What is the meaning of life? There’s still time to figure it out in the world’s most famous living museum.
AS WAS SAID OF ALL PARIS, THE LEFT BANK IS THE CAPITAL OF Hope and the Paradise of Misery, where one can live in continual expectation, relishing failure and the pleasures of melancholy if one chooses. During my student days there, Jonathan Cape, an English publisher, used to take the boat-train over from London on weekends and lead me on walks through the Paris of his youth—here he rejected James Joyce (“Bloody crossword puzzle”); there he knew a lady with plump arms and eyes of a heartbreaking sadness, right there, on the rue de Tournon. Maybe, if I listened, he would publish my first novel in England; he didn’t, but this stately, white-haired relic became one of my favorite ambulatory monuments.
The Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, comprises half of the great city of Paris, so of course it includes working-class and middle-class districts, the monstrous Manhattanized skyscraper of Maine-Montparnasse, offices and businesses and quietly expensive neighborhoods where people live quietly expensive lives. Its monuments, such as the Eiffel Tower, its museums, such as the great Rodin Museum in its classic hotel, and its historic refuges, such as the Roman baths from 200 A.D. in the Cluny complex, have little to do with what we think of when we think Rive Gauche. The spirit of the place is more truly expressed by the little passage near St-Germain-des-Prés where Dr. Guillotine perfected his “philanthropic decapitating machine.” The enduring legend of the Left Bank comes out of the 5th, 6th, 7th and 14th arrondissements: the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the warren of medieval streets near the Place St-André des Art (including the narrowest street in Paris, the Street of the Fishing Cat—rue du Chat-qui-Pêche), the spirits of Sartre and Genet and Camus at St-Germain-des-Prés, and the ghosts of the painters and writers of Montparnasse, where Gertrude Stein made so many remarks and Hemingway paid attention.
This legendary lifestyle adjusts and survives in its own way. Take, for example, the cinémathèque phenomenon—the countless little rooms where movie-crazed Parisians can assuage their indiscriminate passion for Jerry Lewis and Eric von Stroheim, Akira Kurosawa and Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin (“Charlot”) and Ingmar Bergman and le film noir américain, which generally means cheapie gangster movies of the ’40s and ’50s. It sometimes seems as if Left Bankers make their livings selling each other movie tickets and ancestral antiques, like Jimmy Durante surviving on a desert island by peddling newspapers.
Despite the accelerated rusting of time, the Left Bank retains its consistency. In the crowds, a visitor still walks with Abelard in the Sorbonne; he meets the obsessed outcasts of Balzac, the cavorting bohemians of Henri Murger, the anxious Existentialists of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and the ghosts jostle each other. An ear to history picks up the steps of the Roman legions marching south past the baths and amphitheaters at Cluny, past the rue de la Huchette, where the tourists come to hear guitarists, past the ancient Romanesque church of St-Julien le Pauvre, where I saw a priest sweeping with a crooked straw broom that looked as if it had been bought in a crooked-straw-broom sale 300 years ago. And at many corners stand the urns, still filled with fresh flowers, for those who died to liberate Paris from the Nazis. Students, bureaucrats and widows live in buildings where Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, generals, composers, heroes, saints, and revolutionists once sojourned. As did Benjamin Franklin; as did I, age 24.
A person who sits at a Left Bank café—which I have been doing for a generation now, studying literature, studying the newspapers, studying the pretty young women, studying my fellow studiers—will notice several brands of professional café sitters. There are those who carry a lot of mouth, filtering reality through laughter, companionship, and discussion. And there are many who carry a load of silence: who sit brooding and watching, smoking, munching, or sipping, waiting for the meaning of life to reveal itself, or merely for the day to end and the time to go back into unobserved privacy. The proper pursuit of a Left Bank café sitter is to practice an agile, caffeine or alcohol-released singing of the Left Bank arias of flirtation and commitment, while watching with irony over all the surrounding aspects of self. After all, there is time enough in this thousand-year operetta to be both solemn and giddy. There are other people. It may not matter. And even if I won’t live forever, which is always a possibility, Paris surely will.
