B004MMEIOG EBOK (7 page)

Chapter 14
A Proposition at Les Editeurs

What walker shall his mean ambition fix

On the false lustre of a coach and six?

O rather give me sweet content on foot,

Wrapped in virtue, and a good surtout.

JOHN GAY,
“Trivia; or, Walking the Streets of London”

I
’d known Dorothy since I first came to France. She was one of the longtime American residents who, from behind the scenes, and largely out of love, manage its society of expatriates. Former booksellers, restaurateurs, diplomats, or civil servants on a pension, they’re usually, like her, married to someone French, and have created over decades what the French call a
réseau—
a network of old school friends, ex-lovers, distant relatives, and neighbors that keeps the nation functioning. No book in France receives less use than the telephone directory. To fix a leak, issue a writ, buy a car, or find a lover, your first stop is your
agenda
—a gold mine of relatives, friends, and remote acquaintances, among whom you are sure to find the expertise you need.

Through a good part of its twenty-year history, the Paris Literary Seminar, France’s longest-running English-language event for writers, had occupied Dorothy’s time. For one week every summer, fifty people from around the world converged on Paris to take classes with authors and poets and absorb the ambiance that inspired Stein, Baldwin, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce.

The latest seminar had just begun, but Dorothy insisted on seeing me immediately at our preferred local hangout, Les Editeurs. A large, bright, and open café at the foot of my street, it has conferred on our intersection a little of the glamour once monopolized by the Deux Magots, Flore, and Brasserie Lipp, that clustered around the intersection of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Rennes, five blocks farther west. One U.S. journalist, seduced by its book-lined walls, red leather armchairs, and the atmosphere of a London gentlemen’s club—or rather how the French imagine a London gentlemen’s club might look—called Les Editeurs “a real Parisian café.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was only three years old. Before that, it had been Le Chope d’Alsace
,
a
real
Parisian café, at least of a certain sort: dark as a cave, even at midday, smelling of cheap wine and Gauloise cigarettes, with a carpet that clung stickily to the soles of your shoes.

Dorothy bustled in, administered the obligatory air kisses, one on each cheek, sat down, and, beginning with a bulging Filofax, proceeded to colonize the table with folders, brochures, and schedules.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Fine, fine,” she said absently.

It was a meaningless question. The seminar always went well. The concept was as adaptable as the hamburger, functional as Kleenex, simple as a shovel.

The real question was:
Why
did it work so well?

“It makes no sense,” I protested when she first explained it to me. “Fifty people, mostly from the United States, pay thousands of dollars to spend a week in France, taking courses in writing?”

“Yes.”

“And teachers—many of them from the United States as well—are paid to come here and teach them?”

“Correct.”

“Then why don’t these people save their money and get together in, I don’t know, Atlantic City?”

My naiveté made her smile.

“John, it’s
Paris
!”

She was too polite to append “you idiot!”

But she would have been justified in doing so. I’d ignored the oldest rule of marketing—sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Berliners are adamant that something called
Berlinerluft—
Berlin Air—seeps up from swamps under the city and has the power to inspire creativity. Angelenos will tell you there is
for sure
something in Californian sunshine that confers on movies made there a special gleam. And anybody who loves clothes will insist that nothing equals the cut of a suit made by the tailors of London’s Savile Row. So a writer might think that Paris, which had stimulated so many literary figures in the past, could do the same for them. Our capacity for self-delusion appears almost infinite. Cannibals believed that if you ate part of your enemy, you acquired his courage and skill. We still believe some grains of fairy dust settle in the wake of the mighty. A Hollywood producer, walking along the beach at Malibu, saw Steven Spielberg sitting on the sand, staring at the sunset. He watched from a distance and, when Spielberg got up, slipped into the hollow left behind. Well, who’s to say?

I waited for Dorothy to order a
café crème
and explain why she had summoned me. An invitation in the very middle of seminar week could only foreshadow a favor. To Dorothy, my role was twofold: as a friend and colleague, but also as part of her
réseau.

“Doing anything this afternoon?”

Ah!

“Nothing in particular. Why?”

“You know we hold these literary walks . . .”

Nobody in the seminar cared to study every minute. Two hours a day was the limit; after that, attention wandered. For the rest of the time, they wanted to enjoy Paris—albeit while doing something literary. To accommodate them, the seminar devoted afternoons and evenings to optional extras—readings, art shows, and literary walks.

“Who’s doing the walks this year?”

“It was hard to find somebody good, but we finally got . . .” And she named a moderately well known American academic: call him Andrew.

“Doesn’t he teach at Harvard or someplace?”

“Stanford. But he’s in Paris on a sabbatical.”

“You lucked out then.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Why? Is there a problem?”

“I’d rather not say. But do me a favor and tag along on his walk this afternoon. I’d be interested in your opinion.”

Chapter 15
The Freedom of the City

The traces of American expatriates, refugees, heroes and rascals are discoverable throughout this city.

WALTER J. P. CURLEY, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE, 1989–1993

N
ext to environmental tourism, cultural tourism is the leisure industry’s major growth area. For every person who hikes across Bhutan or counts butterflies in the Brazilian rain forest, another longs to plunge into the thickets of literature, unaware that it’s just as full of surprises, agreeable and otherwise, as any Amazonian jungle.

Spain, Switzerland, Italy, even countries of the old Soviet federation—all host summer events for wannabee authors. Dorothy had shown me some of their brightly colored brochures. I’d examined them with disbelief. One in Spain taught the literature and aesthetics of bullfighting, including visits to the
corrida
, though hopefully only as a spectator. Another in Rome, devoted to “The Literature of Cuisine,” was simply a pretext to eat an enormous dinner every night. The only required reading was the menu.

Others were stranger still.

“ ‘Enforced café sitting,’ ” I read. “ ‘The students choose one of the city’s historic cafés and remain there for no less than two hours, during which they observe and record the passing scene . . .’ ”

“I wondered if that would work here,” Dorothy mused. “We have the cafés, but the proprietors don’t like you to just sit. It could cost a fortune in
café crèmes
.”

“Here’s a woman who teaches ‘Writing as Dance.’ You don’t actually put anything on paper—you just learn to
move
creatively.”

“I noticed that one too. But she’s busy through next summer.”

“And this! ‘Seamus O’Finnegan, author of
Learn to Love Your Novel
, offers his workshop on advanced creative techniques.’ Have you seen this? He suggests you buy a soft toy or a pillow and give it the name of your project. When work is going badly, you should cuddle it or talk to it.”

“Oh, Seamus. Yes. We had him two years ago.”

“You’re not going to tell me anyone would pay good money for that!”

“We were turning them away, John! I’d use him again, except he’s booked solid. All the best people are.”

O’Finnegan’s shenanigans particularly irritated me. Writing shouldn’t need all this voodoo. Did Hemingway cuddle a cushion called
The Sun Also Rises
? Did Fitzgerald surreptitiously squeeze his teddy bear Gatsby? (On the other hand, Henry Miller fondling a doll called Sexus did make a certain amount of sense.)

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tag along with your literary walk. Like to give me a clue about what I’m looking for?”

“I prefer you keep an open mind.”

Walking back home up rue de l’Odéon, I remembered a walk I’d taken at a festival in Kuopio, Finland. It wasn’t actually a walk but a work of conceptual art called
Windwalk
, created by the British artist Tim Knowles. He was obviously a fan of the 1950s French theorist Guy Debord, one of the inventors of psychogeography
.
Like surrealism, psychogeography meant pretty well what you were pointing to when you said it, though one brave soul defined it as “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities. Just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”

Our Finnish group met in the town square and were each handed a bicycle helmet with a small triangular sail attached. The sail swiveled as the wind took it, and each of us headed in the direction it pointed. At the first corner, an eddy of wind sent half the group in one direction, the rest in another. By the end of the morning, we’d been scattered all over town. A conventional walk had become an adventure.

I’d almost reached our building when someone at my elbow said, “Excusez-moi. Je suis . . . I mean, nous sommes . . .”

“It’s okay. I speak English.”

They looked just like the hundreds of other couples who passed me every week: Burberrys, sensible shoes, distracted expressions, and a much-folded map.

“We’re trying to find the Luxembourg Gardens.”

I pointed to the colonnaded Theatre de l’Odéon at the top of the street.

“They’re on the other side.”

They stared at me suspiciously, then back at their map. They’d have preferred me to be French. Then they could be sure I wasn’t making it up. For all they knew, I might just be another tourist, as lost as they were.

“Try turning the map around,” I suggested. Perversely, Paris street maps put north at the top, but they were walking south. Cautiously, they did so.

“You’re here.” I indicated rue de l’Odéon. “There’s the theater. And these are the gardens.”

“Right!” said the husband. “You see, honey. I told you.”

The wife’s self-control was admirable. Instead of kicking him in the shins, she just narrowed her eyes.

“We’re looking for the outdoor café,” she said. “It’s supposed to be very nice.”

“There are three, actually,” I said. “The best one is near the bandstand. On the upper level.”

The wife looked around uncertainly. “And that would be . . . ?”

“I’ll show you,” I said.

We walked up to Place de l’Odéon and waited for a bus to maneuver its way into the street without scraping the cars illegally parked outside the Méditerranée restaurant on the corner. By folding back the glass doors along Place de l’Odéon, the owners gave the diners incomparable access to this amusing piece of street theater, as well as the view and the warm breeze. As usual in summer, chattering groups occupied every table, and the man who managed the wooden boxes of Marennes oysters was furiously opening them by the dozen while impatient waiters lined up to fill orders. Overhead, the blue canvas marquee fluttered, agitating the words “Le Méditerranée” written in a flowing hand any Parisian would recognize instantly.

Jean Cocteau’s drawing for the restaurant La Mediterranée

“Ever heard of Jean Cocteau?” I asked.

In 1960, Cocteau had lunched here with friends and was preparing to depart. I could imagine the camel hair coat draped over his shoulders, the soft felt hat being molded between those long white fingers, ready to be placed on that leonine head; the only sight more impressive than Cocteau entering a restaurant was that of him leaving. Before bowing him out, the management asked him to sign the
livre d’or
, the guest book. Ever flamboyant, Cocteau never just
signed
anything. Instead, he decorated an entire page with a drawing so striking that the restaurant redesigned its linen, crockery, and marquee to incorporate it.

“Wow!” said the husband softly as I pointed to part of the design woven into the burgundy carpet outside the front door. They stared at it, then looked up at the marquee. A corner of this city that otherwise would have passed unnoticed came alive. I suddenly remembered a passage from
The Great Gatsby
that I’d read a thousand times, but never would again without a twinge of recognition.

    
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

        
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

        
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.