Many members of the expatriate community in Montparnasse were layabouts and led lives in striking contrast to the industry and professional dedication of writers like JOYCE, HEMINGWAY, and STEIN. The latter roundly despised the easy-going and nonproductive ways of most Quarterites. Those people who were serious at being, or trying to become, writers, and those who were not, formed two distinct groups that were openly and publicly at odds. The easy-going contingent were called ‘tawdry bums’ by the columnist Alex Small in the Paris Tribune of April 1929. He summarized their style and their raison d’être in the following words: ‘One could dress as one pleased and one could get as drunk as one pleased, and one did not have to account to the neighbours for one’s private life.... To add to the gayety, and to the unreality of the atmosphere, no one in the crowd [of Montparnassians] I am describing ever worked.... The fantoches who gave Montparnasse its reputation, though they sometimes vaguely hinted that soon they were going to get down to work, knew that they were fooling no one, not even themselves.’
Glassco, and his friend Graeme TAYLOR, fitted into this portrait of denizens of the Quarter, of which Robert McALMON—if only by virtue of his industry on the typewriter, which was always clattering in his room—was a not entirely typical member.
Other than the well-known bars and a few restaurants, Glassco’s references to specific locations are, at best, occasional and not always reliable. No. 147 rue Broca is the most precisely identified private location in the Memoirs. Fortunately, it is one that has survived the many changes that have overtaken the Quarter in the intervening years. The section of the rue Broca (page 21) where #147 is located was renamed the rue Leon-Maurice-Nordmann in 1944. No. 147 is on a long street that ends in a cul-de-sac, consisting of one- and two-storey artists’ studios that stand in a relatively modern neighbourhood of handsome, bourgeois six- and seven-storey apartment buildings dating from the 1930s. The entrance to the laneway is a metal gate very much as Glassco describes it (minus the ornamental iron arch in plate XVI), and there is still visible on one wall an advertisement for a grocer that must date from the 1920s. The studios are in various states of upkeep, and here and there one sees bits and pieces of unfinished sculpture and abandoned statuary lying about—much like the sight that greeted Glassco when he escorted Daphne Berners (Gwen LE GALIENNE) and Angela MARTIN (Yvette Ledoux) for their night of lyrical love-making à trois. The actual studio in which they cavorted (I was told by a longtime resident of the street) was lost to a fire. The convent that abuts on this bohemian preserve is a girls’ school of the Religieuses Pideles Compagnes de Jesus—identified by Glassco, likely in error, as Ursulines, perhaps because of the street’s ancient name of the rue de l’Ourcine and its association with the ancient artisans of Lourcine who set up here and were exempt from certain taxes. In general, Glassco tends to be casual in his urban geography, as he was conveniently flexible in the dating of some events. Thus we are told that Emily Pine parked her mufflerless Bugatti ‘somewhere near the Sphinx’, which we are then told was an ‘imposing Egyptianesque building which housed that extremely high-priced brothel.’ But the Sphinx did not come into existence until 24 April 1931, almost three years after the episode recounted by Glassco. There are other examples where Glassco strays. The rue de la Glacière, which he describes as a ‘narrow white winding street’, is, in fact, straight and quite wide. Similarly, the ‘rue de l’Archevêque’ and the ‘rue Le Grattier’ are, to name them correctly, the quai de l’Archevêché and the rue le Regrattier.
The famous bars and cafés of the 1920s have suffered with the passage of time. Some have disappeared completely, others have been changed into newly named establishments with, of course, the tobe-expected alterations that new ownership usually makes. Glassco reports on this sadly in a letter to Kay BOYLE in August 1967. ‘The city is a beautiful shell,’ he wrote. ‘The Coupole is a chic bedlam, the Dingo a Japanese restaurant, the Select hip.—The Jockey has been redecorated; the garden of the Closerie des Lilas is a parking space.’
Near the great intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse—the actual focal point of Montparnasse—are four famous cafés: the Dôme, Rotonde, Select, and Coupole. Although busier with traffic, the district has remained essentially true to the past. One can still visit these cafés (now greatly expanded), most of which started out as modest, usually working-class, bars that catered to a local clientele. After the First World War and the growing influx of foreigners into the Montparnasse quarter, a gradual transformation of the bars and cafés began to take place. In the 1938 edition of his Being Geniuses Together, McAlmon reported that ‘the various cafés around Montparnasse had been or were being enlarged and become bourgeois,... Moreover a new generation was flooding Paris, and a change of custom and habits is quick in the post-war age.’ ‘Flooding’ is the right word, since contemporary records suggest that anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand Americans flocked to Paris at the time, and a goodly number of them became fixtures in Montparnasse.
The desire to cater to the American presence became evident in the advertising, which stressed the ‘Bar Américain’ motif, but the American influence was most spectacularly seen in the nightlife of the city. Many black American musicians and entertainers made their way to Paris, where they found greater freedom to perform and circulate, and were enthusiastically received by the French. As McAlmon puts it about one such artiste: ‘When the then seventeenyear-old Josephine Baker wriggled on to the stage, cockily exotic, the French audience went wild.’ He might have added that the stunningly statuesque Baker was topless and wore only a string of bananas for demureness’ sake! Parisians responded eagerly to the new and suggestive music by black musicians, whether it was jazz, or other forms that were being improvised, developed, and performed. Robert DESNOS wrote an article about West Indian music, helping to popularize it, and about the Bal Nègre, which rapidly became very chic. Thus the popularity of a bar like BRICKTOP’s, to which Glassco and McAlmon repaired. Though it was in Montmartre—on the Right Bank, distant from Montparnasse—it was eagerly frequented by both locals and visitors, many of them celebrities.
The Jockey—at the corner of the rue Campagne-Première on the Boulevard du Montparnasse—was another American-style bar that, with the Falstaff, serious pub-crawlers made part of their itinerary. It was the creation of Hilaire HILER, the Sidney Schooner of the Memoirs, and was the first nightclub that he decorated (he also decorated the Jungle, and the College Inn, with French street scenes, cabarets and views of seaports). The Jockey had a fresco of an American Indian on horseback with a tomahawk on its front, while the other external walls of its pie-shaped building were adorned with cowboy figures, serape-clad Mexicans, blanket-wrapped Indians, and the skull of a Texas longhorn. The Jockey had a reputation as an amusing and sociable rendezvous where, in McAlmon’s words, ‘dramas and fights did occur, but generally comedy and good will prevailed.’ Hiler played jazz piano, and KIKI was a fixture. The building no longer exists.
The Falstaff—at 42 rue du Montparnasse—which survives with its original décor of wood-panelled walls, dark-green velvet banquettes, heavy wood bar, and tile floor with its small-patterned design—was a cosier and more comfortable establishment. For McAlmon and his friends it was ‘our rendezvous. It was comfortable and tastefully decorated and the Dutch barman, Jack, refused to serve various people, and that was nice. He could not stand just the ones most of us could not stand: It is now a restaurant/brasserie (the Restaurant Falstaff) with a large variety of beers on tap.
The Dingo was not as fortunate. It started life in 1924 as Le Dingo, at 10 rue Delambre, and announced itself to the passerby as ‘Dingo American Bar and Restaurant’. It was originally a workingman’s bar and took its name from le dingo, slang for a crazy person. It was later owned by Louis and Yopi Wilson, an American-Dutch couple. A popular drinking establishment, it was immortalized by its famous barman, Jimmie CHARTERS, a former Liverpool boxer whose memoir, This Must Be the Place (1934), was named for an anecdote in the book in which Charters saw a Rolls Royce draw up in front of the Dingo, depositing two fashionable women who peered through the from window uncertainly, just as his friend Flossie Martin proceeded to walk in, muttering ‘You bitch!’ ‘Come on, Helen,’ one woman said to the other, ‘this must be the place.’ After his visit in 1960 Glassco reported that the Dingo had become a Japanese restaurant. It is still a restaurant, but called the Auberge de Venise.
The two premier cafés-térrasses establishments of the period, though, were the Dôme, and—a block west across the Boulevard du Montparnasse—the Select, with the Roronde and the Coupole running close seconds.
The Café du Dôme, at the southwest corner of the Montparnasse-Raspail intersection—also known as Le Dôme—was a favourite haunt of expatriate artists and writers, as well as their models and girlfriends, and was founded in 1898. In A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway declared it to be a more reputable hangout than the other neighbourhood bars because its clientele was made up of serious and working artists rather than poseurs and layabouts (though in the 1920s he had written an article about it for the Toronto Star Weekly, describing the Americans who went there: ‘They are nearly all loafers expending the energy an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they’re going to do...’). The Dôme came in for its fair share of criticism as a ‘second home’ for the seriously underemployed. Al Laney, the jaundiced newspaperman, saw the Dôme in a different light. He wrote:
This group ... centred around the intersection of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail ... was composed almost entirely of semi-permanent exiles, male and female, who invariably spelled art with a capital A. Their meeting place, almost their home, was the Dôme, a café which ... [was] by all odds the most interesting place in all Paris....
Hundreds of Americans lived as close to it as they could, and if they could not find places in the quarter they came every day to the Dôme anyhow.... They would leave the terrace at dinnertime only to rush back to find seats for the evening and especially for the early morning hours.
The Select—at 99 boulevard du Montparnasse—opened in 1925 and catered essentially to the same crowd, although it had its own distinctive feature in Madame Select, who presided over the cash with fingerless gloves, and over a house speciality, Welsh rarebit (it is still a speciality). Both are mentioned by Glassco. The Select was the first café/bar in Montparnasse to stay open all night, an innovation soon copied by the competition in the neighbourhood. It attracted various writers—including Hemingway, Callaghan, and McAlmon—but was not particularly favoured by other artists, who suspected Madame Select, the presiding wife of the owner, of being too close to the police, whom she was inclined to call at the slightest hint of a disturbance. It was at the Select that the American poet Hart Crane got embroiled in an argument with a waiter and hit a policeman who had been hurriedly summoned by Madame. Crane was brutally treated by the police and spent a long week ‘as a guest of the City of Paris’, with his case not helped at all when various of his well-meaning but boozy friends tried to form a barricade across the rue Vavin to prevent his being carried off to prison.
La Coupole, just down the Boulevard du Montparnasse from the Dôme, opened on 27 December 1927, not long before Glassco arrived in Paris, at number 102. It advertised itself as a ‘Bar Americain’. With its cavernous interior, 15-foot-high ceilings and pillars decorated by Montparnasse artists, its restaurant and dancing and its famous bar, it quickly became the hang-out for denizens of the quarter. It is still a ‘Bar Americain’ with ‘Dancing’, occupying the ground floor of what has been remodelled to look decidedly like a six-storey modern office building. At the end of her edition of Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle writes of visiting it in August 1929, when Paris was deserted. She sat on a high stool and talked with Gascon, the barman and part-owner: ‘... without his handsome presence, his quiet generosity to artists, his beguiling smile, and his white-lipped fury for any kind of violence, the Coupole would have been a quite undistinguished place.’ Gaston suddenly remembered a pencilled note Robert McAlmon had left there for her when he was about to leave Paris, telling her where she could pick up his ‘fairly new’ Remington portable typewriter.
Café de la Rotonde—at 105 Boulevard du Montparnasse, directly across from the Dôme—was founded in 1911. Hemingway hated it, saying (in his article for the Toronto Star Weekly) that it attracted the ‘scum of Greenwich, New York’, and then tourists from across the ocean—the ‘scummiest scum’. Nevertheless, the Rotonde was popular.
The Closeries des Lilas, at 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse—one of Ernest Hemingway’s favourite cafés—was the scene on 17 February 1922 of an inflammatory ‘Congress’ of a large gathering of modernist artists and intellectuals that included the composer Erik Satie; the artists Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, and Jean Cocteau; and the writer Andre Bréton—a friend of the Dadaist Tristan TZARA, who did not attend. Breton was charged, fallaciously, with disrupting the modernist movement by antagonizing the Dadaists. He therefore broke away from the Dadaists, and his other modernist friends, and founded the Surrealist movement.
Lipp’s, or the Brasserie Lipp, was (and still is) across the Boulevard Saint-Germain from the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots. It had the advantage of serving late-night meals—Hemingway praised its food.
The Gypsy Bar, which Glassco visited on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet with Daphne Berners and Angela Martin (pages 20–1) is different from Gypsy’s Bar on the rue Cujas, which McAlmon and Joyce liked as a late-night hangout in 1921. Both are now gone.
It used to be said about one of the painters in Montparnasse that, although he appeared to be well informed about world events, no one had ever caught him reading a newspaper. The same observation may be made of the people who inhabit Glassco’s Memoirs. They seemed to be cocooned against the outside world, and Glassco’s own narrative is almost totally devoid of references to the times. If the young generation had come to Paris in search of freedom and pleasure, or some sort of spiritual enlightenment, it was clearly determined not to allow the world, as inhabited by their families, to interfere with their own restricted universe, defined by little magazines, eccentric art, personal relationships, and outré behaviour. Immersed in all this, as described by Glassco, readers have to remind themselves that his sojourn in Paris was more or less bracketed by Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in May of 1927—which had all of Paris, where he landed, in an absolute tizzy and talking about it for months afterwards—and the great stock-market crash of October 1929, which precipitated the Depression and sent many of the remittance expatriates reeling home.