The Left Bank still bravely attempts to shoulder the burden of classic bohemia, but as it grows massive and expensive, other places come along to do the job: London, New York, San Francisco, a piece of every college town. There used to be (perhaps still is) a Left Bank bar or gallery or café in my other hometown, Cleveland, and elsewhere, too. Rive Gauche is a magic international phrase, evoking the universe of wine, garlic, fun and endless youth. (Maybe it was only a frame shop in Cleveland.)
Allen Ginsberg once took me to a vegetarian restaurant on the rue Cardinal Lemoine called Auberge Inn—a triple pun, since auberge means inn and aubergine is eggplant (well, it’s funnier if it sneaks up on you without translation). There Allen sang a Buddhist country-western rock song about love and death, clacking his musical tools, and a young man tried to pay for our tea, saying, “I want to pay! I must pay! I’ve never paid a check before!”
I looked at the unhealthy vegetarians, dreaming in their Levis, strumming away and singing their versions of Judy Collins and Bob Dylan songs, and remembered Baudelaire’s relevant Left Bank question: When shall we get on toward happiness?
Each new generation makes what progress it can. France itself, and even Paris, tends to be settled, materialistic, and family-oriented. The excess rootless hope and dreaming are shipped across the Seine to the Left Bank to be marinated in the cafés, parks, brasseries, garret rooms, discotheques, student clubs, cinémathèque, tryout night spots, and, in more organized fashion, in the various schools and institutes—medical, dental, liberal arts, language, art, music, and drama—that have traditionally supported much of the youthy bustle of these few square miles on the bank of the slow river that are devoted to the Elders and Youngers of Hope and Misery.
At the origins of William Burroughs’s career as drug addict, collector of boys, Bohemian wanderer, and loyal accountant of his dreads, there seemed to be a midwestern American moroseness, a passion to relieve boredom, find something to do, manage to fill the hours of his time on earth. It was appropriate that he was a son of the manufacturer of Burroughs calculating machines. Thanks to the good equipment he had inherited, and hard work, he tinkered with the controls until he opened the locks into his nightmares. He won a partial victory. It wasn’t easy. The morose mask became permanent, even in his peaceful and rewarded last years.
During a filmed interview, Allen Ginsberg said that everyone needs love, everyone wants love, a speaking from the heart, that’s what we’re all after—love—“Isn’t that what you want, Bill?”
Staring coolly into the camera, Burroughs muttered through his teeth: “Not really. “
—Herbert Gold, Bohemia:
Where Art, Angst, love and Strong Coffee Meet
“Take those two words, gold and pleasure, for a lantern, and explore the great cage of Paris,” Balzac commanded. One of his print shops on one of the narrow lanes off the rue de Seine is memorialized with a plaque, but my favorite of Balzac’s streets is the rue Mouffetard, which runs upward into the Place de la Contrescarpe, where until a few years ago one of the last vespasiennes of Paris could be found, offering relief to the kidneys of men while affording everyone a view of their feet and their polite, abstracted, thoughtfully concentrating faces. Now the rue Mouffetard—pawn-shops, Left Bank proletariat, the boarding-house in Père Goriot where Vautrin and Rastignac lived—has become La Yuppieville, with trendy restaurants and antique shops and even, Lord forgive us, a t-shirt store or two. Several generations ago, another novelist, Huysmans, made an odd remark: “Paris is a sinister Chicago.” It must mean something—probably that Huysmans never visited Chicago, but being French he wasn’t stopped by lack of knowledge. The artistic vitality of Paris is running a bit thin these days, but there is still enough to spread a sheen and gloss over the damp, gray, lovely city and conceal its mournfulness with good cheer.
