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November, 2005
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Paris Reviews: Notes on French Culture
by Larry L. Dill
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
---Ernest Hemingway to a friend in 1950
I.
This past summer I read a half dozen books on French history and culture including Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions,” two monographs on French history--one on Cardinal Richelieu and the establishment of the modern French monarchy in the 17th century, the other on the trial and execution of Louis XVI at the end of the 18th century (the effective end of the French monarchy during the French Revolution)-- and two contemporary books about Paris by Adam Gopnik, “Paris to the Moon,” and “Americans in Paris.”
Until recently Gopnik was the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker Magazine. He still writes about Paris every chance he gets even though he is back in New York now filing stories mostly about New York street life. A recent example of “New York street life” from Gopnik was a piece about the incredible array of vegetables at the new Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circle. (Yawn).
“Paris to the Moon,” a collection of Gopnik’s New Yorker essays filed from Paris takes its name from a painting he and his wife saw in the window of a Paris art gallery shortly after their arrival there, which depicts a surrealistic scene that might have been inspired by Saint-Exupery, in which 19th century Parisians appear to be boarding a commuter train that appears to be linked by a rail line to, where else, but the moon. In his introduction to “Paris to the Moon” Gopnik lays out his childhood fantasies about going to Paris and how the painting, “Paris to the Moon,” when he finally arrived there, was for him the equivalent romantic metaphor of Hemingway’s Paris as “moveable feast.” The famous Hemingway passage quoted above (actually just an off-hand remark he had made to a friend) became the posthumously chosen title of Hemingway’s Paris memoirs.
Gopnik’s earlier book, “Americans in Paris,” is actually just an anthology of writings on Paris by famous American writers—Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, etc., etc., and of course Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway himself. In his introduction and in his selection of writings for “Americans in Paris,” Gopnik gives one the feeling that there is a life of the mind in Paris that can be carried out into the street like money, fine clothing or a beautiful woman on your arm. Yet in “Paris to the Moon,” Gopnik’s own memoir, he slips far too often into the Dave Barry mode of lighthearted American comic humor and self effacement. Unwittingly, or not, I believe, Gopnik too often portrays himself, for comic effect, not so much as the ugly American as just an American buffoon. It is both sad and disingenuous. In his most probing critiques his intellectual observations are fine and perspicacious. So it is hard to understand how he could have lived in Paris and appreciated all the American writers who have lived in and written about Paris before him, and still write a book that instead of “Paris to the Moon,” should have been called “Dave Barry goes to Paris.”
Despite his sometimes unbearable lightness, one of Gopnik’s recommended books on Paris is Hemingway’s “A Movable Feast,” a book I’d had on my bookshelf for years but had never read until this summer. Hemingway was around 60 (roughly my age now) when he was writing “Movable Feast” in Havana, Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho. While he was writing it he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Old Man and the Sea,” and the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was still in high school and before I could graduate and study Hemingway in college, in fact, before Hemingway could publish “Moveable Feast,” he had already killed himself in the living room of his Ketchum ranch house by sitting in a chair and leaning his forehead against an upright double barreled shotgun. His fourth wife, still asleep in another part of the house was startled awake for a moment by what she thought was Hemingway slamming a drawer shut somewhere in the house.
“Moveable Feast” is everything Gopnik’s New Yorker writing is not (no offense Adam). It is messy, despite Hemingway’s minimalist writing style, opinionated, and almost always politically incorrect. I just saw the Martin Scorsese film on Bob Dylan the other night and Dylan, at 60 something, commenting on his youth, reminded me of Hemingway at 60 something commenting on his youth in “Moveable Feast.” No New Yorker smarminess. No apologies. No remorse. As Dylan put it about his treatment of Joan Baez, “You can’t expect a man to be wise and in love at the same time.” Whether Dylan was in love with Baez, or another woman, or himself or just his art is not made clear. But the statement somehow stands.
Neither Dylan nor Hemingway is beyond self effacement though, to make the joke. Nor is either beyond the literary device of comic exaggeration, the main tool of the trade of the Dave Barry’s, Marion Winik’s and David Sedaris’s of the world. As Samuel Beckett (the Irish Nobel Prize winner who wrote only in French) once said, “Nothing is funnier than tragedy.” And that idea is not lost on either Dylan or Hemingway. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read Philip Roth’s new novel, “The Plot Against America,” or anything else Roth has ever written.
