Hemingway Remembers Paris

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

These words, written by Ernest Hemingway to a friend in 1950, appear at the start of A Moveable Feast, which was completed in 1960, but tells of the time he lived in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, between 1921 and 1926.

His memories of that period are captured in 20 short essays: each stands alone, and there is no overall storyline or theme, beyond that of the city itself, but this slender book conjures an image of Paris that is almost tangible. The smells, tastes, sights and sounds of Paris spring off the pages, and the people breathe again as they laugh and love and quarrel and drink and smoke and work and dream. All human life is here: raffish Bohemian artists, avante garde writers and poets, drunks, bartenders, fishermen, street cleaners, booksellers, waiters...

There are glimpses of those who later became well known, alongside others who were already famous. There is Gertude Stein looking, says Hemingway, like a peasant woman rather than the Roman emperor she later resembled; James Joyce, who drank sherry, not  wine, and kindly Sylvia Beach from Shakespeare and Company, who ran a lending library for ex-pats, and provided a refuge when they needed it. Hemingway recounts his friendship with Scott and Zelda Fitgerald, locked into their mutually destructive relationship – and paints a distinctly unsympathetic portrait of Zelda, who I had always thought of as something of a victim. He is far kinder in his portrayal of Ezra Pound, who comes across as being nicer and gentler than I imagined, but my perception of the poet is coloured by his later espousal of Nazism in Italy, and his somewhat irregular domestic arrangements.

And you see the young author learning his craft as a writer, trying to form one true sentence that will carry his story forward. Sometimes words pour out of him, at others he struggles to find the language that expresses his thoughts. Writing about writing he says:

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago an the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake.

He spends a lot of time hungry, because he and Hadley have very little cash, but he believes lack of food sharpens his perceptions (I have to say I found this rather disturbing). And when he does have money he seems to spend it on food and drink for himself, with never a though for Hadley and their baby son.

Ernest Hemingway in 1918, three
years before he went to Paris.

The book provided source material for Paula McLain, who gave a voice to Hadley in her excellent novel, ‘The Paris Wife’, where Hemingway is charming and charismatic, but a bit of a sod. ‘A Moveavle Feast’ does nothing to dispel that view.

To some extent I think Hemingway has been overshadowed by his own myth – all that machismo stuff about bull fighting, and hunting, and fishing. I always forget how good a writer he was, and it was at this point in his life that he himself realised he really could write, and he gave up regular work as a journalist (although he still did odd articles from time to time) and moved to Paris, determined to write fiction.

In many ways it’s a magical time, but it ends with the appearance of another woman.  Hemingway makes no excuses for what happens – although he seems to put the blame on that other woman, who became his second wife. But he is nostalgic for the past, and for Hadley. “I wish had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” he says. He finishes as he starts, with a tribute to the city.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs to that of any other. We always returned to it no matter ho we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this was how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

A Scarlet Pimpernel flower.

Does anyone else out there have a problem with the French Revolution? My view of it is much the same as my view of the English Civil War, and is best summed up by Sellar and Yeatman, who maintain that the Royalists were romantic but wrong, while the Roundheads were repulsive but right (it’s in their amazingly funny history spoof ‘1066 And All That’). Only in the case of France it’s the Revolutionaries who are repulsive but right, which is a shame, because when it comes to ideology I’m with them all the way, same as I support Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians.

Baroness Orczy

But it’s hard to hard to know how much of our image of the French Revolution is shaped by  novels like Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I haven’t read for years and years and years – I think I may still have been at school when I last picked it up! Anyway, since I have embarked on a ‘virtual’ trip to Paris with Paris in July and Dreaming of France, I felt it was time to reacqaint myself with Sir Percy Blakeney, his wife Marguerite, and the devilish French spy Chauvelin. And I am so glad I did. The novel is ideologically unsound and extremely biased, so I feel guilty about enjoying it, and it certainly couldn’t be described as great literature. But it is SUCH fun. And I am SOOO in love with Sir Percy, just like I was as a teenager! It’s a real romp of a book, a love story and an adventure yarn, that could even be described as a mystery thriller I suppose.

