Diane Johnson, Steven Barclay, David Downie, David Sedaris, Adam Gopnik, Edmund White, René de Ceccatty
“A great voice on the Paris scene, the Village Voice has reawakened a sense of literary community that has been dormant in Paris for many years.”2
—jeff greenwald
The “Lost Generation” of the ’20s and the “New Lost Generation” of the ’40s undoubtedly left their mark on American literature. For the aspiring young writers of the 1980s Third Wave, the literary achievements of these two predecessors were an incentive, but just as much a daunting task. In fact, there were doubts within the Paris community and the Anglophone press as to whether the Third Wave would be able to claim either a Hemingway or a Baldwin. In an article entitled “Making Waves: A Letter from Paris,” Virginia Larner, who taught literature at the American School of Paris and was a regular of the Village Voice, wondered too whether “Paris could sustain a vibrant literary community of expatriate writers that continued to draw inspiration from its historical Muse.”3
This “Muse,” the Paris of the interwar and postwar years, was no longer the fertile ground for a vanguard renewal. At the start of the 1980s, the world’s eyes were turned to New York, the hub of buzzing artistic creativity and literary inventiveness. At the same time, there was no denying that Americans were back in Paris, and the cultural and literary effervescence generated by the fresh talents of the Third Wave, busy writing and launching their magazines, started to attract even established authors from the States. Together, they formed the core of a strong literary presence within the walls of the Village Voice.
“Americans have always loved Paris,” Edmund White writes in The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris,4 but we might add that they only saw the city through the lens of their own eyes and time. The Paris of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was not the Paris of the 1980s. Drawn into a more cosmopolitan world, our city was entering the era of postmodernity, balanced between tradition and innovation, a city of “paradoxes” as White aptly perceived.5
Diane Johnson
Already a bestselling author6 when she settled in Paris in the early ’80s, Johnson fell in love with the city in 1967 as she was passing through, with only a couple of hours to look around between trains. In a much later interview, she recalled that precise moment: “Place de la Concorde, at dusk, a light snow-fall. The lights going on all around the Place . . . And that was it.”7
She lived near the Romanesque church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one of the oldest landmarks in the neighborhood, and the city, for that matter. From her kitchen window she discovered “a rounded structure” in the yard of the building next door. Intrigued, Johnson came to learn that it was the remnant of a chapel built in 1608 by Marguerite de France, aka Queen Margot, whose reign was darkened by the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion. Transplanting the story of this unrest to her book Into a Paris Quartier,8 she also included the boisterous life of her neighborhood at the turn of the seventeenth century, the central stage of political intrigues, bravura adventures, and alcove romances brilliantly portrayed by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers (1844). While the ever-present architecture of her neighborhood called up a much-distant past, shadows of the postwar artists and writers were likewise haunting its streets and literary cafés.
Steven Barclay
The founder of the San Francisco Steven Barclay Agency for Lectures and Readings, Steven Barclay is part and parcel of this chapter as he brought some of the greatest American literary voices of the 1980s and ’90s to our bookstore. During this period, he divided his time between the West Coast and Paris, the latter a kind of haven for him. Steven had grown up in our city and confided in his memoir that “in the same way childhood experiences imprint themselves on your emotional power, what Paris had to offer remained engraved in my memories and emotions.” His collection of pieces, A Place in the World Called Paris, is indeed an impressionistic portrait of the capital, made up of more than one hundred and seventy fresh and often startling excerpts from world authors that call to mind their own personal experience here, from Kafka and Rilke to Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov.9
Presenting his work at the Village Voice on June 29, 1995, Steven insisted that it was not an anthology of quotes. He had specifically chosen each selection as a reflection of his own Paris and the emotions it evoked in him: “There is me in this book; it is a book of the heart, in which I meant to convey my own sensorial and sensual experience of Paris.” He further confided that walking through the city, he found “isolated moments of great beauty, a sort of symphony of grays: this is the Paris I love.” To illustrate this point, Steven quotes Vladimir Nabokov, who “regarded Paris with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys” of his life, and Henry Miller contemplating Paris with its “range of grays . . . seemingly infinite . . .”10
In her introduction to his memoir, Susan Sontag, another fervent lover of Paris and Steven’s lifelong friend and former mentor, made the connection between him and Chekhov’s Three Sisters and their longing for Moscow. Like the young women distraught at being away from Moscow, Steven continued to yearn for the city of his imagination and barely concealed aspirations.11
Charcoal illustrations by the artist Miles Hyman emphasize this subdued atmosphere of the skyline in soft gray shades.
