Left bank, right bank
Peter Quennell
Paris John Russell (Thames & Hudson £25) The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties William Wiser (Thames & Hudson £8.95)
During the 18th century, itinerant Londoners often drew a sharp com- parison between the fine new buildings, spacious prospects and good modern lighting of their own largely rebuilt city and the confusion, dirt and narrow streets of overcrowded, still half-mediaeval Paris. Today the position has been sadly reversed. One grows fond of London, as of an ugly, amiable old friend; but, except, now and then, in Regent's Park and around Wren's Royal Hospital, one can seldom whole- heartedly admire it; and there are some regions, for example Piccadilly Circus, of which one feels actively ashamed. Has any other major European metropolis a shab- bier and more squalid central point?
No Frenchman, I believe, though he may protest against M. Pompidou's monstrous museum and similarly discordant struc- tures, has ever felt ashamed of Paris; and, besides the noble perspectives that the Baron Haussman opened up, there is a whole quarter, the ancient Marais, full of noble 17th- and early-18th-century town houses, that 'property developers' have respected, and that, not very long ago, was conscientiously and cleverly restored.
John Russell's Paris, which devotes 24 pages to the Marais, is the most informative and best illustrated guide book that I have lately come across. The first edition ap- peared in 1960; but, encouraged by his wife, Rosamond Bernier, founder and co- editor of that admirable magazine L'Oeil, he has now re-equipped it with over 300 plates — a series of excellent contemporary photographs and good reproductions of well-chosen pictures, prints and drawings. In each of his 16 chapters, he concentrates on a different aspect of the city and its im- mediate surroundings, or on an historical period that has contributed to its har- monious evolution.
Paris, of course, has had a savage past; and Parisians seem to pride themselves on their indomitable pugnacity. One remembers, at the time of the Stavisky riots, watching them in a news-reel perform all the actions one associates with revolu- tionary street-warfare — cutting down trees, prising up cobble stones and scatter- ing marbles beneath the hooves of horses; and an eye witness described to me how he
had observed an elderly couple, no doubt a concierge and her husband, disputing fiercely at the end of the bridge that leads towards the Chambre des Deputes. 'We must throw the deputies into the Seine!' he cried. The woman disagreed; but he con- tinued to vociferate that he himself was go- ing to march. At last she submitted. 'All right! Give me the keys!' she said, and turn- ed and left him to his battle.
There are very few Parisian neighbourhoods that have not witnessed revolutionary episodes, and seen a bar- ricade erected. In the quiet Palais Royal (formerly the palace of the Regent d'Orleans, recently the home of a great novelist, the inimitable Madame Colette) an unknown young barrister named Camille Desmoulins once sprang on to a cafe table and delivered an eloquent impromptu speech. The date was 11 July, 1789; and his harangue helped to launch an insurrec- tionary movement that swept out through the nearby streets and culminated, only two days later, in the storming of the Bastille.
John Russell combines his knowledge of history with a professional understanding of the arts; and he is also extremely instruc- tive about the origins and associations of such extraordinary Parisian monuments as Notre-Dame, the Sainte Chapelle and the many-fronted Louvre. Discussing the Chapelle, which every tourist loves, he is obliged to admit that, apart from its marvellously delicate proportions and 'some pieces of thirteenth-century glass', little now remains of the mediaeval fabric; while Notre-Dame has been repeatedly restored and vandalised — notably during the revolution, when the 21 statues of French sovereigns, whose heads are today in the Musee de Cluny, were brutally decapitated. As to the Louvre, it is a glorious architectural hodge-podge. Endlessly planned and replanned by suc- cessive governments and rulers, it has become in its time 'a prison, an arsenal, a mint, a granary, a country seat, a publishing house, a Ministry, a menagerie, an Institute for Advanced Studies, a telegraph station, a shopping arcade, an hotel for visiting heads of state...' It has undergone five centuries of change. The last important alteration, however, took place in 1884.
Although the author is at his best writing of the city's visual splendours and their historical and literary background, 'Pari- sian and Parisienne' provide the subject of a long and interesting chapter. He is a keen spectator of the human comedy, and ex- plains, among much else, why it is that even the most courteous Frenchman occasionally displays a certain restlessness if he hears us try to use his language. 'It is not our mistakes that the French particularly object to ... ' a knowledgeable American jour- nalist told John Russell. 'What they cannot abide is the lack of assurance, the hesita- tion, the low-water pressure with which Americans or Englishmen get their words out'.
My only serious criticism of Paris as a guide book concerns the sheer weight of this handsomely produced volume; one could never hope to carry it around with one as one revisited the scenes that it describes. The Crazy Years, on the other hand, is a lightweight in both meanings of the term. Easy to slip into a coat pocket, it gives us a cheerfully informal account of the Franco-American bohemia that flourished between 1920 and 1930 amid the cafes and studios of the Left Bank, until the New York stock market collapsed and most of the transatlantic expatriates were obliged to hurry home.
Its picturesque opening passage sets the tempo of the narrative: 'He was Modi, she was Noix-de-Coco — or he called her Haricot Rouge that winter of the Great War when the lovers ate nothing but red beans ... ' William Wiser's hero and heroine are better known as the painter Modigliani and his 'last great love' Jeanne Hebuterne whom he had plucked, 'a fresh and tender blossom', from a neighbouring art-school. When Modigliani died of tuber- cular meningitis, his mistress almost im- mediately followed him by jumping from a fifth-floor balcony; and these tragic young people, we learn, were true precursors of the 'crazy' period that followed.
Somewhat unexpectedly, another precur- sor, or 'harbinger of the age', is said to have been the President of France, the manic- depressive Paul Deschanel, who tumbled out of a train in his pyjamas, and was discovered wandering down the track. This too, William Wiser claims, was a strangely significant occurence; and, what is more, while Deschanel was still President, 'two playful but serious revolutionaries of art' Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara — arriv- ed from Zurich 'to sow anarchy in the established patterns of French culture.'
Thus the book rambles comfortablY along, introducing, as it widens its scope, a host of famous or notorious characters — Harry Crosby, 'J. P. Morgan's erratic nephew' and a suicidal dilettante; the poet E. E. Cummings, who arrived in Paris a virgin at the age of 22, and remained a virgin, we are told, some time after he had met 'Marie Louise' at Sultana Cherque's restaurant; Ernest Hemingway and Ger- trude Stein, Picasso, James Joyce, Diaghilev, Chanel, Cocteau, Nancy Cunard, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Natalie Barney, Ezra Pound, Matisse and the eccentric composer Georges Antheil. All are garlanded by William Wiser with amusing scraps of gossip; none is very carefully appraised. The Crazy Years is a pleasantly readable book, despite its obvious limitations; but it does not, I think, make nearly enough of the literary and artistic achievements of the period it chronicles. We often forget how high were the hopes with which the present century began. Picasso and his associates_ looked ahead from the 1920s in a mood of unbounded self-confidence. The so-called 'Crazy Years' or 'Jazz Age' were surely far more imaginative and productive than most of the periods that have succeeded it.
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