The Left Bank tries to save the past, both the ancient traditions and the two centuries of bohemia. It tries to non conform and yet enrich itself. The result is the preservation of the charming tangle of medieval streets near the Seine and the dizzy street life of the rue de la Huchette and St-Germain-des-Prés and the cafés near the Sorbonne and Montparnasse. The result is also the plastic, glass, steel, and aluminum international skyscraper inflicted on the Maine-Montparnasse neighborhood, where once the streets were sweetly sordid. The City of Light is also the City of Neon Light.
Sobriety hides in the religious corners—the square of St. Sulpice, for example, the stately gray medieval church of St-Germain-des-Prés and all the lovely chapels and agreeable, foot-wearying sanctified enclaves—because, after all, this is still right-thinking France, even if it is also the Left Bank. Sobriety is stowed and spills out of vital junctions that reflect the ancient linkage of piety and marketplace. In front of the Hôtel Madison, where I used to stay—along with Alexander Calder, the mobile maker and Elie Wiesel, the writer—there is a statue of Denis Diderot, encyclopedist, philosopher, atheist, joy giving novelist, occasional jailbird. His finger is uplifted in warning. If one follows his pointing, it becomes clear that he is shaking his finger at the great church across the Boulevard St-Germain.
Sometimes the young and the discontented of Paris pick up cobblestones to demand virtue, or use the majestic sycamore trees to build barricades. After the “events” of 1968, many of the cobblestone streets were tarred over, many of the trees removed. This is a good French way to deal with unrest. There is equal justice for all in Paris, Anatole France noticed. Neither the rich nor the poor are allowed to sleep under the bridges.
The Left Bank is the original opera set—La Bohème’s Mimi and Rodolfo warbling and dancing and embracing through a cutesy decor of chimney pots and narrow winding streets and four cafés at every corner. Well, that paroxysm of fantasy has subsided. Housing pressure takes precedence; both artists and real people live where they can. Where there used to be four cafés at every corner, there are now perhaps only two—the others replaced by a video-rental emporium, a mini-micro supermarket, even an amazing junk-food trough.
But there are still those two cafés at each corner (and a few on the block in between) with their terraces, serving the flâneur, the street wanderer who wants to share in the contemporary medley of musical comedy and rock ’n’ roll. The splendid cafés of an earlier time, the Flore, the Deux Magots, the Coupole, the Brasserie Lipp, are still the splendid cafés of today. Hemingway, Sartre and Gertrude Stein have gone to the Great Café in the Sky, but I met a Moroccan film director’s girlfriend at the Deux Magots. Surrealism, Dadaism, Existentialism, even Communism, have been replaced by Structuralism and Deconstructionism and a heavy fragrance of consumerism. Often the artists are merely playing themselves, merchandising the style, so one must search and poke to find the brooding old Left Bank.
The daughters of the lovely, vicious green-skinned girls of pre-beatnik Paris, the girls of the postwar zazou persuasion—such as Juliette Greco when she sang of dead leaves, Les Feuilles Mortes—now look out for their health, take vitamins and have learned to stride along more like Americans and less like foot-bound Chinese maidens. There are Zen, Encounter, yogurt, and tennis and mountain-climbing shops. Well, let’s not exaggerate. You can find a few runners along the Seine, watching out for the loose bricks, the winos and the fishermen, but they are likely to be Americans or laborers in the giant UNESCO complex, infected by contemporary ways of relieving world-historical anxiety. Today’s Left Bank beauties have better teeth, cleaner hair, longer legs than they used to. This is not really a regression, unless one is hopelessly sentimental about the old garret, hot-plate, no-heating days of Paris bohemia, when changing residences meant throwing one’s books out the window in the night while the landlord, to whom one owed rent, was busy sleeping off her day’s wine.
Wine is more expensive now.
The concierge doesn’t always dress in the black of grief and gloom.
My old concierge now has a daughter who is a ballet dancer, a rat d’opéra.
