Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Read online

  For all his keenness to adopt the manners of the Parisians, Jefferson was not very impressed with what he called, with a slight sneer, ‘the vaunted scene of Europe’. As a self-styled ‘savage from the mountains of America’, he said he found the general fate of humanity in the European countries ‘most deplorable’; Voltaire had been right to judge that every man there must be either the hammer or the anvil. Admittedly Europeans were still far ahead of Americans in manners and the arts, but, ‘My God!’ said Jefferson, ‘how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. I confess I had no idea of it myself.’

  He also feared the influence of Europe on young Americans who came abroad. He noticed how in Paris they acquired a ‘fondness for European luxury and dissipation’, even ‘a spirit of female intrigue’. It was all very un-American; he wished their parents would not send them.

  This did not stop him enjoying Paris to the full. He would work all morning, ride in the Bois de Boulogne, then sometimes explore the bookshops on the Left Bank; when he eventually went back to the USA the books he had bought in Paris required 250 feet of shelves. Dinner in mid-afternoon was followed by the theatre, the opera or a concert, then a visit to some glittering salon. He was introduced to Madame de Staël, and became particular friends with Lafayette’s aunt, the Comtesse de Tessé, who snared his passion for gardening. He had a friendly dispute with the naturalist Buffon about the size and appearance of the American moose. Since Buffon could not be persuaded that it looked quite different from a reindeer, Jefferson sent over for a specimen to prove his point. Eventually a giant skeleton arrived; the creature had been specially hunted down and shot by a New Hampshire general, who enclosed his bill.

  Over in Jefferson’s home state of Virginia they wanted a new Capitol building for Richmond, the seat of government, and they wrote to ask for Jefferson’s advice. He recommended that they copy a Roman building he had seen on his travels around France, the Maison Carré at Nimes. They agreed; he sent a French architect over to Richmond to supervise the job, and the result was so successful that it was copied in American public buildings until the First World War.

  By contrast, when Jefferson went to England for the first time in 1786 he was impressed by nothing except the mechanical inventions and the landscape gardening. His notes on his English travels rarely ran to more than a bare statement of accounts: ‘For seeing house where Shakespeare was born, 1s.; seeing his tomb-stone, 1s.’

  *

  As the French Revolution approached, Jefferson felt himself to be more than an onlooker, knowing that the USA had provided a model for the French republican movement. He hoped the final settlement in France would resemble the English constitutional monarchy, rather than aiming for full-scale democracy all at once, and was fearful that in attempting too much the revolutionaries would lose everything.

  In the spring of 1789 he sketched out a proposed Charter of Rights for France, largely modelled on the US Constitution, hoping that Louis XVI might sign it. There was provision in it for habeas corpus and a free press; legislation would be in the hands of the Estates General (nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie), with the King’s consent; fiscal privileges were to be abolished. But another American on the scene, the conservative-minded Pennsylvania statesman Gouverneur Morris, who in 1787 had been responsible for much of the final wording of the Constitution, thought Jefferson was far too radical and democratic in his attitude to the French insurrection. Morris admired French royalty and was alarmed by the mob.

  Up to now, American politics had been conducted mostly by consensus; there were two factions, but they usually managed to agree. Suddenly, the execution of Louis XVI and France’s declaration of war against Britain caused a rift between them. The conservative element had always implicitly opposed the French Revolution, and now (said Jefferson) they were ‘open-mouthed against the murderers of a sovereign’. The more democratic faction were alarmed by events in France, but still regarded the Revolution as a laudable extension of the USA’s own. Jefferson observed, not altogether with regret, that the French had ‘kindled’ American politics, had stirred up the two factions to an ‘ardour’ which internal affairs alone had not managed to excite.

  The French Revolutionary Government sent an envoy over to the USA, Citizen Genêt, and he had a mixed welcome. At Philadelphia the crowd donned red caps and sang the ‘Marseillaise’, but when someone showed George Washington a broadsheet depicting his own head being chopped off on the guillotine, Genêt’s recall was demanded. Jefferson sadly described all this as ‘liberty warring on itself’, while to the French, the USA no longer seemed an unshakeable ally. Genêt’s successor wrote: ‘Jefferson, I say, is an American and, as such, he cannot be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of all the peoples of Europe.’

