Moonlight Over Paris (27 page)

F
irst and foremost, I would like to thank everyone who has embraced my books so enthusiastically. I am so fortunate to have such devoted readers, and I am deeply grateful to each and every one of you.

In the course of researching this book, I relied upon the collections of a number of libraries and archives. I would specifically like to acknowledge the Archives of American Art (Anna Coleman Ladd papers), the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Gerald and Sara Murphy papers), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the National Archives in the U.K., the New York Public Library, and the Toronto Public Library.

I would also like to offer my thanks to those who were kind enough to help me with my research, either by answering my questions or by examining sections of my work-in-progress for errors. Susan Logan and John Barkley offered their observations on artistic techniques and the artist's path; Jennifer Yates cast her professional translator's eye over my French usage; Lori Barrett advised me on all things musical; and Erika Robuck provided invaluable suggestions regarding my characterization of several figures from the Lost Generation. Any inaccuracies or mistakes that remain are entirely my responsibility.

To my literary agent, Kevan Lyon, and her colleagues at the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency, in particular Patricia Nelson, I once again extend my heartfelt thanks.

Also deserving of my praise and gratitude is my editor, Amanda Bergeron, whose patience and understanding kept me writing even when I was convinced I had lost my way. I am also very grateful to Elle Keck in editorial, as well as my publicists Emily Homonoff, Lauren Jackson, and Miranda Snyder, together with Kim Therriault, for their ongoing support.

I would like to thank everyone who supports me and my books at William Morrow, in particular Tom Pitoniak, Emin Mancheril, Mary Ann Petyak, Serena Wang, Molly Birckhead, Jennifer Hart, Samantha Hagerbaumer, and Carla Parker. The producers at HarperAudio have once again created a beautiful audiobook and I am most grateful for their hard work. I am also indebted to everyone at HarperCollins Canada, among them Leo MacDonald, Sandra Leef, Colleen Simpson, Cory Beatty, Shannon Parsons, and Kaitlyn Vincent. Last but very much
not
least, I want to thank all of the sales staff in the U.S., Canada and the international division for their efforts on my behalf.

Closer to home, I'd like to thank the circle of friends whose love and support keeps me afloat: Ana, Clara, Denise, Erin, Irene, Jane D, Jane E, Jen, Kate H, Kelly F, Kelly W, Liz, Marissa, Mary, Michela, and Rena.

My heartfelt thanks go out as well to my family in Canada and the U.K., most especially my father, Stuart Robson; my sister, Kate Robson; and my beautiful children, Matthew and Daniela.

Most of all I want to thank my husband for his support, understanding, and love. And just so you know, Claudio—you are the hero of
my
story.

Meet Jennifer Robson

JENNIFER ROBSON
is the
USA Today
and #1
Globe & Mail
bestselling author of
Somewhere in France
and
After the War Is Over
. She first learned about the Great War from her father, acclaimed historian Stuart Robson. In her late teens, she worked as an official guide at the Canadian National War Memorial at Vimy Ridge in France and had the honor of meeting a number of First World War veterans. After graduating from King's College at the University of Western Ontario, she attended Saint Antony's College, University of Oxford, where she earned a doctorate in British economic and social history. She was a Commonwealth Scholar and an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow while at Oxford. Jennifer lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and young children, and shares her home office with Sam the cat and Ellie the sheepdog.

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Paris and the Lost Generation

T
HE TERM “
L
OST
G
ENERATION,”
which has come to be attached to the group of writers and artists who came of age during or just after the First World War, was coined by Gertrude Stein, who overheard a garage owner bemoaning the laziness and lax work ethic of a young mechanic in his employ. The garage owner called the mechanic and his contemporaries “une génération perdue,” and Stein, who knew the value of a bon mot as well as anyone, told Ernest Hemingway about the conversation. He used it as an epigraph in
The Sun Also Rises
, and many years later wrote about the phrase in his memoir,
A Moveable Feast
. It's worth noting that he then added, “I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be.”

In the years following the end of the Great War, thousands of expatriate writers and artists were drawn to Paris, lured in part by the buying power of the American dollar: by the summer of 1925, for instance, one dollar equaled twenty French francs. A decent meal might be had for two francs, a room in a hotel might be let for 200 francs a month, and nearly everything else was correspondingly cheap if your pay or savings originated in dollars. For example, William L. Shirer, who later became known for his work with Edward R. Murrow, earned $60 a month for his work as a deskman at the European edition of the
Chicago Tribune
(he arrived in late 1925, so his tenure didn't coincide with Sam's fictional sojourn there).

Shirer had just graduated from college, and had spent all his life up to that point in the American Midwest. Although he had planned on returning to the United States
after a short stay in Europe, he instead decided to remain indefinitely. The allure of Paris was simply impossible to resist. “In this golden time one could be wonderfully carefree in the beautiful, civilized city, released from all the puritan, bourgeois restraints that had stifled a young American at home,” he later wrote in his memoirs.

It was possible not only to live well in Paris, but also to live relatively free of intolerance, small-minded attitudes, and old-fashioned conventions, and to do so surrounded by like-minded people. It was also the case that Paris, perhaps more so than at any other time, simply felt like the center of everything. The most interesting fiction, poetry, theater, music, dance, and art was being created in Paris, and if that wasn't strictly true it at least
felt
true.