Cheap living and feudal luxury still exist side by side. The Faubourg St-Germain, traditional resort of the rich and aristocratic, also rents rooms to students and artists; great restaurants look only a bit more discreet than the neighborhood brasseries. Although the medieval walls of Paris are down, replaced by speedways, there is still a sense of concentration within limits, of a continuing dense urban unit. On the same brief turn up one of the streets off St-Germain-des-Prés—the rue des Ciseaux, say—rank smells and delicious whiffs struggle for control of the stroller’s nose. The Left Bank is a place of lazy enjoyment and of irritability; coffee, wine, garlic, bread, fruit, spices. The open-air market at rue de Buci lacks only Gene Kelly to tap-dance his way past the cheeses and apples. If it’s April, this must be Paris.
In the old days, I would buy my lunch at an open-air market and eat it on a bench along the Seine, or in the garden of the little Ukrainian church at the corner of the rue des Sts-Pères and the Boulevard St-Germain. Now I often do the same thing, joining other picnickers in the Place de Fürstemberg, outside the Delacroix Museum, and then sitting over an espresso or a citron pressé at the Deux Magots or the Flore, the Bonaparte or the Old Navy, watching the ghosts of both the past and the future. No matter how loafingly the body coils or uncoils on wire or wicker chairs, Rive Gauche Present invites contemplation of Left Bank Past.
Symbolic of both the change and the sameness is the adventure of the St-Germain-des-Prés wino called P’tit Louis, or Little Louie. He was selected as a photographic model by Timberland Shoes, which had decided that the one thing a Left Bank hobo needs is a sturdy, long-lasting pair of American boots. After auditioning more than 50 “personalities of the sidewalk,” the advertising agency chose P’tit Louis because of his authentic hat, nose, overcoat, and grizzled style.
The day I read about this in the morning Figaro, I happened to meet Little Louie on the steps of the philosophical and geographical institute located between the Café aux Deux Magots and the Café Bonaparte, where he was being asked about his views of the world by a French television team with the usual tense and worn international media faces. He was earnestly discoursing on the life of a clochard (a word that means one who sleeps under bridges and clocks) while occasionally taking a deep puff on his cigar or an even deeper drag on his bottle of Gros Rouge—for inspirational purposes only, of course. He was wearing The Shoes. He was not wearing socks. Today he was, as everyone is supposed to be for fifteen minutes of a lifetime, a Star.
Later that day I had lunch at chez Lipp, the brasserie of politicians, littéraires, filmmakers, the famous, and those who want to look at the famous, and I failed to recognize Leslie Caron at the next table. I too have grown older. Nearby, poodles were yipping in the laps of their lovely mistresses, who were feeding them morsels of sausage. (Poodles don’t develop cellulite.) My friend at lunch, a journalist who has lived most of his life in Paris, a man who ranks high in the Café-sitting Olympics, stipulated that the Left Bank isn’t what it used to be, and nothing is, but it is still “agreeable.” The pickpockets and the arrogant waiters are more fun than elsewhere, the people are still humble and modest (and proud of it, in that French way), and the rusty treasure of a place is still a treasure, even polished up for display in a living museum of impacted time. If a person can be entertained anywhere, or bemused by the nearness of history, he can be bemused and entertained here.
“Let’s search the Left Bank,” I proposed to a friend. “Let’s try to find a bad meal.”
We succeeded. It was in an Algerian restaurant on the rue Xavier Privas, because we wanted couscous, that North African specialty of grains and vegetables and spices and various meats. But we cheated: it was a restaurant aimed like a missile at tourists, with a barker outside; and even here the food was merely mediocre, perhaps even interesting, which of course is not a word of highest commendation for food. One can eat poorly only with the greatest difficulty in the myriad small restaurants of the Rive Gauche.
Paris is still Paris, portions of the Left Bank are still something of the bohemian nation, but of course elements of Bon Chic, Bon Genre—the French version of gentrification, yuppification—have turned many of the former attic rooms into pretty studios. When I was a poor student and would-bee buzzing around St-Germain-des-Prés, Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, I knew a little hotel in the rue de l’Odéon where other would-bees stayed for 50 or 60 cents a night. The “facility” was between each two floors. There was no shower or bath, so part of our social life consisted of meeting at public bath houses, carrying our towels. (“We always knew Paris would be like this!”)