  In 1796 John Adams succeeded Washington as President, and the country came near to declaring war on France and making an alliance with Britain. When Jefferson himself took over the Presidency in 1801 he studiously embraced neutrality. He said he was determined to avoid ‘implicating’ the USA with Europe, ‘even in support of principles which we mean to pursue’.

  The emergence of Napoleon further diminished American enthusiasm for the French cause. For a time, the victorious Bonaparte, who had made Spain cede Louisiana back to France, planned an expedition to New Orleans to take power there. But it never sailed, and eventually Louisiana was sold to the Americans for $15 million, a purchase that almost doubled the size of the USA.

  The two-and-a-half-year war between Britain and America, which broke out in 1812, achieved nothing beyond reinforcing the American belief in neutrality; the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned Europe that the United States were ‘henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization’, while American policy towards the outside world was now simply ‘not to interfere’. Yet though isolationism had become the dominant note in official circles, a steady stream of Americans continued to cross to Europe, many of them on cultural Grand Tours. Among literary men, Washington Irving came to Paris in 1804, the scholar George Ticknor in 1819, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1826, Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1832, and Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1858. The first young American to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, John Vanderlyn, came in 1796, and many others followed. Doctors, clergymen, and bankers came too; and in 1844 P. T. Barnum brought General Tom Thumb to perform before Louis Philippe. In 1858 an American Church was established in the rue de Berri for members of the nonconformist congregations; and in the 1880s the Episcopalians built themselves a cathedral off the Champs-Élysées. An American newspaper magnate, James Gordon Bennett, established a European edition of his New York Herald in Paris in 1887, while the Chicago Tribune, not to be outdone, set up its own Paris edition a little later.

  *

  Alongside this solidly respectable American community of the Right Bank, with its smart hotels, cathedrals, and newspapers, another Paris began to attract its share of American attention. It was this ‘alternative’ Paris that would draw writers to the French capital in such droves after the First World War.

  The Latin Quarter, on the Left Bank opposite Notre Dame, came to be so called in medieval times because it housed the university, and students who flocked there from all over Europe used Latin rather than French as their lingua franca in the streets. By the late nineteenth century it was the only part of central Paris to retain much of its medieval layout, for during the 1850s Baron Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III, had been commissioned to plan a drastic reconstruction of the city, sweeping away most of the narrow alleyways and lanes where criminals and insurgents could hide out – as described in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) – and which had helped to foment uprisings like those of 1830 and 1848. Haussmann’s brief was to drive broad boulevards through the huddle. This he did, ruthlessly. But the Latin Quarter remained comparatively untouched, and soon began to attract tourists who came i
n search of its celebrated vie bohème.

  The life-style of the Quartier Latin had always been bohemian – as is demonstrated by the careers of two early members of the University of Paris, Peter Abelard and the rakish poet François Villon – but nobody seemed to consider this of much interest until the 1840s, when a book about Latin Quarter life suddenly became a bestseller. It was written by a concierge’s son, a hack writer named Henri Murger, who preferred to call himself Henry Mürger, and had abandoned his clerk’s job in the hope of becoming a poet and painter. The result was his Scènes de la Bohème,* serialised in a Paris magazine during the 1840s and staged there in 1849. Fifty years later, Mürger’s book was sentimentalised in Puccini’s La Bohème.

  Mürger’s Bohemia – an exaggeration, though not a gross one, of the real thing – is a Latin Quarter inhabited by art students, would-be poets, and literary hacks employed by mysterious periodicals. They occupy garrets, avoid paying their rent, and borrow wherever they can, so as to eat in such pot-houses as Mother Cadet’s, ‘famous for its rabbit-stew, its genuine choucroute and a watery white wine with a flavour of musket flints’. Garret life consists largely of cutting up one’s furniture and burning it to keep warm. The hack writer Rodolphe, the book’s hero, dwells at the top of an old building near the Place de la Contrescarpe, close to the river and the Sorbonne. In order to keep his fire stoked, Rodolphe has cut up everything except the bed and two chairs, which are made of iron; sometimes he takes to burning his own manuscripts. Yet there is never any real hardship. Creditors are outwitted, forgotten dinner invitations surface just when the stomach demands attention, and loans are raised from skinflint uncles. When the worst comes to the worst, Rodolphe sleeps at an address on the Avenue de Saint-Cloud, ‘in the third tree on the left’.