David Downie
A writer of books about Paris as the city of culinary art and lovers, but also of intrigue and night crime, Downie was at the Village Voice on October 20, 2005, to launch his new Paris, Paris, Journey into the City of Light12 and to share with us his serendipitous wanderings through the city. He likened them to “the butterfly’s irreverent, erratic fluttering from one place to another . . . alighting onto . . . those green, battered book boxes clinging to riverside parapets.” These were the bookstalls of the Bouquinistes13 along the riverbanks, an endless curiosity to tourists. Downie did not just browse through these multiple boxes, but engaged in conversations with their owners, learning about the long and fascinating history of this singular Parisian trade: “These quay-lifers were more than mongers of a mishmash of books; they were the inheritors of a five-hundred-year-old tradition of book lovers, possessed by an obsession they call ‘la maladie des livres.’ All day long and year around, rain or shine, they did not miss one day at their bookstalls despite meager takings.”
Enhanced by Alison Harris’s black and white photographs of unusual street scenes, Downie’s book Paris, Paris is an invitation to brief but fortuitous encounters.
David Sedaris
For this New Yorker author of popular and witty stories, living in Paris meant the arduous job of learning French. The American humorist, who was in and out of the city through the 1990s, gave no fewer than five readings at the Village Voice over the years. Every American could identify with his stories grounded in US society and culture, but, as we know, humor does not always translate well. It is just amazing that his books have been translated and well-received all over the world, including France.
The top selling one here is Me Talk Pretty One Day14 (Je parler français) that relates his comical experience of taking in French and coming out with gibberish, told with a healthy dose of self-derision. His bilingual audience at the Village Voice often asked him if he was popular in France. In the presence of his French publisher and his translator, he remained rather vague in his reply. His books had been published in twenty-six different languages and, he explained, their reception depended on the translation, over which he had no control. What surprised him were the enthusiastic crowds at his readings in some non-English-speaking countries whose cultures were so different. As Sedaris said, “a story really comes to life when read out loud with the necessary rhythm.”15 And to him, his success abroad remained a mystery.
“Your stories are universal!” someone shouted from the tightly packed rows of the standing crowd one evening. Perhaps “universal” was the right word. Behind the humor and mockery of his homegrown American culture, his short fiction caught on just about everywhere, perhaps because he was able to tap into the infinite range of human experience.
As a matter of fact, at each of his signing sessions that sometimes lasted until midnight, David took the time to listen to every single reader who came to him with a copy to sign and a life story to share. A certain detail would find its way into one of the small blue notebooks he often pulled out of his shirt pocket. Years later, he would open one at random, and a remark would jump out at him, becoming the seed for a new story.
Edmund White
This Paris “flaneur,” as the author described himself, was the eminent literary figure of the Third Wave of American expatriates with an impressive number of fiction and nonfiction books set in Paris, his adopted city from 1983 to 1995. Edmund lived on the Île Saint-Louis in the shadow of Notre-Dame de Paris, one of the oldest and most elegant neighborhoods with stately seventeenth-century buildings gracing its riverbanks, illuminated at night by sightseeing cruises on the river Seine. Yet he was irresistibly drawn to the other Paris that did not figure on postcards, but was only waiting to be discovered.
An admirer of Baudelaire, the poet of the “Tableaux Parisiens”16 that revealed the underside of a glittering nineteenth-century Paris of the time, Edmund followed in his footsteps, becoming “that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice and curiosity direct his or her steps.” His book The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris17 is a recollection of his wanderings through the twists and turns of Parisian streets and alleys and his discovery of other neighborhoods: not the classical “pearl-grey city” of Baron Haussmann with “its long vistas of leafless plane trees . . . and unbroken façades,”18 but the peripheral “teeming districts of Belleville and Barbès where Arabs and Blacks lived and blended their respective cultures into new hybrids.”19 They embodied a changing Paris, “a landscape made of living people.” Yet just around the corner, the “odd detail” caught his eye: “the weathered threshold . . . the burlap sandbags” in the gutter, or “the lace curtains in the concierge’s window.”
