Paris Journal VI: Raiders of the Lost Generation

Paris was once populated by a Lost Generation of expatriate Americans known for their talent, wit and sometimes genius. Woody Allen humorously addressed this era of the 20’s in Midnight in Paris. Today that Lost Generation has multiplied and their great great great grandchildren—in other words, Americans, are everywhere. Having propagated almost biblically, the descendants of the Lost Generation have become like a plague of locusts. You can’t go anywhere in Paris without seeing Americans and just when you think you’ve located a bona fide Frenchman, who talks the talk and walks the walk, even he or she can turn out to be an American dressed up as Frenchmen. You learn not be fooled by Francophiles in berets, who can rattle off esoteric Metro stops like Michel-Ange- Molitor and have no trouble cherching for the rue du Cherche-Midi. Though the onslaught of Americans is welcomed for the economic bounty they represent, they’re looked at suspiciously and even disdainfully by many Parisians precisely because even those with affectations fundamentally lack the Gallic charm, the holy grail that many Americans come to Paris for in the first place. When a Frenchman comes to New York, he or she is generally treated like royally due to the way they embody what is deemed to be a superior culture. But the achievements of the Lost Generation of Hemingways and Fitzageralds have long been forgotten and it’s the image of the ugly American with his or her profound lack of savoir faire—the tourist loaded down with guide books, time sensitive tickets to the latest blockbuster art show at the Grand Palais and naturally their Zagat’s--that’s prevailed. In a sense it’s unfair. Why should enthusiastic Americans be penalized while the French are rewarded for being what they are?

Slovenia Journal VI: A Tale of Two Cities

Drawing by Hallie Cohen  of Kranjska Gora Church

Start from Tarcenta in Northern Italy and then ride through the Rezia mountains 20 or so kilometers through the Tanamea Pass to the Slovenian town of Zoga (translation “saw mill”). Krn Mountain on the Slovenian side is where Hemingway worked as an ambulance driver in the First World War. It served as the backdrop for A Farewell to Arms. The terrain is awe inspiring and dramatic. As you approach Slovenia, onion domes emerge out of nowhere in the mountains. But what is even more dramatic besides the beaut, punctuated by the turquoise waters of the Soca River, is how a relatively short distance defines two radically different worlds. Look down from a point in the mountains at night into the Italian and Slovenian sides. One is a mass of connected lights (Italy), the other (Slovenia) is characterized by huge areas of darkness separated by sporadic light. One conveys the feeling of Western Europe, the other is a world made up of Celtic, Slavic, Bavarian and Tyrolian influences resulting from successive waves of invasion. Parts of Slovenia belonged to both Italy and Austria- Hungary and were fought over by both of these powers, among others, throughout varying periods of history (which explains why cemeteries memorializing the dead of many countries are ubiquitous throughout the countryside). Riding through the steep mountain passes and small villages, one can’t help feeling this is the terrain where myths and legends were and perhaps are still being made. As you drive past a town like Zoga, you get the feeling of watching a folk tale spreading out before your eyes.

O Quebec IV: The Golden Book

Photo by Hallie Cohen

Le Livre d’Or is the name of store on la rue Principale Sud, which is Main Street in Sutton, a high-end tourist destination in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Sutton boasts tasteful shopping nooks and upscale B and B’s, exemplified by Le Pleasant Hotel and Café, whose stark modernity embodies the anomalous cosmopolitanism you’ll find in similar out-of-the-way oases of sophistication like Kinsale in southern Ireland. Le Livre d’Or is one block down from rue Pine and two blocks from rue Maple, the street names reminding us that Sutton, for all its Frenchness, is only a hop, skip and a jump from the English speaking world. On the used book table is the Livre de Poche edition of Ernest Hemingway’s L’Adieu aux armes, published by Gallimard in 1948. It begins, “Cette année là, à la fin de l’été, nous habitons une maison dans un village qui, par-delà la revière et la plaine, donnait sur les montagnes.” Next to L’Adieu aux armes is Milan Kundera’s L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être, published by Folio. It would not be surprising to find these tomes in a bookstall overlooking the Seine, but the proximity of Le Livre d’Or to the U.S. border makes the cultural displacement all the more startling. Signs on the road outside of Sutton alert drivers to la Douane, or customs, which is only a few miles away. No culture wars are being fought on rue Maple, but it’s a different civilization.

The Forbidden City

When in Venice, you might go to the Cipriani. In London, the Connaught. In Paris, the George V or the Ritz. And on the Cote d’Azur, the Hotel du Cap. These are the old fashioned Grand Hotels, with quiet corridors, doting concierges, and soft, elegant sheets that were turned down by the night maid. When it was a seller’s market, you had to be landed aristocracy or at least know a landed aristocrat to make a reservation in some of these dignified redoubts. They were a far cry from the Holiday Inn, the Marriott or even the Meridien. These hotels were more like clubs and had a certain cachet. The closest most travelers would come to one of these pleasure domes came from reading about them in the pages of a novel. Writers like Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway and Graham Greene might have been found at their bars, documenting the foibles of the upper crust as they recorded the cultural history of the age. However, let’s say one wins the lottery or has the uncanny good fortune to invest in Apple at the right time and, for a moment at least, becomes the kind of cash cow that needs to be milked. There generally is no more reliable place to empty one’s pockets than a grand old establishment like the Cipriani, facing the Lido, the beach where Ashenbach confronted his homosexual longings in the Mann novella. But, will the uprooted cosmopolitan of the 21st Century really find respite in these museums, in which the aristocracy of Europe, probably including several itinerant Romanov’s, experienced its death rattles? Indeed, these anachronisms have a clientele that differs greatly from the world they entertained in the past. It’s a little like entering the Forbidden City in Peking. The experience of the tourist is nothing like what it was like when the inner sanctum was really off limits to anyone but emperors.

Paris Journal IX: A Moveable Feast

Hemingway called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it is hard to regard the Parisian salons presided over by the great cultural figures of the past—Breton, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway himself, and numerous other denizens of Parisian cultural life—as feasts in the same sense as the collations that occurred in American and even English cultural life. For all the brilliance of French cuisine, one associates the great gatherings of Parisian intellectuals that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century at cafés like Les Deux Magots (which are now over priced tourist meccas) with buffets of conversation and ideas. In contrast, Truman Capote threw his famed Black and White Ball for Katharine Graham in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza in l966. It would be hard to imagine a latter-day infant terrible and major French celebrity like Houellebecq throwing a comparable society bash for someone like Carla Bruni. Thus, though one reads about the social mores of the French upper classes in Remembrance of Things Past, it is really difficult to imagine the kind of literary cocktail parties and dinners one expects in New York occurring in Paris, where the spread of ideas has a more extemporaneous feel, fueled by the ongoing presence of a true café society on streets like the Rue Mortorgueil, which is to Paris today what the Boulevard St. Germain was a century ago.

Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”

Diasporic Dining: Episode VIII (Let's Do Lunch)

Photo by Hallie Cohen

Most writers today are too young to remember the infamous SASE, or self-addressed stamped envelope. The sight of your returned SASE in the mailbox was the equivalent of being stabbed in the back by the STASI before the fall of the Wall. It was tantamount to being extraordinarily rendered by The Company and involuntarily entered in the waterboarding time trials in Tirana.

   

The advent of email has ruined certain key rites of passage, like receiving a SASE on a gray afternoon in the middle President’s Day weekend, with no possibility of remediation on Monday, it being a federal holiday.

   

Of course the phone company doesn’t celebrate Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthdays. Why not call and ask for an explanation?  Then again, there is no law that says a writer can’t just jump off a cliff.

     “Is Max Perkins in?”

     “Who, may I ask, is calling?”

     “It’s Ernie Hemingway, silly.”

     “I see, but I thought you had blown your head off.”

     “No, I actually just got scored by a bull’s horns in Pamplona. In Second Life.”

   

The Phone Doesn’t Ring Twice is a sequel to James M. Cain's famed novel that is just waiting to be written. It deals with the rage growing in the heart of a writer whose calls to editors are nothing but unanswered prayers.

   

So what is writing, or literature for that matter, without the SASE, the phone, and the notorious publishing lunch? A writer knew he had made it when an editor or agent invited him to lunch. But the publishing lunch has gone the way of Random House's house.

   

In addition, most of the midtown Manhattan skyscrapers that publishing companies now occupy have become too expensive for what is essentially a cottage industry, and the average Joe, who still dreams of singing for his supper, or lunch, is left to surf the Internet with a bagel.