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CHAPTER 1

The Literary Left Bank

A Bird's-Eye View

WHEN we think of Rive Gauche, images of youth, art, and la vie de bohème leap to mind. These are hardly what Philippe Auguste envisioned at the start of the thirteenth century when he extended the city wall to the south bank of the Seine. His aim was to lure industrious burghers to settle this undeveloped area. Instead, rebel scholars from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame moved in and created the University of Paris. Within a century it was the most illustrious school of theology in Europe, "the oven in which the intellectual bread of the Church was baked," as one medieval Pope called it. The hoi polloi nicknamed the district the Latin Quarter, after the language the scholars spoke.

The university gave the Latin Quarter its raison d'être, but it was the freethinkers — including the mavericks, the subversives, the spectacularly politically incorrect — who gave it its verve. Take François Villon, for example: poet, thief, priest-killer, and Master of Arts in Theology. Or the scatological monk Rabelais: he could have been burned at the stake for ridiculing the university's teachings. Four hundred years later, Simone de Beauvoir was a "dutiful daughter" until she fell under the spell of the squat future guru of existentialism while they were studying for an exam.

Foreigners also made their mark — young Rilke, young Hemingway, young Orwell — attracted by rents they could afford.

Between Moliere's first theater, Racine, Mme de La Fayette, and the founding of the Comédie-Française, Saint Germain-des-Prés finally saw the literary light in the seventeenth century, supplanting the Latin Quarter as the Left Bank's premier literary terrain. It reached its apogee during the fervent years after World War II, when figures like Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, Richard Wright,James Baldwin, and the trio of Sartre-Beauvoir-Camus made it the intellectual capital of the western world.

Next-door Faubourg Saint-Germain went literary in the eighteenth century and remained so to the end of the belle époque. This aristocratic district was especially prized by writers as a setting in novels, including Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, James's The American, and Proust's The Guermantes Way.

For Montparnasse, apotheosis arrived in the twentieth century, when, as editor Samuel Putnam put it, "for a decade or more, Paris was a good deal nearer than New York or Chicago to being the literary capital of the United States, as far as earnest and significant writing was concerned." This was the "Lost Generation" era of Gertrude Stein, who coined the label. Her protégé Ernest Hemingway and many other writers, lost or not, spent "earnest and significant" time in the district. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Jean Rhys were among them. In the 1930s Samuel Beckett decided to settle in Paris for good, and the failed forty-year-old novelist Henry Miller made his miraculous breakthrough with Tropic of Cancer, inspired by the "constant army of artists" he saw all around him:

This is what makes Paris, the vast group of men and women devoted to the things of the spirit. This is what animates the city, makes it the magnet of the cultural world.

THE LATIN QUARTER

THE CHURCH OF SAINT-JULIEN-LEPAUVRE

Consecrated in 1220, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was just nearing completion when the newly established University of Paris began setting up shop next door. And as the university had no buildings, this little gem of a church became its chapel and assembly hall. Over the centuries, it's where Petrarch, François Villon, and Rabelais prayed and attended gatherings. But in the 1520s students rioted and trashed the church. The clergy banned further assemblies.

Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre fell into decay, the Revolution closed the church, and Haussmann's successors scheduled it for demolition. But in 1877, public outcry saved the loveable old wreck. A decade later it came back to life as a Greek Orthodox house of worship, glowing with gilded icons.

In Jean Rhys's 1928 novel Quartet, the middle-aged writer Heidler, based on Rhys's lover Ford Madox Ford, takes his mistress to the church:

Marya turned to watch Heidler go down on one knee and cross himself as he passed the altar. He glanced quickly sideways at her as he did it, and she thought: "I'll never be able to pray again now that I've seen him do that. Never!"

RUE DU FOUARRE

All that remains of the medieval Left Bank's most influential street is a sad little connector between Rue Lagrange and Rue Dante. Yet this was where, in 1215, the rebel intellectuals from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame founded the University of Paris. Because no classrooms were available, lessons were taught outdoors, with the students sitting on bundles of straw — fouarre. Young men flocked from all parts of Europe to literally sit at the feet of such theological giants as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. By Dante's time, only a century after the university's founding, the street was so famous that he could write about it in the The Divine Comedy without even calling it by name, in a stanza about a star teacher:

... the eternal light of Sigebert Who escaped not envy, when of the truth he argued, Reading in the straw-littered street.

Starting with Boccaccio, in a lecture in Florence during the 1370s, many people have claimed that the father of Italian poetry lived in Paris, but no solid evidence has ever come to light. All the same, the city likes to think he did, and it gave Dante a street.

Boccaccio, the illegitimate son of a Florentine gentleman and a French lady, was almost certainly born in Paris. Oddly, he gets no street.