  He picks up his first girl, Louise, in a dance hall. She is one of the tribe of grisettes, apprentice seamstresses and milliners who wear grey work-dresses in the daytime and minister to the fancies of the students and other bohemians at night. Mürger calls her ‘one of those birds of passage that nest, as fancy or often as necessity dictates, for a day, or rather for a night, in the garrets of the Latin Quarter, and readily stay for a few days in one place, if they can be detained by a whim – or by ribbons’. Sex is part of the backdrop in the Latin Quarter, and is treated with the same brisk humour as are the young men’s financial scrapes:

  Marcel’s door … half opened and Rodolphe was confronted with the spectacle of a young man wearing only glasses and a shirt. ‘I cannot receive you,’ he told Rodolphe.

  ‘Why not?’

  A woman’s head poked out from behind a curtain. ‘There’s the answer,’ said Marcel.

  ‘She’s not at all good looking,’ said Rodolphe, as the door was shut in his face.

  Rodolphe, evicted from his garret, is immediately taken in by its next tenant, the eighteen-year-old grisette Mimi, ‘with whom Rodolphe had at one time done a little billing and cooing’. She is described as ‘an adorable creature with a voice like the clash of cymbals’. (Another of the grisettes is known as Musette because she sounds like a bagpipe.)

  When neither borrowing money nor bedding their girls, Rodolphe and his friends – ‘Gustave Colline, the great philosopher, Marcel, the great painter, Schaunard, the great musician’ – loll about in the Café Momus. The patron complains that they drive away all other customers: they steal the newspapers, monopolise the trictrac board, paint pictures, make coffee in their own percolator, and refuse to pay the bill.

  Rodolphe is working endlessly on a play, while Marcel the painter labours at a canvas entitled The Crossing of the Red Sea, which has been offered for exhibition so many times that ‘if it had been put on wheels, it could have gone to the Louvre by itself’. The picture is eventually sold to a grocer, who has a steam-boat and the words Marseille Harbour painted on it and hangs it up as his shop sign. Marcel is delighted.

  Rodolphe and his friends have a thoroughly un-solemn attitude to the arts. An evening of festivities announced by them includes the following events:

  8.30 pm. M. Alexandre Schaunard, distinguished Virtuoso, will perform on the piano ‘The Influence of Blue upon the arts’, a mimetic symphony …

  9.30 pm. M. Gustave Colline, hyperphysical philosopher, and M. Schaunard will embark upon a comparative discussion of philosophy and metaphysics. To prevent collision between the antagonists, they will be tied together …

  N.B. All persons desirous to read or recite poems will be immediately expelled from the Rooms and handed over to the police.

  Much fun is poked at the serious literary aspirations of one Carolus Barbemuche, who wants to join the bohemians, and tells them solemnly: ‘In my view, art is a sacred calling.’ Rodolphe writhes in an agony of boredom when Barbemuche reads to him from one of his manuscripts.

  Mimi deserts Rodolphe for a nobleman; Rodolphe publishes a poem about her, and when her new lover sees it he throws her out. Dying of tuberculosis, she returns to Rodolphe and his friends; but her demise is treated briskly and without melodrama, and the book ends with Rodolphe and Marcel determining to buy themselves a slap-up meal.

  Scènes de la Bohème was translated into English, but was too risqué to catch on in the drawing rooms of Kensington and Boston, Massachusetts. The great popularity of the Latin Quarter ‘bohemian’ image in the English-speaking world by the early twentieth century owed something to Puccini’s bowdlerised operatic version of the story, but just as much to a novel by an Englishman. A few years after the Scènes had first been published in Paris, a twenty-two-year-old English painter of French descent, George du Maurier, came to the Latin Quarter to study art. He eventually became well known as a Punch cartoonist, but at the end of his life he turned novelist. His Trilby (1894), loosely based on his own experiences as a Paris art student, was a runaway success on both sides of the Atlantic, playing no small part in attracting young Americans to Paris in the years that followed.

  Du Maurier’s Latin Quarter is scarcely recognisable as Mürger’s. His bohemians are affluent young Englishmen of the upper class, with mutton-chop whiskers and top hats. Far from needing to burn their furniture, they live in mid-Victorian splendour and according to mid-Victorian morals. Du Maurier’s appallingly named hero, Little Billee, is ‘innocent of the world and its wicked ways; innocent of French especially, and the ways of Paris and its Latin Quarter’. He exults in the company of his ‘glorious pair of chums’, Taffy and the Laird, and has an ‘almost girlish purity of mind’. His friends walk everywhere arm in arm with him as if he were their grisette.

  The heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall, an artist’s model of Irish birth, is equally ambiguous sexually. Du Maurier gravely informs us that she ‘would have made a singularly handsome boy’, and his drawings emphasise her masculinity. Though she poses for artists ‘in the altogether’ – it makes Little Billee ‘sick’ to think of this – she is described in sexless, religious terms: Little Billee perceives in her ‘a well of sweetness … the very heart of compassion, generosity, and warm sisterly love’, and hopes to turn her into the sort of girl who could be ‘his sister’s friend and co-teacher at the Sunday school’. Du Maurier admits that Trilby’s life so far has not been exactly ‘virtuous’, but emphasises that she has ‘followed love for love’s sake only,’ and persuades himself that ‘she might almost be said to possess a virginal heart, so little did she know of love’s heartaches’.

  Having cut himself off from Mürger’s themes – the comedy of poverty and the ups and downs of sexual entanglements – du Maurier is obliged to cobble together a plot combining Dickens with stage melodrama. Svengali, the Jewish mesmerist and musician who catches Trilby in his snare, is Fagin revived, ‘a tall bony individual … of Jewish aspect … His thick, heavy, languid, lustreless black hair fell down behind his ears on to his shoulders, in that musician-like way that is so offensive to normal Englishmen.’ He mesmerises Trilby into becoming a great singer, but then dies, whereupon she fades away.

  Silly as the story is, ‘
people went Trilby mad,’ writes Gerald du Maurier, the author’s son, ‘especially in America’. The novel was still well known, at least by hearsay, among the Americans who came to Montparnasse in the 1920s. One of them, Kay Boyle, had been called Trilby by one of her boyfriends back home.

  *

  Among the subsidiary characters in Trilby is a figure named in the published book as ‘Antony, a Swiss’, but who in the original serial publication (in Harper’s) is called ‘Joe Sibley’ and is an American:

  … the idle apprentice, le roi des truands … to whom everything was forgiven, as to François Villon … Always in debt … a most exquisite and original artist, and also somewhat eccentric in his attire … When the money was gone, then would [he] hie him to some beggarly attic in some lost Parisian slum, and write his own epitaph … decorating [it] with fanciful designs … On the third day or thereabouts, a remittance would reach him from some long-suffering sister or aunt … or else the fickle mistress or faithless friend (who had been looking for him all over Paris) would discover his hiding-place, the beautiful epitaph would be walked off in triumph to le père Marcas in the Rue du Ghette and sold for twenty, fifty, a hundred francs; and then … back again to Bohemia … époi, da capo!

  And now that his name is a household word … he loves to remember all this.

  This was du Maurier’s reminiscence of James McNeill Whistler, who did not love to remember it in the least, but threatened to sue; hence the change of name and nationality when Trilby appeared as a book.

  Du Maurier had crossed paths with Whistler during art-student days in Paris, and despite the expurgation of Trilby, Whistler’s features can be detected among the background figures in several illustrations in the book– long-haired, monocled, and in dandy’s clothes. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, the son of a railway engineer, Whistler had set off at the age of twenty-one to study painting in Paris, in the atelier of the Swiss artist Charles Gleyre, who also instructed Renoir. Whistler soon became known as a natural Paris bohemian; he acquired his first grisette – a hot-tempered girl known as Fumette or La Tigresse – and, unlike du Maurier and his friends, entered completely into Latin Quarter life. Behaving like any rapin (art student), he would pawn his jacket on hot days to buy cool drinks, and attend classes at Gleyre’s only when he felt like it. He dressed with panache, reviving a florid style of costume that had first appeared in the 1830s. It is said that he had not merely read Scènes de la Bohème but knew much of the book by heart.