A Literary Pilgrim Goes to Paris

Four years ago during my first full year of literary walks Bill Collis and some fellow Aussies took the walk I call “A Band of Outsiders." This stroll takes place in the colorful Place de la Contrescarpe-rue Mouffetard neighborhood of the Latin Quarter, home to no less than the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell in the 1920s and other very great writers earlier. Bill liked it so much that he wrote about it when he returned home.  His article ran in the Sunday Australian newspaper and subsequently Bonjour Paris.  He called it “A Literary Pilgrim Goes to Paris.”

Below is Bill’s article, accompanied by pictures that illustrate the walk. 

"A Literary Pilgrim Goes to Paris"

By Bill Collis
 

Walking along the boulevards of Paris, becoming a flâneur, is an essential Parisian experience – more so if you have a passion for the literary history of the city. For the ‘The Band of Outsiders’ Literary Walking Tour in Paris, I met the expatriate American writer, David Burke, with my fellow walkers at Place de la Contrescarpe. He began by explaining that just as writers were enriched by living in Paris, our appreciation of their lives and work is heightened by following them from place to place in our imaginations or, even better, in our walking shoes.

In spite of the snobbish idea that tourism is not really travel I was hoping, as I arrived in Paris, that it was still possible to have a life-enhancing, even life-changing, experience in a short time away from the humdrum world of daily life. Like everyone else interested in literature I had read that Paris in the first half of the twentieth century was a haven foreign writers and artists, attracted by its great artistic and social freedom. I read Being Geniuses Together 1920-1930, by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle about expatriate American writers and artists living in Paris, which had inspired me to read Hemingway, Fitzgerald and many others. Gertrude Stein wrote: “Paris was where the twentieth century was.”

I also had a fascination with the vast series of novels, La Comédie Humaine, by Honoré de Balzac. When I started reading them in my twenties I found it all so different and foreign from anything else I had read. My acquaintance with this city seems to have spanned my whole adult life; in my dreams and in my reading.

So, now I stood with David and our group at the centre of the ancient Fauberg Saint Medard, an area which in the Middle Ages lay outside the city walls. He described how wine was cheap and untaxed then and this area teemed with traders and travelers. Francois Villon and later, Rabelais were known to have caroused at the taverns there.

In 1922 the young Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, moved into an apartment around the corner in rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The old building is still there with a plaque indicating their stay there. David reminds us of Hemingway’s character, Harry, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, thinking about this area: “And in that poverty, and in that quarter…he had written the start of all he was to do. There was never another part of Paris that he loved like that.”

And it is a rich quartier. Down the hill a block from Hemingway’s we stopped at Valery Larbaud’s apartment where James Joyce finished writing Ulysses. Then we strolled on through the colorful market street Rue Mouffetard to Rue du Pot-de-Fer where George Orwell once was living a life of poverty that he described in such detail in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London.

It was beginning to rain as we stopped outside the house Balzac used as a model for Mme Vauquer’s pension bourgeoise in Le Père Goriot. For shelter we ducked into a nearby art gallery, and David took the opportunity to entertain us with the stories about characters Balzac used in his novels, like the young law student Rastignac and the evil Vautrin. Paris is a tangible mix of the past and present, and the longer we stay in Paris we will come to agree with Balzac when he claimed: “while searching the dead I only see the living.”

Our walk concluded at the 15th century church of Saint Medard, where Jean Valjean is pursued by the evil Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. We then adjourned to a nearby café where we relaxed over a glass of wine, un vin rouge, trying to absorb what our afternoon had given us.

That is where their true legacy lies.

                                                                                                                            

I would like to give recognition here to Patti Miller, the literary mentor of my Australian walkers and an outstanding writer whose latest book is the memoir Ransacking Paris .

Spring & the First Walks of 2016

April in Paris …

“Chestnuts in blossom,                                                                      

Holiday tables under the trees . . .”

And moi, David, I’m blossoming too, as I launch my season of literary walks in Paris in 2016. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, George Orwell, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and James Baldwin are among the Anglophone giants with me.  So are such world-famous French writers as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine for a few of these towering literary figures, every one with a dramatic personal saga to tell.

As one of my walkers put it, “It seemed that the writers’ spirits were walking along with us, pointing out their favorite haunts and whispering their stories in our ears.”   

View my Schedule of Walks and join me this beautiful Spring season.

Happy strolling with my writers in the most colourful neighborhoods in town!

Farewell to 2015

It's time to say good bye to David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walking Tours for the year 2015, but fear not! My walks will be off and running in April 2016.  In the meantime, please dig in and explore my archives of literary Paris blogs which you can find right here.  The website will be my way of keeping in touch, because I’ll be in a certain big country where Facebook, Google, the NY Times and other modes of communication are forbidden.

I wish you joyful times in the months where I’ll be missing you, but I will be digging out new literary nuggets for when we get together.  

À bientôt! 

Photo Credit: My good friend, Julia Browne

Victor Hugo in the Marais & Elsewhere

In October 1832, thirty years old and already the titan of French letters,Victor Hugo moved with his wife Adèle and their two sons and two daughters into the spacious second-floor apartment in the Hôtel Rohan-Guéménée at No. 6 Place des Vosges, looking over the park.  Now the Musée Victor Hugo, it is a rich part of my “Great Days of the Marais” walking tour.

Riding high on the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, several lavishly praised books of lyrical poetry, and his riot-igniting play Hernani already behind him, Hugo was the Romantic Movement’s acknowledged leader. Here he wrote his most successful play Ruy Blas, three other dramas, poetry, and drafts of sections of Les Misérables. In 1841 he was elected to the Académie française and four years later elevated to peer of France as viscount by King Louis-Philippe. But during the Revolution of 1848, Hugo switched to the democratic side and was elected deputy to the Second Republic ‘s National Constituent Assembly.

Portrait of Adéle Hugo

Casting a pall over Hugo’s triumphs, however, was the calamitous state of his marriage. Adèle, his childhood sweetheart, came to see him as an egotist and a tyrant, and she entered upon an affair with Hugo’s close friend Sainte-Beuve. The double betrayal crushed him. But in January 1833 he met a lovely young actress engaged for a bit part in his play Lucrèce Borgia. From his first night with Juliette Drouet to her death half a century later, they spent hardly a day apart. “Jugu,” as he called her, unleashed in her “Toto” a passion for the erotic, and she thrilled to his poetry, as Adèle never had. Juliette became his copyist, putting his unruly scrawl into legible form until her eyes gave out in old age. Although they saw each other almost daily, they managed to exchange seventeen thousand notes and letters.

Portrait of Juliette Drouet

Toto set Jugu up in a modest apartment nearby on Rue Sainte-Anastasie. The back door of his house opened onto the Impasse Guéménée, providing convenient cover for his visits to her, and eventually, to many others. Juliette managed to live with his dalliances, but his serious affairs hurt.

Hugo loved being on the Place des Vosges, but on June 24, 1848, after street fighting broke out during a workers’ uprising, he wrote in his journal:

“Fourteen bullets hit my coach house door, eleven outside, three inside. A soldier of the line was mortally wounded in my courtyard. We still see the streak of blood on the paving stones.”

Bust of a young Victor Hugo

 Hugo quickly moved his family to the then-countrified neighborhood of Saint-Georges, in today’s Ninth Arrondissement. Three years later, in 1851, his fiery denunciation of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état forced him to flee from France, and he, his family, and Juliette went into exile, first in Brussels, then in the Channel Islands, remaining there until the fall of “Napoléon le Petit,” as Hugo dubbed him, in 1870.





The rooms in the Musée Victor Hugo are devoted to three periods of Hugo’s life:

1. his dwelling place on the Place des Vosges …
2. his exile in the island of Guernsey (we see a Medieval-themed room from his Hautville House and a Japanese-style room from Juliette Drouet’s house Hautville Fairy, pictured below)…
   
3. and his last fifteen years in Paris.

An elderly Victor Hugo

The reconstituted bedroom from his final home on Avenue Victor-Hugo (named for him during his lifetime, a very rare honor) is dominated by the Louis XIII bed in which he died on May 22, 1885, at eighty-three. His last words were “Je vois la lumière noire”—“I see the black light.”

Jean Rhys in Montparnasse

The classic 1920s Art Deco café Le Sélect is one of the key stops on my “Lost Generation” literary tours. Standing at the corner of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the rue Vavin, Le Sélect opened its doors at the height of the expatriate frenzy, in 1925, and remains the best preserved café of the era. This was a hotbed for writers. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway here set no less than four scenes in his first novel, published the year after the cafe’s opening. But other outstanding writers also made fine use of Le Sélect – Jean Rhys among them, in her first novel Quartet, published in 1928.

In a scene in the café, her fragile heroine Marya has to endure a nasty scene at with her lover Heidler and his testy wife Lois. Trying to lighten the tension, Heidler beckons Guy Lester to the table, but the utterly plastered Guy calls Marya a hussy.:

“Darling Marya,” said Lois, laughing on a high note. “You don’t know her,

you don’t. She’s as harmless at they’re made, Guy. A sweet young thing on the

sentimental side.”

The thinly disguised models for Heidler were Ford Madox Ford, Lois for his long time mistress the Australian artist Stella Bowen, and Marya for Rhys herself.

Ford Madox Ford was a British literary powerhouse, famed for his 1916 World War I novel The Good Soldier. He moved from London to Paris in 1922, in time to attend Proust’s funeral as the self-appointed representative of English letters. In Paris he joined Ezra Pound in promoting James Joyce’s work and in 1924 founded the Transatlantic Review. He and Stella Bowen moved to No. 84 Rue Notre Dame des Champs in 1925.

Ford was a wheezy middle-aged fat man with a walrus-like moustache, but had remarkable success with women. His friend Joyce wrote:

“O Father O’Ford you’ve a masterful way with you,

Maid, wife and widow are wild to make hay with you.”

Stella Bowen

Jean Rhys was one of those wives. She was officially Mme Jean Lenglet, married to a Dutch man of that name. Ford hired her in 1924 to work on the Transatlantic Review. He tutored her in the craft of writing, published her first story in the Review, and took her birth name of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams to the pseudonym he created for her of Jean Rhys. She was thirty-four (hardly the young thing Marya seems to be in Quartet), a beautiful woman, but emotionally shaky and painfully shy.

Their affair began early in 1925, after her husband Lenglet went to prison for embezzlement.

At the time that Ford and Stella Bowen moved to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Rhys was in Juan les-Pins, helping a rich American woman write a book (as does Rhys’s heroine Sasha Jansen in her later novel Good Morning, Midnight), but Ford managed to get her fired by the lady, forcing Rhys  to come back to Paris, where he installed her in a hotel by the Gare Montparnasse. It was just such a place as the one Heidler installs Marya in Quartet:

“It was impossible, when one looked at that bed, not to think of the succession

of petites femmes who had extended themselves upon it, clad in carefully

thought out pink or mauve chemises, full of tact and savoir faire and savoir

vivre and all the rest of it.”

Ford’s final break with Jean Rhys came in the fall of 1926, when, after much griping from Bowen, he left for an extended book tour in the United States. Rhys then returned to her husband in Holland, where she wrote Quartet. Its publication two years later was successful – and sparked alternate versions of it by the three other concerned parties: a novel apiece by Ford Madox Ford and Jean Lenglet and a frontal attack on Rhys by Stella Bowen in her autobiography, Drawn from Life. Ironically, Quartet turned a quartet.

Ezra Pound's Atelier, at Last!

I’m fascinated by the relationship of people and their places, especially when it comes to writers in Paris -- where they were and what they did there. Take this photo from 1922.  \From left to right, they are Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Joyce’s lawyer John Quinn.  I knew that it was photographed in front of the big wooden door to Pound’s atelier at No. 70, bis, rue Notre Dame-des-Champs in Montparnasse.  I had stopped at the sturdy steel street gate there many times during my “Lost Generation” literary walking tours, but must to my frustration the sturdy steel gate was always closed, making it impossible to go in and see Ezra Pound’s place.  But then last November when I was doing a walk with four jolly Swedes, the steel gate was wide open.  Construction work was going on. I was through the gate with a flash, with my team of Scandinavians racing behind, down the long, narrow corridor to the little courtyard in front of Pound’s atelier, where modernization was going on.

At last I know where it was. Note the bulky wooden door in the 1922 photo with Ezra Pound and his visitors and look at the one of me standing before that same wooden door in November 2014.  

Here are the photos from last year:

Poet, editor, and all-round cultural gadfly, Ezra Pound lived with his artist wife, Dorothy

Shakespear, at No. 70, bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs from the summer of 1921 until the winter of 1924.

A brilliant and omnivorous student and translator of ancient poetry, including Chinese and Japanese verse, this Idaho-born American settled in London in 1908, where he wrote influential poetry (“In a Station of the Metro,” and the Hugh Selwyn Mauberly cycle), edited the little magazines Poetry, the Egoist, and Blast, and became a guru to younger poets, most notably H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and T. S. Eliot. But feeling that London had lost its literary edge (“an old bitch, gone in the teeth”) and having talked James Joyce into moving to Paris, Pound decided that he should be there too. He arrived in December of 1920. Sylvia Beach was in for a surprise when he first paid a visit to Shakespeare and Company:  

“His costume—the velvet jacket and open-road shirt—was that of the English aesthete of the period. There was a touch of Whistler about him; his language, on the other hand, was Huckleberry Finn’s.”

The tall, lanky, red-bearded Pound was one of the most influential figures on the expatriate scene as magazine editor, advisor to Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press, and champion of Joyce and Eliot. In Pound’s words, this was “a grrrreat litttttterary period.” He was also a mentor to Hemingway, giving him lectures on literary style in exchange for boxing lessons. Gertrude Stein was Pound’s only known enemy. She called him “the village explainer, excellent if you were in a village, but if you were not, not.”

He called her “that tub of guts.”

Besides his work for others, Pound started writing his Cantos, the vast cycle of poems that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

After four years, he felt that the city had become too crowded with Americans who were “anything but the Passionate Pilgrims of James’s day or the enquirers of my own.” At the end of 1924, Pound, his wife and his mistress, the concert violinist and musicologist

Olga Rudge, moved to Rapallo, where Rudge had a daughter by him the following year.Pound’s unbridled support of Mussolini, capped by pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic broadcasts during World War II, irremediably tarnished his reputation and led to his incarceration in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital in 1946 (though he could have faced the death penalty for treason). Twelve years later a group of literary supporters, including his old protégés Hemingway and Eliot, successfully petitioned for his release. He returned to Italy, where he died at eighty-seven in 1972.