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  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

  Next 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 shenani
gans 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.

  Chapter 16

  The Man Who Knew Too Much

  The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

  VOLTAIRE

  Two mornings later, Dorothy and I met again in Les Editeurs.

  “You ambushed me,” I said accusingly.

  “Well, a little. Sorry.” She didn’t look contrite.

  For the ten of us who assembled on rue de Rennes for the literary walk, the biggest surprise was the youth of our guide. About forty, blond, tanned, and soft-spoken, Andrew could have passed for Robert Redford’s nephew. A couple of women in the group regarded him with not entirely academic interest, while the older ones wondered if they could keep up with someone so fit.

  They needn’t have worried.

  At Deux Magots, Andrew positioned himself with his back to the café, facing busy boulevard Saint-Germain. Staring over our heads, he announced, “Here we are at one of the most famous cafés of Paris, Deux Magots. Established in . . .”

  Literary memoirs often describe how a charismatic teacher ignited their interest in literature. “I longed for the next class when we would gather round the skirts of Miss Wilkins, hanging on every word as she read Emily Dickinson . . .” Whatever quality those educators possessed, Andrew had it in reverse. Having memorized Parisian cultural history down to the price of a pipi in the toilettes of Le Sélect in 1928, he wanted to be sure we knew every bit of it. One could feel the interest of the group drain away, as if sucked down some intellectual plughole. A few of us cast glances toward the chairs and tables set out on the sidewalk. What if we sat down, just for a minute, and ordered a coffee, or even a glass of champagne . . . ?

  “I wasn’t sure,” Dorothy said. “But I’d heard things. People said he was a bit . . . dry.”

  Dry? Andrew was more than dry. He was parched. Desiccated.

  He spared us nothing. History. Statistics. Quotations. Dates. And more statistics after that. Then he produced his latest book and read—or rather droned—a couple of pages. The desire with which some had looked on him gave way to distaste. Those who’d feared physical exhaustion no longer did so. Compared to this leaden progress, a walk to the mailbox was as thrilling as white-water rafting. It reminded me of something the director Terry Gilliam said about working with Robert De Niro on the film Brazil. The actor was so meticulous that it took weeks to shoot a few brief scenes. “We were all in awe of De Niro,” said Gilliam, “then we shifted round one hundred and eighty degrees and wanted to kill him.”

  If Andrew’s soporific lectures affected me less than the others, I put it down to having survived a traditional Catholic education, administered by the sort of priests and nuns you’d expect to find in an Australian country town. Their aim wasn’t to educate but rather to create a mind barren of all information, a blank page, receptive to the church’s multitudinous thou-shalt-nots. Over decades of droning lessons and Sunday sermons, I’d built up a partial immunity to boredom, in the wa
y that repeated snakebites make you resistant to venom. Faced with Andrew, however, even my energy began to fail. As we reached Place Saint-Sulpice and the church towers loomed over me, I feared the consequences if I stepped inside. What if I fell into a trance, was taken for dead, and woke up a week later interred in the crypt, like a character out of Edgar Allan Poe? Rather than risk it, I dropped back, slipping away around the first corner.

  Girls on a café terrasse, 1920s

  Over a gin and tonic on the terrace of the Café Flore, I relaxed into the ambiance of the late afternoon. If only Andrew could see Paris as I did—the way it had been in the 1920s, when the cafés’ wicker chairs spilled onto the sidewalk and new arrivals from America lingered over a glass of white wine, absorbing the street life flowing by, so unlike anything they knew at home: the taxis with their hooting klaxons, the boulevardiers in tightly fitted three-piece suits, tipping their hats to the women in their cloches and silk stockings as they shared a fine à l’eau with a friend and wondered what the night would bring.

  The love of a city, like the love of a person, often begins in the first instant of encounter. The rest is discovery and exploration. “We didn’t feel out of place,” wrote the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan of his first evening in Paris.

  The corner was like a great bowl of light, little figures moving into it and fading out, and beyond was all of Paris. Paris was around us and how could it be alien in our minds and hearts even if no Frenchman ever spoke to us? What it offered to us was what it had offered to men from other countries for hundreds of years; it was a lighted place where the imagination was free.

  Though Andrew was interested in Paris, he didn’t love it. Oscar Wilde scorned such people who “know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Andrew knew the facts but not what they signified. He could recite them, but he could not bring them alive. And in a guide that’s fatal.

  “He looked ideal,” Dorothy said. “Good credentials, pleasant manner. . . . Such a disappointment.” She flourished a handful of papers and started quoting from them: “ ‘Frankly boring’ . . . ‘Not what we expected’ . . . ‘We didn’t finish.’”