Now I was paying several hundred times as much to stay in the same hotel, but an elevator had taken the space once given to the water closets, there was a neat little bathroom in each room, and strategic antique beams had been exposed. All over the Left Bank, the little boardinghouses that recalled Balzac and Wilde and the Existentialists and waves of foreigners washing up on the shores of bohemia have become pretty and clean and healthy: “Nostalgia,” as Simone Signoret wrote, “is not what it used to be.” Yet the shadows of the lovers and philosophers and wine drinkers remain in corporeal new lovers, thinkers, flirters, café sitters. There are still plane trees and cobblestones and little squares like the Place de Fürstemberg, where I heard a flamenco group howling magnificently of jealousy and loss. There are still international beatniks and hippies in the Place de la Contrescarpe; even a few French ones. The Rive Gauche is still a country of the mind, a nation of smoke in the head, the republic of imagination, the place of strict welcome to the amusing from everywhere, a purgatory of hanging loose.
“Money can’t buy happiness,” admitted my friend Claude Roy, a writer who lives on the rue Dauphine, but a person can use it well and happily here to buy his fruit, cheese and wine at the rue de Buci street market, books at Le Divan or La Hune, paintings in the dozens of galleries, all within a few minutes’ stroll of his apartment. In a shop on the rue de Tournon that sells toy soldiers of ancient breed—Napoleon, Lafayette, Joan of Arc—I saw a newer toy soldier, of painted lead, in a black hat and cape. It was one of the heroic battlers in the wars of the Left Bank circa 1930, a tall, thin, Irish toy soldier—James Joyce. The pen can be both as mighty and as leaden as the sword.
Come with me down this street and meet the ghosts of our earliest years. Run, school-boy, run, with your sachel bouncing between your shoulderblades—shout, shout for no reason, for the pleasure of being alive, glance quickly into the antique shop, where the grey cat sleeps amid the yataghans, parasols, and fans, run on past the shop where the embroideress is ruining her eyesight stitching initials onto snow-white sheets, run past the bearded chiropodist as he surveys the long pavement from his window, run as far as the bronze lion guarding the entrance to the Villa Fodor. But you’re so quick, I’ve lost sight of you. Have you slipped into the church where the candle flames flicker in front of the grotto of Lourdes? Are you hurtling down the rue Raynouard, where the cab horses needed to be reined in? I’ll not go chasing after you, little ghost from 1908. Too much has changed for the worse in our city to let me smile at you as cheerfully as I should like.
—Julian Green, Paris,
translated by J. A. Underwood
Without going out of its way to welcome the stranger, the Rive Gauche has evolved an immense traditional hospitality. Hardly anyone rejects her embrace—although, as anyone who has been the victim of Parisian impatience can attest, sometimes the embrace is pretty cool. It requires an ability to fight back, which was lacking in the tourist I saw desperately shouting. “Diet pop! All I want is a diet pop! Why can’t I get a diet pop!” on the terrace of La Palette, on the rue de Seine, near various art schools. This is one of my favorite cafés, but the burly waiter, who must have attended Berlitz Anti-Charm School, kept asking, “Champagne? Cognac? Faites un bel effort, monsieur!” (“Make a beautiful effort, sir!”), as if he didn’t understand. Of course the waiter understood the tourist’s wish. Of course he likes to play his games. Of course the art students and Rive Gauche locals—including an African prince in his robes, Swedish explorers, tousled philosophers, and me—were sadistically entertained by this unwinnable battle.