You may have noticed that a number of notable literary and artistic figures who lived in Paris in this period make no appearance in this book, or are only mentioned in passing. Among them are Ezra Pound, John dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Cole Porter, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau, and they are absent either because they weren't living in Paris in the period
Moonlight Over Paris
takes place, or because I couldn't establish a plausible connection between them and my characters.

The question of plausibility preoccupied me for many weeks when I first began to research this book. In the beginning, I wasn't at all sure if I would include any real-life members of the Lost Generation as characters. How likely was it, I asked myself, that Helena would have encountered any of these people? I soon realized that her background and interests made it not only likely, but also very nearly inevitable.

Ninety years on, it's difficult to reliably establish the number of Americans living in Paris in the 1920s, for official estimates vary considerably. The French census of 1926 counted just under 18,000 Americans living in France, with roughly half of them based in Paris and its suburbs; but that figure didn't include the thousands of undocumented visitors who had, for instance, overstayed their visas or had entered the country illegally. In 1923, an article in the European edition of the
Chicago Tribune
(yes, Sam's paper) cited a figure of 32,000 Americans living in Paris. The real number, which likely hovered somewhere in between these two estimates, fluctuated according to the exchange rate and other economic factors, and it also included all Americans in Paris, many of whom were businessmen with no connection to the arts. Historian Warren Susman has speculated that only one-tenth of American expatriates were writers or artists, which leaves us with a very rough estimate of two or three thousand
men and women, to which must be added several hundred expatriates from other countries, most notably Britain, Russia, and Spain.

It may seem implausible that a newcomer to Paris in 1925 might have been able to attend a party and there meet a dozen or more famous writers and artists, but making some provision for exaggeration and hindsight, the people who belonged to the expatriate artistic community did socialize with one another, did spend great amounts of time in one another's company, and did tend to frequent the same cafés, restaurants, and bars. Paris, in that sense, was a small town—and like most small towns it was the sort of place where everyone seemed to know everyone.

Two of the most central figures of the Lost Generation were Sara and Gerald Murphy, although they would almost certainly have resisted being attached to any sort of label. Immortalized in Calvin Tomkins's long-form essay of 1962, “The Best Revenge is Living Well,” and recently the subject of several biographies and novels, it is impossible to read or write about France in the 1920s without encountering the Murphys. My characterization is a sympathetic one, for they were simply the sort of people you wanted to be around—funny, charming, warm, witty, and interesting. They instantly made any gathering a success, and they retained their characteristic warmth of spirit and generosity even in the face of the two overwhelming tragedies that brought an end to their life in France. These were the death of their son Baoth in 1935, age 16, of meningitis, followed by the death of their other son Patrick in 1937, also at the age of 16, after a long battle with tuberculosis. After Patrick's diagnosis in 1929 they moved to Switzerland, where he might receive the most modern treatments available, and then back to the U.S. in 1934. After they left France Gerald never painted again.

During their years in France, the Murphys gathered around them a group of friends that included Archibald MacLeish, a famed poet and later the Librarian of Congress; Ernest and Hadley Hemingway; Pablo Picasso; and, perhaps most famously, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The Murphys were partly the inspiration for Fitzgerald's characters Dick and Nicole Diver in
Tender is the Night
, although the literary notoriety that came with this connection always upset Sara. “I didn't like the book when I read it, and I liked it even less on rereading,” she told Tomkins in 1962. “I reject categorically any resemblance to us or to anyone we knew at any time.”

By establishing a friendship between Helena and Sara Murphy, I was able to create a pathway into the world of the Lost Generation, a world that leads her not only to Sam Howard but also to Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, Sylvia Beach, and even such lesser-known figures as Rosalie Tobia, the proprietor of Chez Rosalie. Signora Tobia was a real person, mentioned by name in a turn-of-the-century directory of artists' models, and was known for her kindness toward many struggling artists, most notably Amedeo Modigliani.

Through the fictitious character of Aunt Agnes, whom I like to imagine as a cross between Margot Asquith and Madame de Staël, I was able to gain entrée for Helena into the salon of Natalie Barney, and introduce her to a group of women who were intellectually curious and socially daring. They included Peggy Guggenheim, Winnaretta Singer (the Princesse Edmond de Polignac), Djuna Barnes, Colette, Elisabeth Gramont (the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre), Thelma Wood, Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, and Romaine Brooks.

Consuelo Balsan, whose fictitious nephew by marriage proves so irksome to Helena, was a real-life figure, too. Born a Vanderbilt, raised in the very top drawer of New York high society, she became a duchess at the age of eighteen when she married the Duke of Marlborough. The marriage was an unhappy one, and resulted in separation eleven years later, followed by divorce in 1921. Later that year, however, Consuelo remarried, this time to Lt.-Col. Jacques Balsan, a pioneering French aviator.

No discussion of Paris in the 1920s can be considered complete without Sylvia Beach and her iconic bookshop Shakespeare and Company, which she opened in 1919. Beach is best known today for her championing of James Joyce, and her decision to become the publisher of his magnum opus
Ulysses
after it was deemed too inflammatory in its subject matter and language to be published in the United States or Britain. In addition to being a center of English-language cultural life in Paris, Shakespeare and Company also operated as a paid lending library, and nearly every acclaimed writer who spent time in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s had a subscription there. Beach closed her shop after the German occupation of France in 1940 and it never re-opened; the Shakespeare and Company of today's Paris bears its name as an homage to the original shop.

To learn more about the Lost Generation and Paris in the 1920s, please turn to my list of Further Reading in this section.