The Flâneur captured the contrasts of Paris and its paradoxes at a moment when the city was progressively absorbing the multiracial world at its margins. Identifying with the Baudelairian figure of the flaneur or, according to the poet, “the embodiment of the contemporary spirit,” Edmund remarked, not without a touch of humor, that he “did so much aimless wandering that Baudelaire would have considered [him] thoroughly modern.”20
Adam Gopnik
A contributor to The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik was curious about the much-discussed cultural differences between France and the United States. In 1995, his review sent him to Paris to report on political, social, and cultural events. He was to put five years of observations into an informative and engaging chronicle of the nineties entitled Paris to the Moon,21 presented at the Village Voice on May 3, 2001.
This intriguing title that seemed to call up Jules Verne and his extravagant adventures actually referred to a nineteenth-century print of a train climbing to the moon, a metaphor for a daring and inventive France on the move. It must be said that this reference was mostly ironic since, according to what Gopnik had seen and experienced, France remained “a country adamantly bent on its status-quo.” It was not surprising that the largest and longest transport strike in the history of the country ended up halting the reforms initiated by Prime Minister Alain Juppé.
More strikes were to follow, one by university students asking for “smaller classes and more money,” and another of high school students marching for “more classes and tougher teachers.” For twenty years, the school system had tried national reforms, but a country that was unwilling to forgo its dependence on “rote learning” at the expense of creativity and individual thinking left him perplexed.
Another topic that confounded him was the “national craze” to retire early in hopes of a more promising and enjoyable life while our speaker recognized that “in the US, to stop working is, in a sense, to stop living.” In a similar vein, the author’s wife found that the French health system (coming from the family’s brief experience with clinics and public hospitals) was “royal for the users, good for the doctors and expensive for the society”—a backhanded compliment at best. Her husband added that the level of care that the French have insisted on might prove to be “unsustainable.”
Paris to the Moon is not just a window onto French politics and society, mostly observed with an amused look; “it is,” Gopnik insisted, “the simple story of family life in Paris. We came to Paris for the pleasure of seeing our small son grow up in a foreign city and in a foreign language, and most of all, surrounded by beauty.”22
One example of the latter is the culture of food so prominent in the French art of living that he, an amateur chef himself, greatly extols. We easily picture the writer browsing in open-air markets, eager to get friendly tips on where to find the freshest products. If he learned to cook true traditional recipes, he also enjoyed trying gourmet restaurants and local brasseries with family.
During the reading at the bookshop, Luke, his six-year-old son, stood beside his father, sharing center stage. After all, this book was supposed to be a fairy-tale journey to the moon, and Luke could claim to be its privileged passenger! However, reality is no fantasy, and it was the author’s wife, Martha, sitting in the audience, who had this final word: “In Paris, we had a beautiful existence, but not a full life.” Mais oui, matière à reflexion! (Food for thought!)
Diane Johnson
Before coming to Paris, Diane had lived in Iran, and her first reading at the Village Voice on April 21, 1988, was to launch her seventh novel, Persian Nights,23 set in Iran at the turn of its Islamic Revolution. It focused on the radical cultural changes the new Iranian theocracy imposed on its citizens, including American expatriates, mostly scholars and scientists, like her husband engaged in medical research there.
Once settled in Paris, Diane wrote, among other works, a trilogy that takes place in contemporary France and presented its first volume, Le divorce,24 at our bookstore on October 5, 2000. She was introduced by the poet C. K. Williams, a long-standing honorary Parisian who compared her to Edith Wharton and Henry James, adding “Diane is another sort, nothing to do with cunning or judgment, rather with good-heartedness. I always sense when I’m reading her works a genuine smile . . . one that manifests a quiet delight.”25
Like these prestigious predecessors, Diane set her comedy of manners in a French aristocratic family, albeit one lacking the grand style of the past. Their son is divorcing a modern and bright young Californian woman, and a war is brewing between the two clans over the French family heirloom, an Old Master’s painting. The Californian brood has landed in Paris to discuss the divorce, with each party firmly determined to win the battle over this valuable piece.
Under the smooth surface of false pretenses, both sides furbish their musty weapons: the French, their aristocratic superiority; the Californians, their pragmatism and sense of reality, silently noticing the telling state of the “decrepit château . . . in great need of repair and modern comfort.”