Shakespeare and Company is an irreplaceable institution: it is an English-language outpost if you need that, but more fundamentally it is a place to renew yourself, a place that embodies a belief in books and in people, a place with a liberal, literate heart and soul—and in that sense a place that symbolizes part of the special spirit of the city. That spirit extends to the chalkboard notices scrawled outside the door, too, source of some of Paris’ prime wisdom and deals, where I found the following: “Paris bookseller looking for outdoor girl to build cabin in north woods. If she will cook him trout for breakfast every morning, he will tell her dog stories every night. “
—Donald W. George,
“The Liberation of Paris,”
San Francisco Examiner
One of the special pleasures of the Left Bank is browsing the different bookstores specializing in English and American books. First among equals is the famous Shakespeare and Company of George Whitman, who used to hint that he was descended from Walt Whitman. His shop on the rue de la Bûcherie, a few steps from the Seine, has been a hangout for poets and college kids since it was called Le Mistral many years ago, before George adopted the name of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore-publishing company, which first printed James Joyce. He keeps open late at night and has frequent mass Sunday teas for visiting geniuses. He is, as e. e. cummings once said about someone else, a delectable mountain, albeit a skinny and irascible one.
The Rive Gauche is a swamp filled with birds and giants, a continent of fantasy, a very lazy but agitated ancient kingdom in the midst of the 20th century, a flâneur among the world’s earnest, a place to miss nothing but also to do nothing, a silence surrounded by noise, a sausage, a beer, a giggle, a dream of the past for those who have a shrug for the future, a baguette, a bottle of red, a bevy of students, a guitar jangle, a festive street orchestra that—I actually saw this—could not pass the hat because they had left it at home. In other words, the Left Bank is a delirious confusion and fantasy.
Like the rest of Paris, the Left Bank really used to be what we still think it is. It is heading toward being a Rive Gauche Museum. That’s the truth and should be accepted. But the flower and bird markets still exist; so do the café sitters and their crises of exhilaration (call it inspiration, call it joie de vivre), and, in that magic light of the Ile de France, so does their gracious melancholy (call it pensive, call it acceptance of the mysteries of being).
One night on the rue de la Huchette, I came upon a group of buskers singing a stirring version of “Let It Be,” that anthem of the late Sixties. They sounded exactly like the Beatles, except that they were singing in Korean. My French friends, a novelist and a psychiatrist who live upstairs from this year-round music festival, said they sometimes couldn’t decide whether to drop coins or bags of water on the entertainers. A few years ago this pedestrian quarter, surfeited with Danish Joan Baezes and Israeli Bob Dylans, was blanketed with revolutionary posters proclaiming a bas les gratteurs de guitares! (Down With the Guitar-Scrapers!)
My personal law for survival and thriving on the Rive Gauche is to enjoy the monuments, parks, museums, churches and great public buildings, but pay attention first of all to the people. They are the distilled essence of France, essence of Paris—beautiful, ugly, surly, funny, greedy, generous, friendly, rude, seething with energetic complication. The best, useless and most fruitful occupation is to find a café terrace, buy a newspaper or a guidebook or any-book to prop against your cup or glass, and join the interlocking dramas of the street and the little stage on which you sit—the scholars, the mumblers, the lovers, the brooders, the debaters, those looking deeply into their liquids or into each other’s eyes. Now you’re there. This was the place.
Against all odds, even against the march of history, it still is.
Herbert Gold is the author of many books, including Lovers and Cohorts, Fathers, Family, Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti, and Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet. He lives in San Francisco.
Night after night I pored over my Philosophical Dictionary and my other books. What seemed obscure or unintelligible I attributed to my ignorance and stupidity, and I persisted. I recall how I suffered over certain passages of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, unable to make head or tail of them. My confidence was further shaken by the fact that other sections were clear and easy to comprehend, as were the same ideas expressed in his plays, essays, pamphlets. Recently I returned to that book, and reading it again in the light of experience realized that I was not entirely to blame, that certain sentences and paragraphs are indeed cloudy to the point of meaninglessness (perhaps written under the influence of drugs). I then understood why Heidegger, whose philosophy had been a powerful influence on Sartre’s development, had described the book as “muck”—not that he was a model of clarity!
—Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris