Worth a mass of writing
Euan Cameron
PARIS: A LITERARY COMPANION by Ian Littlewood John Murray, £12.95 Ithrew myself on a bench,' wrote George Moore, recalling Paris during the 1870s in Memoirs of my Dead Life, 'and began to wonder if there was anything better in the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself.' For anyone who has ever yielded to such a fancy this is an ideal book, and one that will provide hours of vicarious nostalgia.
Mr Littlewood's book is a tour of literary Paris, of the streets and squares, cafes, restaurants, and houses that are associated both with characters in literature and their creators. His selection of passages chosen to evoke the essence or mood of the city extends from Villon and Rabelais up to the immediate postwar years; I do not believe he quotes anything more recent than Saul Bellow's elegiac essay on 'Old Paris' and, Bellow apart, virtually no contemporary writers are included.
With the aid of helpful maps and good illustrations, Mr Littlewood's tour begins on the Ile de la Cite where Gargantua pisses on the people of Paris from the towers of Notre-Dame. (The poet, Raoul Ponchon, shows the same sort of antipathy a few pages later for the towers of Saint Sulpice.) His choice of passages for the Ile Saint Louis very aptly sums up the peculiar wistfulness that can overcome the flaneur: Balzac describes it as a 'nervous sadness' and though Baudelaire was attracted by the sense of isolation he experienced on the island, Cyril Connolly also writes of his 'presentiments of loss'. The pages devoted to the Seine, its bridges and its lovers, include Apollinaire ('Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine . . . ') and the marvellous Jacques Prevert, but are all too short. In the Ier and IIe arrondissements he is much more generous even if there is so much to regret here; before the destruction of Les Halles (Zola's ventre de Paris) to walk there at dawn was to have lived, and it seems inconceivable that future genera- tions will respond with anything but dis- dain for the garish commercialism of the Forum des Halles today.
British visitors to Paris quoted by Ian Littlewood include John Evelyn, Dr John- son and Mrs Thrale, Thackeray, Dickens, Mrs Trollope, Orwell, and the 12-year-old Rudyard Kipling. In the 19th century many foreign visitors were enticed to Paris out of curiosity for the temptations to de- bauchery, and they were either repelled or fascinated by the prostitutes and gambling dens of the Palais-Royal, or pulled in both directions like Sir Walter Scott (Nice with her fairest vizard, this central pit of Acher- on'). Gerard de Nerval ignored such plea- sures, happy to walk his lobster here, but it is hard not to feel nostalgia for the gaudi- ness of the past when contrasted to the sex-shops and Minitel advertisements of Paris today.
We move to the Marais where, thanks to Andre Malraux, it is still possible to imagine the world from which Madame de Sevigne wrote her letters in the rue de Thorigny. The artisan population may have left this part of the city but we should be grateful for the preservation of the quartier and the restoration of such hotels as the former Venetian embassy, now transformed into the Musee Picasso. Just off the place des Vosges one can still see the house in the rue des Tournelles which became one of the great 17th-century salons. 'It was the resort of Moliere,' Mr Littlewood tells us, 'and La Fontaine, of Boileau, La Rochefoucauld and Mme de Lafayette.'
Mr Littlewood pays scant attention to the Buttes-Chaumont, ignores the once melancholy seductiveness of the former slums of Belleville and Menilmontant; he whisks us through Pere Lachaise, and settles more assuredly on the Left Bank. Here the text is dominated more by our own century than previous ones and so we have good, apt passages on the cafés of Montparnasse, the Saint Germain of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and on the American expatriates. Here is Heming- way's Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises:
We crossed the bridge and walked up the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. It was steep walking, and we went all the way up to the Place Contrescarpe. The arc-light shone through the leaves of the trees in the square, and underneath the trees was an S bus ready to start. Music came out of the door of the Negre Joyeux. Through the windows of the Cafe aux Amateurs I saw the long zinc bar . . .
Countless young Americans must have come to Paris, following the shades of Ernest and Scott, but reading such pas- sages it is another American, Henry Mil- ler, whose tough and vivid prose best evokes prewar Paris. Not only did Miller know Paris and the Parisians better, he trod the streets of the bas quartiers and could impart the raw sensuality of these areas without Hemingway's sentimentality. Writers and litterateurs still meet in the cafés of Montparnasse, but today the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots are hardly the 'rendez-vous de l'elite intellectuelle' as the menu at the Deux Magots boasts.
Our tour continues through old streets towards the Seine, to the rue des Beaux Arts where Oscar Wilde died in the Hotel de l'Alsace, the haunting rue Visconti where Balzac and Racine once lived, to the rue de Seine and the Hotel de la Louisiane, surprisingly little changed, and the home at various times of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Cyril Connolly, Henry Miller and many more. Then it's back over the river where Mr Littlewood invokes Proust and Dick- ens, Colette and Somerset Maugham (who lived in the Faubourg St Honore before Flaubert, towards the end of his life, moved there). He adds a trip to the XVIe, an acknowledgement to the Eiffel Tower where de Maupassant dined because 'it's the only place in Paris where I don't have to see it'.
The final chapter is devoted to north Paris from the rue de Rome to the Gare de !'Est, but it is in that part of the IXe, between the Place Blanche and N-D-de- Lorette where Mr Littlewood's extracts are most compelling. This was where Zola's Nana walked and a host of radeuses sought their clientele nightly, and it was a district full of literary associations: the Naturalist movement was born here and Gautier, Murger and Hugo all lived in the rue N-D-de-Lorette at different times. Somer- set Maugham visited Arnold Bennett in the rue de Calais and, nearby, in the rue Douai, Charles Dickens was invited to meet George Sand (`Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed', he wrote) at the Viardot's home where Turgenev kept a flat on the third floor so as to be close to Pauline.
No one can evoke fin de siecle Montmar- tre and its demi-monde, its cafés reeking of absinthe, coffee and cheap cognac, like Zola, but George Moore catches the fla- vour of sad superficiality of the place, and the period. And here is Jean Rhys' heroine, Marya, from Quartet, looking out of the window of a cheap hotel room:
The Place Blanche, Paris. Life itself. One realised all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
Paris can still have that effect on you.
For readers of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and the Goncourts, there are constant reminders of their work in the extracts Mr Littlewood quotes. What is missing? Cer- tain French writers — Marcel Ayme, Ju- lien Green, Celine, Queneau — could profitably have been included, and it is extraordinary that Richard Cobb, who has penetrated !'esprit frangais more profound- ly than any living Englishman, should not be mentioned. I should have liked more on the fringes of the city but such whingeing is churlish; this book is not a catalogue, and Mr Littlewood is a sympathetic, civilised and unobtrusive companion. He offers his selection with a self-effacing modesty that would be astonishing in a Parisian, and the only real complaint can be that it is too short.
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