Still somehow, miraculously, there is no hint in “Moveable Feast,” that within a year of completing the great memoir of his youth in Paris that Hemingway might kill himself.
Except for this line at the end of a chapter on an evening he spent with his friend, the French painter Pascin and two of his lovely young models.
“They keep me awake,” Pascin said. “I never sleep.” He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dome. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
Case in point of Hemingway as the joker are his tales in “Moveable Feast” of his association with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the funniest of which is his meeting with the plaintive Fitzgerald in a Paris restaurant where Fitzgerald confesses that his wife, Zelda, (whom Hemingway has already determined to be crazy) had indicated that Fitzgerald’s penis was insufficient to give her pleasure. Hemingway describes how he took Fitzgerald to the restroom, specifically to look at his disparaged member. Hemingway pronounced Fitzgerald adequate and then took him to the Louvre to look at the male nude statuary to prove his point. Fitzgerald suggested that the penises in the Louvre may have been minimalized for ethical reasons. Hemingway shrugged, sighed, and said, “You want to look at some of the other paintings while we’re here?”
II.
William Blake is my model of the intellectual traveler (or my excuse at least). He never went anywhere. Even his poem “The Mental Traveller,” is not about reading or thinking about foreign places. It is about the journey of life, where ever you happen to be. And the trip you’re on in life is mostly taking place inside your own head. That is why Dylan, The Doors, and the Dead notwithstanding, William Blake, living in England in 1798, writing a major poem called “The French Revolution,” was the favored poet of the 1960s.
In modern times writers are expected to be more like Henry James or Twain, Celine or Kerouac. And in this, Gopnik follows these writers by going to the places and clearly articulating his observations. But he does not seem to have let himself be fully immersed in French culture. Like Bill Clinton (“I smoked marijuana but I never inhaled.”) Gopnik may have smoked some weed and tried some drugs in Paris (both literally and figuratively). He may have slept with the Australian au pair he met at the Ritz hotel swimming pool where he took his young son for exercise, but if so he doesn’t talk about it.
When he jogs past the statue of Baudelaire in the Luxemburg gardens, he may be aware that the ghost of Baudelaire is chiding him for running instead of getting drunk, but he is unable to join forces with those Parisian American hedonists like Henry Miller who says on camera in the film “Reds,” “The only exercise I ever got was fucking.” Gopnik, for all his savoir-faire, seems more like the hapless innocent Rousseau portrays himself as in the “Confessions” than Celine, Proust or Baudelaire.
In other words, Gopnik’s descriptions of Paris are rather like Sister Wendy’s descriptions of nude art. She approves of it intellectually but is not likely ever to pose for a nude painting of herself. Or even suggest that she had or had not ever entertained the thought. This stance, I believe is a form of condescension. In the end, Gopnik’s work has a kind of accent. It isn’t a French accent. It isn’t even an American exile accent. It is a New Yorker Magazine accent: that safe, sophisticated erudition that is, well, for lack of a better description, always politically correct, literally speaking. The Kerouacs, Millers and Bukowskis of the American literary scene are reviewed by the New Yorker, but not published. And Gopnik often avoids tough subjects as if his editor were looking over his shoulder. A deadly form of submissiveness in a writer. When he turns a phrase that doesn’t call for engagement, he is one of the best writers in America today.
And he is courageous in his occasional attempts to take on subjects that are themselves politically incorrect, and take them on in ways that show incisive analysis. But he pulls his punches in the area of politics, sex and religion: the three taboos in bourgeois American conversation and evidently still the three taboos of the New Yorker—a nervously erudite cynicism that he diffuses with the ubiquitous self-effacing humor.
III.
In the August 22, 2005 issue of the New Yorker, Gopnik attempts once again to grapple with the latest twists in the complex French psyche, dealing first with an ubiquitous sense of gloom that pervades Paris these days because they lost the 2012 Olympics to London, and then moving on to the more serious issue of the rejection by French voters this spring of the draft of a new European Union constitution, which Gopnik points out was overseen by France’s own beloved ex-president, Giscard d’Estaing. “This was not just a defeat for the European project,” Gopnik suggests, “but a sign of a seemingly fatal disconnect between voters and the political class—the kind of complete collapse of confidence that seems to define a ‘crisis of the regime’.”