And, before anybody quibbles, I know it is not really set in Paris, but it begins and ends there, and it is all about the Revolution, and the Revolution took place in Paris. Did it happen elsewhere in France I wonder? I must admit I don’t know a lot about it, but there must have been uprisings and incidents in other places – or did the rest of the country just follow where the capital led?

I’m sure most of you know the story. Here we have the inane, foppish Sir Percy Blakeney and his beautiful French wife Marguerite, dubbed ‘the cleverest woman in Europe’ by those who know her.

Sir Percy Blakeney, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was in this

year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty.

Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and

massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking,

but for a certain lazy expression in his deep-set blue eyes, and that

perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly-cut

mouth.

It was nearly a year ago now that Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart., one of the

richest men in England, leader of all the fashions, and intimate friend

of the Prince of Wales, had astonished fashionable society in London

and Bath by bringing home, from one of his journeys abroad, a beautiful,

fascinating, clever, French wife. He, the sleepiest, dullest, most

British Britisher that had ever set a pretty woman yawning, had secured

a brilliant matrimonial prize for which, as all chroniclers aver, there

had been many competitors.

Leslie Howard Merle Oberon starred
in the 1934 movie of the book.

However, the couple seem to have fallen out of love within months of their whirlwind marriage, and appear to have nothing but contempt for each other. Marguerite, like the rest of her glittering social circle, is fascinated by the daring exploits of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a mysterious master of a disguise who risks his own life to snatch aristocratic victims from the jaws of the guillotine. His symbol - the tiny red flower of the scarlet pimpernel – has become extremely fashionable, and there is even a popular rhyme which everyone is quoting:

We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.

At this point we meet Chauvelin, the scheming French envoy, who blackmails Marguerite into helping discover the Scarlet Pimpernel’s identity. If she refuses, then it will death for her brother Armand, a republican supporter who has been revealed as a traitor to the cause.

Chauvelin was putting the knife to her throat. Marguerite felt herself

entangled in one of those webs, from which she could hope for no escape.

A precious hostage was being held for her obedience: for she knew that

this man would never make an empty threat. No doubt Armand was already signalled to the Committee of Public Safety as one of the "suspect";

he would not be allowed to leave France again, and would be ruthlessly

struck, if she refused to obey Chauvelin. For a moment--woman-like--she

still hoped to temporise. She held out her hand to this man, whom she

now feared and hated.

She is convinced she has failed in her task, because the only person at the meeting place she uncovers is her husband, who is fast asleep... Eventually she tells him about the threat to her brother, and he promptly heads off to France to save Armand.

Only now does Marguerite finally realise the awful truth – her dull, stupid husband is the clever, brave Scarlet Pimpernel... and she has unwittingly revealed him to his enemies. So she follows, determined to warn him, and the tension mounts as Chauvelin tries to catch his prey, Sir Percy tries to evade him, and Marguerite tries to catch up with her husband. She seems to spend a lot of time hiding behind hedges and things, and she gets dirtier and dirtier, and her fine clothes get tattered and torn, but eventually she and Sir Percy get back together, declare their undying love for each other, and sail off into the sunset... well, back to England at any rate. And, in case you are wondering, Armand does get rescued, along with the father of Marguerite’s old schoolfriend. So everyone is happy, which is good. I like a happy ending.

Karen, who runs the Book Bath blog, and Tamara, over at Thyme forTea, are organising Paris in July, while Paulita, at An Accidental Blog is hosting  Dreaming of France.

I Love Paris... A Guide to Paris that's Older than Me!

I love Paris, and my mother and I have visited almost every year since my father died but she is no longer up to the journey, so this summer I’m staying in England. But I can still have a virtual trip, thanks to Karen who runs the Book Bath blog and Tamara over at Thyme forTea, who are once again organising their annual visit to La Belle Française by hosting Paris in July, so I can enjoy all things French without setting foot on the Continent. There’s all ready a whole host of participants who have written about their holidays in Paris, as well as posting pieces about Parisian history, books, music and food. So I hope no-one will mind me joining in at this late stage: to be honest, I’d forgotten all about it, otherwise I would have saved my recent review of Maigret novels and included that.

Anyway, I thought I’d tell you about The Paris We Love, which belonged to Mum, but when she moved she didn’t have room for all her books so she gave this to me, and I was really pleased, because I’ve always loved it.  Published by the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd in 1950 (it’s older than I am), it is jam-packed with fascinating details, and crammed with maps and illustrations – most of them in colour. It must have been quite something when it was new, because paper rationing only ended in 1949, the year before this was published, and there had been stringent guidelines about the way books were printed, with recommendations about print size, margins and blank space. Pictures, which took up precious room, all but disappeared.

The Paris We Love was printed in France (perhaps the French publishing industry had survived the war in better shape) and edited by Doré Ogrizek, with a foreword, or introduction, from playwright, artist and film-maker Jean Cocteau, who urges us to cherish the past. He warns that it is a tragedy to destroy places that witnessed famous deeds, events and pageants ‘from whose ghosts the spirit of the city is created’. But goes on to stress: “It s true that the pick-axe can never quite vanquish these ghosts, for, if their haunts disappear, they will seek them, and will enwrap our own spirits in enchanted mist.”

Silly though it sounds, I love everything about this book, and I can pick it up over and over again, browsing through a different section each time – there are chapters on the various areas of Paris, as well as others on the city’s history, night life, bridges, food and artists. And every time I look I learn something new. Not only does each area of Paris have its own unique atmosphere, but each chapter has its own unique style, for each is written and illustrated by a different author and artist.

It’s part travelogue, part history book, and part cultural reference guide. There are stories about the river that dominates the city, the gardens, the buildings, squares and streets. Above all, there are tales of people. Here you’ll find stories about saints and sinners, kings and revolutionaries, artists and tradesmen, rich and poor. Hard facts rub shoulders with myths and legends, but truth and fiction alike are equally unbelievable – and endlessly fascinating.

One of my favourite pieces is the account of St Geneviève who harnessed the divine power of prayer to repel Attila and his hordes (would that all conflicts could be solved that easily). In addition, ‘miracles occurred wherever she set foot’ which must, I think, have been rather uncomfortable for her, and made every day life more than a little difficult. I was reminded of poor old King Midas who found that turning everything to gold had its disadvantages.

And what about Monsieur de Jussieu, the naturalist who brought a young cedar of Lebanon back to the Jardin des Plantes, keeping it in his hat, and ensuring its survival by giving it his water ration. Or Louis VI who died of grief after his son died from injuries sustained when his horse shied, scared by a herd of pigs in the street.

Then there’s the fantastic tale of the Petit Pont (that’s the Little Bridge (even my failed ‘O’ Level French is up to translating that) destroyed 16 times, most amazingly of all in the 18th century, when a woman fulfilling a vow put a lighted torch in a wooden bowl and left it to float on the Seine, where it set light to a hay barge, which was cut adrift by the frightened sailors and hit the bridge...

It doesn’t cover anything in great detail, which is hardly surprising when you consider it spans some 2,000 years, but it’s a treasure trove of odd snippets of information, a kind of taster that makes you want to find out more. And it’s great fun to read bits that relate to places you know, and to see if things have altered. Obviously, the history still holds good, and the myths and legends are like fairy tales, which never lose their appeal. However, surprisingly, a lot of the city remains just as it was 60 years ago – indeed, the central area can’t have changed all that much since it was laid out by Haussmann in the 19th Century, and modern development seems to have taken place on the outskirts. 

Sadly, it’s a bit chunky to tote around when sight-seeing, but it’s as good as any modern guide book (actually, I think it’s better, but my nearest and dearest say I have odd taste in books) and the authors of the various chapters offer a very personal view of the city. For example, Marcel Brio, writing about the Eiffel Tower, describes it as a 'great, hollow pyramid... a series of giant ladders for spiders with a craze for climbing and adds that it provides ‘a pleasant balcony for foreigners and provincials who want to combine dizziness with a ‘monumental’ view of Paris’. He has quite a lot more to say on the subject of the iconic tower, but is obviously not a fan.

For the final word I’ll return to Jean Cocteau, who says: “Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.” And that is what this book will do – help you discover the secrets of Paris, and reveal the city’s hidden past. All illustrations to this post are taken from the book.

Edited, Monday, July 8, 2013: Just discovered the lovely Dreaming of France meme, hosted by Paulita over at An Accidental Blog, so I'm joining in that as well! 

Short Story Sunday: Having a Lovely Time...

‘Ready?’ enquired Sheila, coming in to look her over. She herself was highly coloured, with dark curls, wet lips, green earrings and a full bosom. She wore a green gown and her black coat with civet cat collar.

Oh, Miss Spence, you do look lovely!’ cried Alice.

Sheila didn’t know what to say about Alice.

Her reaction is unsurprising because poor Alice, the central character in Dorothy Whipple’s short story A Lovely Time, definitely does not look lovely. She is wearing a black dress which hangs from her shoulders just as it hung from its hanger.

...in fact there was little difference between the two means of support, for although Alice was twenty, she as small and bony as a child...

An Eton crop was a very short,slicked
 back hairstyle, made famous by singer
Josephine Baker in the late 1920s.

Beneath it she is wearing her new woolly vest, with a piece cut out of the top so it will not show (but it does, as we discover later in the evening). Over the dress she places what she considers the crowning glory of her outfit: a strawberry pink, artificial satin cloak with a ruched collar, hand-made by her sister. She has used lots of powder, lipstick and eyeblack on her face, but doesn’t know what to do with her hair – so she lets Sheila persuade her to go for the Eton Crop look, plastering it with borrowed Stickit (which is like boiled starch) which causes the hair at the back of her head to rise’ like a stiff hackle’.

Alice comes from Ilkeston, but since moving to London she has taken to calling herself Alys, to rhyme with knees. Her job in an office barely brings in enough money to pay the rent for her small, cold room, and there is little left over for food, and none for luxuries. She never goes out and has no social life, since she has no friends in London. So she is delighted when Miss Spence (the girls in the lodging house address each other very formally) asks her to make up a foursome with two men for a night out, with dinner at a restaurant, and a trip to a  night club.

She sang as she took off her work-a-day clothes. Fancy Miss Spence asking her! It was most kind, because she hardly knew her really and yet she called her darling and asked her out to dinner and a night club. Oh, London life had begun! She had been lonely, she had been dull, she had been cold and felt the food at Vale House inadequate, but now the lights had gone up, the fun, the excitement, the experience she had come for were going to begin!

What Alice doesn’t realise is that she is ‘Hobson’s Choice’, and has only been invited because another girl can’t (or won’t) go. She has no social graces, no style, no conversation, and is shy, inexperienced, and unsure of herself, so an evening with Sheila and her smart men friends is bound to be a disaster.

Dorothy Whipple.

Finally the night ends as it began with Alice, her dreams shattered, writing to her sister. Unable to tell the truth about her lonely life in the big city, her inadequacy, and her fears that she will never fit in, she says the only thing she can: “I had a lovely time.’ 

In some ways, although their lives are very different, she reminded me of Julia in EMDelafield’s Holiday Group (another of the tales in The Persephone Book of Short Stories), desperately trying to convince herself that everything is wonderful. On the face of it Alice is more naive, but when it comes down to it she is a realist and is better able to face the truth about herself and her life, even though she is left bitter and disillusioned. She may fool her family back home, but she can’t fool herself.

The Persephone Book of Short Stories

Fountains and Sculptures

Birmingham Town  Hall, overlooking The River in Victoria
Square, which is lovely spot to sit on a sunny day.

These are not the best photos I’ve ever taken – either the sun was in the wrong place for good shots or, more likely I suspect, I was in the wrong place. As the Duchess told Alice, everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it, and the moral of this is that you should never take pictures with the sun in your eyes. Anyway, these images are a nice memory of a few hours spent in the sunshine with my elder daughter yesterday afternoon, so I thought I’d post them for a Saturday Snapshot.  Lucy had spent a couple of days with my mother in Herefordshire, then caught the train back to Birmingham where she had time to spare before the boarding the coach for a six-hour journey home to Devon, so we met up, had a chat and a tea, and sat basking in the sunshine, in Victoria Square. 

Quality time for Mother and Daughter!

 It’s one of the nicest parts of the city, with fountains, steps and statues, and the buildings up this end are old and attractive (unlike the Bullring). There is, as you might expect from the name, a statue of Queen Victoria, which was erected in her honour on 10 January 1901 – just 12 days before she died. The original monument was made by Thomas Brock (who also sculpted the statue of Victoria which stands outside Buckingham Palace), but it was recast in bronze in 1951. 

Queen Victoria: She's probably not amused
at the quality of this photo!

Dominating the Square is The River, a water feature by Dhruva Mistry, which is made up of four separate artworks. In the upper pool is a bronze statue of a bathing woman who is, apparently, The Spirit of the River – but she is known locally as The Floozie in the Jacuzzi!  The paving around the rim of the water is engraved with lines from the ‘Burnt Norton’ section of TS Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets’,  but it’s hopeless trying to get a photo of the quotation, because you can’t get enough letters in the picture that are readable. However, it says:

And the pool was filled with water of sunlight, and the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, the surface glittered out of heart of light, and they were behind us, reflected in a pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. 

Cooling off.... The Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

The water certainly glittered yesterday, cascading down a flight of steps into the smaller pool, which is where we sat - on the edge, of course, not in the pool itself!  The statue here is called Youth, and shows a boy and girl with an egg and cone (though these last two are difficult to spot as they are partly submerged).

Youth: We sat by this statue of a boy and girl, listening to
water splishing and splashing.

On each side of the fountain are The Guardians, two large stone sculptures which look a bit like sphinxes, and next to them are the two obelisks, Object (Variations). I am not sure whether there is any special significance to the sculptures, and I have to admit the symbolism (if there is any) is lost on me, but it’s a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by. 

One of Mistry's Guardians.

The sculpture I really adore is Antony Gormley’s The Iron Man, which is another feature of the Square, and is a much better guardian for the city than any of Mistry’s pieces. He’s 20 feet high, and stands at angle, tilted slightly backwards, and slightly to one side, with his feet buried in the pavement. He looks like some kind of ancient Egyptian mummy, or alien being, who has landed on earth, feet first, and remained that way ever since watching over the city and its people and is, I feel, a powerful and beneficent presence. To start with the sculpture was called Untitled, but Brummies coined the nickname, and consequently Gormley asked for it to become Iron:Man, referencing the fact that this piece represents the traditional metal-working skills of Birmingham and the Black Country.

The Iron Man: I love this sculpture and its rusty
looking surface, which is not corrosion, but is part
of the design, caused by oxidisation of the metal.

Alongside the Iron Man is the Town Hall, which is based on the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum, and opened in 1834. One of the architects was Joseph Hansom, who invented the Hansom cab, a kind of horse-drawn taxi, but he went bankrupt which delayed construction. Charles Dickens gave public readings at the hall to raise money for the nearby Birmingham and Midland Institute, and the first public performance of Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ took place here. 

Birmingham Town Hall, where Charles Dickens read his work
to packed audiences

Behind the fountain is the Council House, completed in 1879 – before that the council met at all kinds of venues, including a pub. Councillors were so awed by their new home they couldn’t decide what to call it, and held a debate to consider the merits of The Council House, The Municipal Hall, and The Guildhall. I would love to see the inside - I gather the interior is just as grand as the exterior.  

When I first moved to the Midlands, Victoria Square was a very busy, very uninspiring traffic junction, but it was pedestrianised in the early 1990s, when Dhruva Mistry’s water feature was the winning entry in a competition to design a

focal point. The revamped area was opened by Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1994, and has now become popular with tourists and residents of all ages.

Saturday Snapshots is being hosted by Melinda at West Metro Mummy. Use the link to see photos taken by other participants and for full details of the meme.