for fiction.

Chronology:

James Joyce (1882 - 1941): 1920 - 1940: Ulysses (1922)

Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972): 1920 - 1925 The Cantos

Editing of Eliot`s Waste Land (1922)

Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961): 1920 - 1924 In Our Time (1925)

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Paris - a Moveable Feast (1964)

John Dos Passos (1896 - 1970) 1917 - 1919: Nineteen Nineteen

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940): on and off 1920s: The Great Gatsby: 1925;

Tender is the Night (1934)

Ford Madox Ford (1873 - 1939): (1922 - 1928): Parade's End (1924 - 28)

It was the Nightingale (1931)