RABELAIS

By the early sixteenth century, over forty colleges, including the Sorbonne, were in operation, but Rabelais, then a graduate student, found their living conditions deplorable:

The prisoners of the Moors are treated better, murderers in prison, even the dogs in your house. If I were the King of Paris, the Devil take me if I wouldn't start a fire in there and have the principal and the regent burned, who tolerate such inhumanity before their eyes.

Lectures were still being held in Rue du Fouarre, where Rabelais's young giant Pantagruel takes on the cream of the Parisian intelligentsia, arguing the 9,764 most hotly debated issues of the day, and "notwithstanding their egos and sophistries, he made fools of them all, and conclusively proved to them that they were just calves in petticoats."

Pantagruel's sidekick Panurge — "a mischievous rogue, a cheat, a boozer, a roisterer" — bests the calves in a less cerebral way:

One day, when all the theologians were summoned to meet in the Rue du Fuerre, he made a mud pie composed of garlic, galbanum, asafetida, and castoreum in quantity and of turds that were still warm. This he steeped in the runnings from sores. Then, very early in the morning, he smeared and anointed the pavement, so that the devil himself could not have endured it. Three or four of them brought up the complete contents of their stomachs, there before everyone, as if they had flayed the fox; ten or twelve of them died of the plague, fourteen caught leprosy; eighteen got the gout, and more than twenty-seven contracted pox; but he did not care a fig.

In his two boisterous masterpieces, Pantagruel and Gargantua, published in the 1530s under the pseudonym of Alcofribas Naiser (an anagram of François Rabelais), the free-thinking Benedictine monk mocked the university 's narrow scholastic education — a dangerous thing to do at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Several printers, including Rabelais's own, Étienne Dolet, were burned at the stake for publishing books casting doubt on the Sorbonne's teachings. Rabelais was also condemned, but he had well-placed protectors.

Saint-Séverin

In the Middle Ages the maze of streets that grew in the shadow of the church of Saint-Séverin was the honky-tonk and cheap eats district of the Latin Quarter, as it remains today. With narrow Rue de la Parcheminerie, once home to scribes and parchment sellers, ten-foot wide Rue Xavier-Privas, where Ronsard and fellow poets used to meet at the Cabaret de la Rose Rouge, and most buildings two or three centuries old, Saint-Séverin is the Latin Quarter's best-preserved area. It was also a key district in the strange life of Joris-Karl Huysmans, torn between his desire for loose women in the prostitute-infested neighborhood and the spiritual solace he craved at the church.

THE CHURCH OF SAINT-SÉVERIN

One of the most brilliant novelists of the late nineteenth century, Huysmans was baptized on February 6, 1848 in this moody Gothic church. It remained linked to his anguished vision, expressed in four novels tracing the spiritual journey of his alter ego, the writer Durtal. In Là-bas, a book so shocking that it could not be published in English for thirty years, and then in a sanitized version, Huysmans explores his fascination with Satanic practices. But in 1892, the year after its publication, a vision of Christ brought him back to the Catholic faith. Three years later he exorcised the " black book" Làbas with the "white book" En route, in which this very church, "delicate and petite, muffled shiveringly in the rags of cabarets and hovels," becomes Durtal's sanctuary:

Saint-Séverin enraptured him, helped him better than any of the others to inspire in himself, on some days, an indefinable feeling of lightness and pity, and sometimes even, while reflecting on the rubbish bin of his senses, to wring regrets and dread out of his soul.

At the end of En route, Durtal retires to a Trappist monastery, presaging Huysmans's own retreats at Benedictine abbeys over the coming years.

MAURICE GIRODIAS AND THE OLYMPIA PRESS

Maurice Girodias — like his father Jack Kahane, Henry Miller's first publisher — specialized in English-language novels that could not be published in Britain or America because of obscenity laws. His books ranged from Rabelaisian erotica to out-and-out "DBs," dirty books churned out by pseudonymous hired hands. Until She Screams, Tender Was My Flesh, and The Whipping Club were a few of Olympia Press's top sellers. But Girodias also had genuine literary triumphs.

Early in 1957, flush with his profits from Nabokov's Lolita, he moved to the seventeenth-century building at No. 7 rue Saint-Séverin, where Allen Ginsberg appeared that September carrying a manuscript by his friend William Burroughs:

Naked Lunch seemed a natural for him, not from the point of view of being a porn novel — which it wasn't anyway — but because he'd published Durrell, Miller, Nabokov, Genet, Beckett.

Girodias hated the look of the manuscript — a bundle of tattered pages with scraps pasted together — and its total lack of "novelistic structure." He turned it down flat. But his divining rod began vibrating a year and a half later when the United States Postal Service cracked down on a Chicago magazine for publishing sections of the book it deemed obscene. He tracked Burroughs down at the Beat Hotel on nearby Rue Gît-le-Coeur, signed him to a contract, and gave him two weeks to get his manuscript typed. Ten thousand copies were in print by the end of July 1959. Naked Lunch was an immediate sensation.

A FRESH LOOK AT ENGLISH

In its first production in 1950, Eugène Ionesco's comedy La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) closed after only twenty-five performances; however, tastemakers like André Breton and Raymond Queneau loved it, and bouche à oreille — "mouth to ear," as the French say — eventually got it back on the boards. The play reopened at the Théâtre de la Huchette at No. 23 rue de la Huchette in 1957 and has been there ever since.

The idea for the play came from the Rumanian-born author's struggle to learn English from a book called L'anglais sans peine, famed for its opening practice example: "My tailor is rich." While all France guffawed at the inane dialogue in the book, Ionesco imagined a world filled with such talk, and ended up writing one of the funniest plays of the twentieth century. Its success made Ionesco a star of the most influential non-realistic theatrical movement of the postwar period, the Theater of the Absurd.

Place Saint-Michel

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME

During the winter of 1922–1923, the weather turned too sharp for Hemingway to work in his garret near Place de la Contrescarpe. So, as he says in A Moveable Feast, he escaped to "a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly" on the Place Saint-Michel. If he worked well he would reward himself with oysters and white wine, because "after writing a story I always felt empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love."

While writing stories set in the Michigan woods, Hemingway hit upon one of his key convictions: transplanting could be "as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things." It's a principle he would embrace for the rest of his life.

Quai Saint-Michel

JEAN GENET, BOUQUINISTE

If Jean Genet had been half as good a thief as he was a writer, he would have been one of the greatest criminals in France. Luckily, he wasn't, because for a number of years the only place he could get any writing done was in a jail cell. An illegitimate child abandoned at seven months by his mother, he was a juvenile delinquent, vagabond, thief, jailbird, homosexual, Foreign Legion deserter, and the twentieth-century heir to François Villon.

In December 1940 Genet was sentenced to his tenth term in prison for stealing books, this time from the big Gibert Jeune shop on Place Saint-Michel. Over the next few years he served his eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth terms behind bars, and there wrote Notre-Dame des fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers) and some of his best poetry. Between stretches, he supported himself by thieving and tending a friend's bouquiniste stall on the Quai Saint-Michel, across the street from his usual digs, the Hôtel de Suède.

In April 1942, thirty-one years old and yet to be published, Genet met two well-connected young browsers who offered to read his work. But before that could happen, he was arrested again and locked up for another six months. When the two men finally got the manuscript the following year, everything about Our Lady ofthe Flowers floored them, and they set up a meeting for him with Jean Cocteau. Ever on the lookout for new talent, Cocteau knew Genet was the real thing. Despite the severe paper rationing during the war, Cocteau arranged to have the novel published. Initially, Our Lady of the Flowers was sold under the counter as high-priced erotica, but it caught on in literary circles. "Saint Genet," as Sartre called him, and his book became a nationwide sensation.

BECOMING GEORGE SAND

On July 15, 1831, Aurore Dupin, the Baroness Dudevant, moved into a fifth-floor apartment in a house which probably stood at No. 29 quai Saint-Michel. She was twenty-seven years old, in the second year of her affair with Jules Sandeau, and working with him on a novel called Rose et Blanche. It appeared under the nom de plume of J. Sand at the end of the year, to generally favorable reviews. But by then she was writing her own novel about a young woman's quest for ideal love in a world where men no longer deny women their freedom. Indiana, the first book to be published under the name of George Sand, was a huge success the following spring. When Victor Hugo scoffed at the praise being heaped on the novel, a much-publicized feud developed — the best break an unknown writer could hope for — jumpstarting her illustrious career.

From her windows overlooking the Seine, Sand witnessed the brutal crushing of a workers' revolt in June 1832. Saber-wielding National Guardsmen shot or hacked down dozens of men, and their bodies were thrown into the river. "The June 6th revolt ... has thrust me brutally into real life," she wrote a friend.

... to see the straw lightly sprinkled on a cart pushed back to reveal twenty or thirty corpses, some in black suits, others in velvet waistcoats, but all torn, mutilated, blackened by powder, mud-splattered and bloodied; to hear the cries of women who recognize their husbands or their children is horrible. Yet even that is perhaps less awful than to see a poor fugitive being put to death beneath one's window, despite his pleas for mercy, and to hear the death rattle of the wounded man whom no one is allowed to comfort and who is condemned by thirty bayonets.

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Excerpted from "Writers in Paris"
by .
Copyright © 2008 David Burke.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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