Dotted with innuendoes that betray true positions, the Sunday lunch ritual turns into a hilarious parody of each family’s cultural biases and deep-seated hang-ups, generously acknowledged by the laughter from our bicultural audience.
Q: “Had you lived longer in Paris, do you feel that you would have perceived those cultural differences with the same acuity?”
Johnson: “Mary McCarthy remarked that the longer she stayed in Paris, the better she understood the danger of being too long in one place, making you lose the perception of those differences. But so far, it has not happened to me because I feel a stranger in Paris, and it seems to me, I will always be one. [laughter] Confronted with my otherness, I feel more and more American in Paris. Yet I admit that moving from Illinois, my native place, to San Francisco, I felt more like an expatriate there than moving from San Francisco to Paris.” [more laughter]
Q: ”Why did you specifically situate the novel in the French upper class and not in the middle class?”
Johnson: “The upper class is more inclined to preserve ancient patterns of behavior, and the rigidity of the aristocratic class allows one to better examine this fact. Also, you observe what’s around you, whom you feel at home with. Through my daughter who married a French architect, I’m exposed to their social milieu, but it is not my world. I write about people I know . . . This being said, I was told by my French publishers that some French magazines would not write a review about my novel as it would be too tricky . . . for their readers.”26
Alan Riding, the new Paris correspondent of the New York Times at the time, had previously concluded in his own review that the Franco-American divorce in Johnson’s novel “with its muted war between the two parties [was] a metaphor for the apparent hopelessness of an entente cordiale between the two cultures.”27
Edmund White
On the other hand, moving to Paris in 1983 at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in America, Edmund White, a warm and outgoing personality, turned out to be as at ease in French society as in his own. His first reading at the Village Voice showcased A Boy’s Own Story28 in September 1983. At this point, he was one of America’s rising literary voices, and in Sontag’s words, “one of its outstanding writers of prose today.”29 Uncannily so, he was still virtually unknown in France. Notable exceptions were a few friends and intellectuals that included the novelist Gilles Barbedette, the French translator and publisher of this fictional memoir, just starting to be praised here for providing a new perspective on homosexuality.
Diane Johnson at the Village Voice Bookshop, October 5, 2000. © Roberta Fineberg
Edmund White, reading at Village Voice Bookshop, April 24, 1997. © C. Deudon
White’s growing circle in Paris also included Michel Foucault, whom he had met earlier in New York and who was a friend of Barbedette’s. The American expressed to both men his amazement at the way they, and for that matter, French gay people in general, continued to live as usual, seemingly undisturbed and unconcerned by the ravages of the AIDS epidemic decimating his friends in New York. A longtime advocate for gay rights and the cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, White knew what he was talking about and vainly tried to caution his close circle about a pending health crisis in France.
In response to White’s warning, Foucault laughed at him and retorted: “Don’t you realize, Edmund, how puritanical you’re being? You’ve invented a disease aimed just at gays to punish them for having unnatural sex.” “Yes,” Gilles chimed in, “that’s a very American idea.”30
A year later, Foucault was dead, and the left-wing newspaper Liberation, one of the most respected dailies in France at the time, “denied the real cause of death on the front page as though it were a calumny invented by his enemies.”31
I myself vividly recall the mid-eighties at the Village Voice when young poets and writers became frantic upon discovering strange lesions on their bodies, undeniable signs of the brutal reality they suddenly had to face. Fourteen young men, friends of our bookstore, died of AIDS within months.
Always taking an active part in our author events, Edmund not only read from his own works, but introduced many other recognized authors that included Harry Mathews, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Diane Johnson, David Leavitt, Michael Ondaatje, C. K. Williams, as well as budding talents. He even wrote a generous article on the bookshop, published in Vogue magazine under the title “Paris’s Movable Lunch,”32 a nod to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, that broadened the visibility of our bookshop in the States and even worldwide.
Speaking fluent French and a great connoisseur of its culture and literature, Edmund soon decided to embrace a project as vast and complex as the life of Jean Genet,33 a social pariah who had managed to become a famous figure in French literature. He launched his biography at the Village Voice on October 22, 1993, with a reference to Genet’s emblematic novel Notre Dame-des-Fleurs (1944), which he presented within the context of homosexual literature in France in the 1940s and ’50s.
Edmund explained that, in those years, “homosexuality was treated as an illness that demanded sympathy and compassion from the reader.” He went on to say that such a conception was alien to Genet, who deemed homosexuality “a sin and a crime.”34 In fact, Genet had a “gloomy view” of a “condition” that, contrary to Sartre’s opinion, he had not chosen. Accordingly, Genet wrote to Sartre that “Homosexuality [. . .] has happened to me like the color of my eyes or the number of my teeth.”35
After more than a decade in Paris, the city had become a ghost town to Edmund, and he was eager to return to his vibrant, “abrasive” New York.*
Two years later, he came back to the Village Voice on September 12, 1998, to talk about his book The Farewell Symphony. The reading turned into an enlightening dialogue between White and René de Ceccatty, a renowned French novelist and literary critic, as it revealed more surprising cultural differences between the two countries.
de Ceccatty: “Was Genet an influence on you, Edmund?”
White: “Genet made his own life a legend, and, doing this, he lied a lot, and so what! What he has written is so beautiful. For Genet, homosexuality was something one could transcend only through artistic creation. He preferred beauty to truth while I do prefer truth to beauty. A gay writer, Genet was also a most original writer.”
de Ceccatty: “Genet, a gay writer? Why this need for a label, Edmund? It would be unthinkable in France to categorize Proust, Gide, or Cocteau as homosexual or gay authors. It would be felt as a diminution of human freedom.
White: “I constantly come into conflict with the French over this subject of homosexuality and its naming, and many friends, including the openly homosexual intellectuals and writers, were afraid that I would present Genet as a gay writer who had a violent gay life. What I tried to do with Genet’s homosexuality was to trace the truth, to trace his irreverent attitudes toward homosexuality. When you talk about this subject, French attitudes and reactions are different from those of Americans. The way bookshops are set up in the two countries is a good example. In America, everything is organized by subjects: African Americans, Feminism, Gay Studies . . . For us, there is no general reader as there is no general voter; there are only special interests, elements that do not melt in the melting pot.”
de Ceccatty: “What is the end purpose of partitioning cultures in American bookstores?”
White: “If we think of literature as a great dialogue between all the literatures of the world, to separate them has no meaning, but in America, we do not think that way—we ghettoize everything. On the other hand, our system works in more than one way. It gives gay books a much longer life than general literature. The average life of a book on a shelf is three, four months while being labeled a gay writer has carried me through many years, and all my books are kept in print.”
de Ceccatty: “The reception in America of The Farewell Symphony was mixed. Some readers were shocked by your straightforwardness in the way you show sex in these given times. They accused you of doing it from a distance, coldly, without emotion. I personally don’t agree with this. It seems to me that distance can create emotion and that, throughout the book, we feel the constant presence of romance and love.”
White: “Right now in America, a large Puritan movement is coming back with its usual focus on monogamy. Homosexuals are accused of not getting married and not having children. But we cannot be assimilated. There are gay writers, though, such as David Leavitt,* who reject being ghettoized, and whose fiction characters are integrated into the great human family. In my own books, the homosexual man’s life is a life apart. You’ve mentioned that my straightforwardness in the book is shocking to some people, but Genet is genuinely shocking. Yet at the same time, there is in him a mix of crude sex and love: ‘I’ve never lived my homosexuality in its purest form,’ he wrote, and what he meant by it is that he had always mingled it with love. It’s the same for me, but I do it in a furtive way. For me, there is always an element of love in the sexual act, if not a fascination for the other, at least for his personality, for what makes him different.”36
de Ceccatty: “Great writing stands on its own; no need to be specified by such an adjective as ‘homosexual’: The Farewell Symphony is a novel about life and death, but there is something else in it.”
White: “In this book, I wished to recall the joy, the exaltation it had been to be gay in the 1970s, a decade of great expectations extinguished in no time by the catastrophic AIDS epidemics and infused with utter despair. It had been so exciting to be a writer then, for homosexuality had become an exciting subject, revitalizing the genre of the novel. The gay culture of the 1970s has been lost, and there is a whole new generation of young gays who have no idea of what we went through, and, like an anthropologist, I wanted to reconstitute that period from its roots to its boughs.”
The Farewell Symphony was also “his adieu to Paris,” and, though not the last one, White’s reading was nevertheless an “au revoir” to our bookshop and his loyal audience. A talented, prolific, generous, magnanimous and witty person, Edmund White greatly contributed to the emergence of a literary force at the Village Voice and to its growing reputation.