Gopnik turns for an analysis of France’s political and social unrest to Nicolas Baverez, the author of a recent best-seller, “La France Qui Tombe” (France is Falling), who he says thinks the current crisis has its roots as much in the French Revolution as it does in contemporary events.
I had always sensed that the French Revolution played a much more important role in the collective identity of the French than say the American Revolution plays in the life of Americans. The French Revolution is closer (if close to anything in America at all) to the Civil War. The late Civil War historian Shelby Foote said famously in his high class southern drawl, “The Civil Wawa, made us what we awwa, both good and baad!” Despite Foote’s histrionics and the fact that southern rednecks still display rebel flags on bumper stickers, gimme caps and baby diapers, I believe that the French Revolution was far more complicated than the American Civil War.
I believe the events leading up to the Revolution and those that followed from the Terror, to the meteoric rise and fall of Napoleon to the restoration of the monarchy to the restoration of the republic, all within less than 50 years, bears out this truth. The English made peace between class and democracy early on. Even the Russian Revolution has played itself out in a perverse reversal of Marxist theory. But the French go on with their history (and their mythology) like the Jews, like the Catholics, like Native American Indians, like the Irish. Like these religious and ethnic groups the French have their own cultural mythology. When the American poet Wallace Stevens wrote that “In Connecticut we never lived in a time when mythology was possible,” he meant “America,” not “Connecticut” and by “we” he meant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in America. And he was right. “Manifest Destiny” was not a myth. It was an ideology.
The difference between a myth and an ideology is complex and their interconnection somewhat difficult to articulate. Both concepts are a form of lie (or at the very least, half truth). One has its roots in a spiritual and emotional quest. The other is tied to class, money and power. They overlap, of course, in both primitive and complex cultures. But the French have lived for nearly 500 years in a vibrant swirling dialogue between French myth and French ideology.
Napoleon, according to Raymond Williams, was the first to use “ideology” in its modern sense, in an attack on proponents of democracy. He saw the French Revolution as the revolt of an ignorant and degenerate rabble spurred on by the self-deceived Philosophes of the Enlightenment. He, himself, he believed, represented the French tradition of Royal governance going back to Charlemagne and even Caesar.
From a Marxist point of view, Napoleon was as delusional as he thought the democratic ideologists to be. He took a traditional metaphysical mythology, “the divine right of kings,” and turned it into a modern political ideology of class warfare.
IV.
Emanating from this fusion of myth and ideology in the French political mind is another legendary element of the French character, the voice of the strong, feminine intellect working itself out, as from a maze, from the medieval male mythology of romance. George Sand, Colette and Simone De Beauvoir come immediately to mind and we need look no further than this passage from Colette’s essay on Don Juan. In the essay published in her memoir, “Earthly Paradise,” she carefully analyzes, through conversation and observation, three of her male friends known for their amorous adventures. “X” as she calls the first one, looks like this:
Like most men capable of servicing (if I may put it that way) a great many women, possession, which is lightening quick, provoked in him a wretched feeling of hopelessness—the neurasthenia of the Danaiids. If I understood him rightly, he could have wished to find at long last a woman who would love him enough to refuse herself to him. But it is hard for a woman to refuse herself. And besides, at the moment when our conqueror glimpsed the veritable purpose of love and the pure and burning space that unites better than the bonds of flesh, two perfect lovers, he was seized by desire so strongly that he flung the object of his love to the floor and possessed her on the spot.
Compare this passionate but even handed assessment of the male psyche published in 1932 to the deliberately hysterical nonsense of the contemporary American writer Camille Paglia, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
Long before Emily Dickinson wrote her secret memos to God ( or more precisely to a male alter-ego) George Sand was doing the same with her fictional Dr. Piffoel (a name playing on a French slang term for her own ungainly aquiline nose). In 1837 when Dickenson was seven and Sand was 33, the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire had been laid to rest. Or at least repressed into the French unconscious.
But the liberation of women in western civilization was only in its nascence. George Sand, born Aurore Dupin, considered second only to Victor Hugo among great 19th century French novelists, made as many waves by her “scandalous” lifestyle as by her writing. The foolish obsession with androgyny extolled by Camille Paglia in “Sexual Persona” pales in comparison to the poetry and subtle truth of Sand’s journals.
Here in its entirety is the June 27, 1837 entry from George Sand’s “Intimate Journals.” It shows not so much an amalgam of feminine sensitivity and masculine strength as it does the full power of a French woman speaking her mind. A power emulated all over the world from Susan Sontag to Maya Lin.
Poor little warbler, how unlucky you were to fall out of your nest last evening before your wings were grown. Forlorn little bird, you are no heavier than a feather and no bigger than a fly. You have made yourself at home here, perching on my finger, nestling in my hair, pecking at my hand and answering the sound of my voice. Who gives you this confidence in my strength and why do you rely on me to sustain and comfort your weakness? This fold in my sleeve in which you take refuge is not your nest. This hand that feeds you is not your mother’s beak. You cannot be so easily deceived, nor have you forgotten your family. You hear the cry of your frantic mother as she hunts for you in the branches of neighboring trees. She would fly through this window if she dared, and you would go to her if you were able. I see that you recognize her cries. Your bright black eyes seem ready to swim with tears. Your head turns restlessly from side to side. Your tiny throat utters feeble notes of protest.
Poor baby bird, you are so fragile that in giving you life, nature seems to have made a jest of you. Yet, that bald head of yours holds a mite of intelligence, and you contain a spark of divinity. You mourn your mother, your brothers, your father, your nest and your tree. You long for a home more suited to your frail organization than the one I provide.
I know that you mourn because you seem troubled. I know you remember because you gaze nervously at the window and feebly strive to answer the voice that calls to you from outside. And since you mourn, since you desire, you love. Yet you submit to the inevitable, and your helplessness is instinct with intelligence which tells you to take refuge in my goodness and to accept my care. You even know how to appeal for sympathy by a manner so full of trust and abandon that it would disarm the hardest heart.
You are not beautiful, I admit. Your ash colored coat is neither striking nor stylish. Your feathers are ragged. The quills of your tail are rolled into a ball of fur. This manner of dress makes you so dowdy that at first impulse one might be impelled to brush you aside.
Nature distributes her favors unequally. To some of her creatures she gives intelligence, to others beauty. My stupid lap-wing, without sense enough to fly straight, blunders around in a beautiful emerald coat and gorgeous aigrette, while you, aborted bird, are colorless and shapeless, yet you know how to give to your homely exterior all the expression necessary for me to divine your least desire.
The love of weakness for strength is a blessed law of nature, but even more sacred is the love of strength for weakness. Therefore is that woman cherished her little ones, and thus man should cherish his woman.
But man, in an effort to maintain and exaggerate the natural dependence of woman, has bound her to himself by laws of servitude. By so doing he has destroyed the joy and the freedom of love.
What woman whose heart life is satisfied will demand a life of intellect? It is so sweet to be loved!
Men mistreat women and abandon them. They despise their ignorance, accuse them of idiocy, and then, when women try to use their own especial wisdom, it is ridiculed. In love, women are treated as courtesans. In the conjugal relation, they are looked upon as servants. Men do not love women. They use them and exploit them, and then consider it fair to subject them to the law of fidelity.
If I abuse you, dear dependent warbler, you will soon escape to the highest trees of the garden, for in a week your wings will have grown and love alone will hold you to my side.
References:
Adam Gopnik, “Americans in Paris” a literary anthology, Library of America, New York, 2004.
----- “Paris to the Moon,” Random House, New York, 2000.
Raymond Williams, “Key Words,” Oxford University Press, New York, 1976.
Colette, “Earthly Paradise, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1966.
George Sand, “The Intimate Journal,” Academy Chicago Press, Chicago, 1929.
Camille Paglia “Sexual Persona,” Random House, New York, 1991.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Confessions,” Original 1783 anonymous English translation, Washington Square Press, New York, 1956.
C.V Wedgwood, “Richelieu and the French Monarchy,” Macmillan, New York, 1962.
David P. Jordan, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979.
William Blake, “Poetry and Prose,” Doubleday, New York, 1965.
Wallace Stevens, “Palm at the End of the Mind,” Knopf, New York, 1967.
Ernest Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast,” Scribner, New York, 1964.
The Building of Rockledge,
"Le Petit Salon de Roc"
A Photographic Essay by Deborah Gaddy with Commentary by Larry L. Dill
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