We'll Never Have Paris Read online

  WE’LL

  NEVER

  HAVE

  PARIS

  WE’LL

  NEVER

  HAVE

  PARIS

  To my father, François Gallix — an inveterate Parisian,

  forever reading or scribbling away in cafés.

  To my son, William Gallix, who was born in Paris. The

  light of my city.

  To my mother, Carole Jessop, née Wanless (1942-2017),

  a Londoner who once resided in Paris. I miss you so much.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Andrew Gallix

  Even As We Plunged Down the Hill

  Max Porter

  French Exchanges

  Chris Power

  The Things I Don’t Remember

  Owen Booth

  Always Fourteen

  Rosalind Jana

  Free Man in Paris

  Jennifer Hodgson

  Laisse Tomber

  S.J. Fowler

  Paris Doesn’t Belong to Us

  Greg Gerke

  Every Story of Paris is also a Story of Disillusion

  Jonathan Gibbs

  The Au Pair

  Emily S. Cooper

  French Lessons

  Heidi James

  Some Standard Paradise

  Nathan Dragon

  Parc des Princes

  Wendy Erksine

  Very Little Romance and Very Little Dialogue

  Ashton Politanoff

  Master Framer

  Kathryn Scanlan

  To Disturb So Many Charms

  Utahna Faith

  To Sing

  Tristan Foster

  Catacombs

  Sophie Mackintosh

  Pilgrimage

  Tomoé Hill

  Marlene or Number 16

  Yelena Moskovich

  Yulia

  Donari Braxton

  Wear the Lace

  Susanna Crossman

  The Blues, the Yellow Sheets

  Christiana Spens

  Living Without

  Gavin James Bower

  The Hanged Man

  Joanna Walsh

  Of Père Lachaise, On Business

  Eley Williams

  Paris: A Manifesto in Twenty Arrondissements

  Julian Hanna

  Paris Montage: Coincidence is the Mystery of the Metropolis; Montage Crystallizes that Chaos

  Richard Skinner

  Paris at 24 Frames a Second

  Richard Kovitch

  The Past is a Foreign City

  David Collard

  Waiting for Godard

  Jeremy Allen

  Paris Belongs to Us

  Elsa Court

  After Agnès

  Niven Govinden

  In Search of the Grinning Cats

  Adam Scovell

  Hulot sur la jetée

  C.D. Rose

  Props

  Laura Waddell

  Music For French Films

  Nicholas Royle

  Paris, You and Me

  Gerard Evans

  Flogging a Dead Clothes Horse

  Thom Cuell

  Paris Does Not Exist

  Stewart Home

  City Not Paris

  Anna Aslanyan

  Manna in Mid-Wilderness

  Natalie Ferris

  Central Committee

  Owen Hatherley

  No Baudelaires in Babylon

  Tom Bradley

  Waiting For Nothing to Happen

  Andrew Gallix

  Donut

  Will Ashon

  What Was His Name?

  John Holten

  The Irish Genius

  Gerry Feehily

  Paris Syndrome

  Dylan Trigg

  Siren Orgasms: Leftovers From an Unfinished Novel

  Fernando Sdrigotti

  The Arraignment of Paris

  Stuart Walton

  Stalingrad

  Will Wiles

  Paris Perdu

  Tom McCarthy

  a mnemopolis, a necropole !

  Andrew Robert Hodgson

  Ten Fragments of an Idea of Paris Already Imagined by You

  Lee Rourke

  The Total City

  Will Self interviewed by Jo Mortimer

  Feeling in Neon

  Cal Revely-Calder

  Terminus Nord

  Adam Roberts

  Poisson Soluble

  Lauren Elkin

  Ghosting

  Susan Tomaselli

  An Exhausting Attempt at Finding a Place in Paris

  Steve Finbow

  At a Remove

  Cody Delistraty

  The Private Life of Quasimodo

  H.P. Tinker

  Three Pear-Shaped Pieces

  Russell Persson

  Mirabeau Passing

  David Hayden

  Flowing, Slow, Violent — A Fantasy

  Daniela Cascella

  Peacock Pie in Paris

  Adrian Grafe

  Dreams of the Dead - IX

  Alex Pheby

  Defunge

  Richard Marshall

  Not-Beckett

  Toby Litt

  Paris, Isidore Isou, and Me

  Andrew Hussey

  Le Palace

  Nicholas Rombes

  Petite vilaine

  Susana Medina

  Existentialism is Gay

  Isabel Waidner

  The Identity of Indiscernibles

  Nicholas Blincoe

  The Parting Sea

  Evan Lavender-Smith

  Celesteville’s Burning: A Work in Regress

  Andrew Gallix

  The Map Rather Than the Territory

  Jeffrey Zuckerman

  Still Paris

  Sam Jordison

  The House of George

  Paul Ewen

  Anchovies

  Brian Dillon

  Belfast to Paris

  Robert McLiam Wilson

  Missing Paris

  Rob Doyle

  Contributors

  “When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it.”

  — Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Hedonism”, Short Talks, 1992

  Introduction

  Andrew Gallix

  In February 1993, the Times Literary Supplement devoted a special issue to France. Articles on all things Gallic, from Louis XVI to Roland Barthes, were announced on the cover, illustrated by a black-and-white shot of a young woman on the banks of the Seine. It was taken surreptitiously by Robert Doisneau, as part of a series for Paris Match documenting the heatwave of 1948. The young woman is sitting on the cobblestones of the Île de la Cité, a typewriter balanced on her lap. With her stylish sunglasses, short skirt and bare feet, she seems to epitomise Left Bank bohemian chic. In fact, she turns out to be English author Emma Smith, hard at work on her second novel.

  Fast-forward to May 1968, and one of the most iconic images of les événements, captured by Jean-Pierre Rey for Life magazine. You can just about make out an elderly couple surveying the march of History from the fifth-floor balcony of a typical Haussmannian building. Below, on Place Edmond-Rostand, a tidal wave of students. Another young woman, perched on a friend’s shoulders, rises above the fray, brandishing the Vietcong flag. Her attitude is reminiscent of the equestrian sculpture of Joan of Arc that stands on Place des Pyramides, although her steed is almost completely obscured.1 All that remains of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the avant-garde artist who translated Burroughs and Ginsberg into French, is a raised fist and shock of hair. The young woman is not chanting slogans or singing “L’Internationale” like her fellow demonstrators, as though her abi
lity to be spoken through — to channel France’s revolutionary spirit while conforming to the allegorical, muse-like status imposed upon her by the male gaze behind the camera — were predicated on her own silence. Or is it simply that she does not know the words? This is a distinct possibility. After all, who better to embody the figure of Marianne in this improvised re-enactment of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, than Caroline de Bendern, an English fashion model of solid aristocratic stock?2

  A few years ago, as I was having a drink with Christiana Spens in Montmartre, a middle-aged American couple alighted at the next table. After a while, the woman, who kept looking over, plucked up enough courage to ask Christiana — not in so many words, but through a series of gestures — if she could take her picture. I was tickled by the idea that they would now go home, to deepest Wyoming or wherever, with their faith in glamorous Parisian women firmly reaffirmed. What they say is all true, they would tell them back home, producing the likeness of a British author as incontrovertible evidence.3

  It is this incident which put me in mind of Doisneau and Rey’s famous pictures, setting off a train of thought about the extent to which our vision of literary Paris has been shaped by anglophone writers. By “literary Paris” I do not mean the city’s depiction in works of literature (Hugo, Balzac and Proust will always trump foreign competitors on that front) or even Saint-Germain-des-Prés’ café society, but rather the more nebulous notion of Paris as the very space of literature.4 A place, crucially, that you have to go to in order to become, be recognised as, and lead the life of a writer. As Julian Hanna puts it, “We left our provincial towns and descended on Paris like the chosen ones, wearing black polo necks, in the hope we’d be recognised by others like us” (p. 171). In Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance (1998), a novel haunted by Scott Fitzgerald, Luke relocates to the French capital, from England, for the express purpose of writing a book, which he abandons as soon as he begins leading the life “intended to serve as its research, its first draft”. The inference, here, is that Luke is a bit of a poseur, but also that Paris is a city where literature can actually be lived out — where you can be a writer without writing. This fantasy of Paris as the locus of an art-life merger recurs throughout the present volume. The narrator of John Holten’s short story decrees that “making an art of everyday life is the aspirational art of living in Paris, everything else is tourism” (p. 307). The young Brian Dillon used to dream of “a city that bristled with profound, radical, stylish thought” (p. 539). Lee Rourke would conjure up Parisian streets that were “alive with intellectual conversation, in that uncaring, fuck you kind of way you’ve always wished existed, those long-winded conversations about Proust with crazed taxi drivers trundling across the arrondissements in wild abandon you’ve always imagined happened” (p. 352). Lauren Elkin’s English character ascribes a young man’s abstract cast of mind to the city he was brought up in: “It seemed easy for him to think that way, having grown up right here, in Paris, near the Jardin du Luxembourg, with all of that literary and cinematic history steeped in his everyday life” (pp. 386-387). “Can you imagine that in England?” enquires Nicholas Royle’s incredulous protagonist, “Streets named after abstract ideas, things that don’t exist?” (p. 241). For the likes of Tomoé Hill, travelling to Paris is a pilgrimage, not a city break: “We go to Paris reverent: as if the city was a heart in a reliquary beating with the words of writers instead of blood” (p. 114) — words which are not, of course, necessarily French ones.

  My contention — and a contentious one it is too — is that the bohemian Paris people think of most readily outside of France — the ur-cliche, if you will — is anglophone. It is the Paris of Hemingway, Joyce, and Shakespeare and Company before being that of Rimbaud and Verlaine or Sartre and de Beauvoir. If we accept this as true, or at least partly so, it is doubtless due to the hegemony of the English language and imperialism of Hollywood as much as the appeal of Hemingway’s blueprint. Scandinavians, say, or Latin Americans, have their own take on this myth, revolving around their own writers’ interaction with the French capital, but these versions are mainly consumed locally. Enrique Vila-Matas provides an interesting case study. In the mid-Seventies, he spent a couple of years eating croque-monsieurs at the Café de Flore and writing a novel (what else?) in a chambre de bonne belonging to Marguerite Duras (a dingy garret for which he never paid rent). Never Any End to Paris (2003), the autobiographical novel that chronicles this period, reads like a roll-call of French intellectual life — the Spanish author cannot nip out to the Drugstore Saint-Germain (now a fashion emporium) without bumping into Roland Barthes — and yet his role model, throughout, remains American. It is the desire to lead a “writer’s life” à la Hemingway that brings him to Paris in the first place, and the whole novel (as its title suggests) provides a running commentary on — and failed re-enactment of — A Moveable Feast.

  How many French authors does Hemingway encounter, or even mention, in A Moveable Feast? To be honest, apart from Blaise Cendrars, I cannot name a single one off the top of my head. All those that come to mind are either American (Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, John Dos Passos), Irish (James Joyce) or English (Ford Maddox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley).5 Paris, for Jonathan Gibbs when he was growing up, was akin to “the drop-in sets of a cardboard toy theatre: the ideal backdrop to whatever drama you imagined you might one day star in” (p. 67). It was also, above all, a cheap-as-frites backdrop for the Lost Generation, which is one of the reasons why the city could be construed as a moveable feast. Will Wiles’s astute observation that the French capital is a “uniquely memetic city” — that its “distinctiveness has been paradoxically easy for other cities to emulate” — also applies to historic bohemian areas, such as London’s Soho or New York’s Greenwich Village, which almost invariably have a whiff of Montmartre or Latin Quarter about them (p. 337). Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s as a place “where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were,” adding that this was “like having a great treasure given to you”. That treasured lifestyle was swept away by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. As Will Ashon remarks, artists thrive where there is “affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate. Which is to say, you can’t be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either” (p. 301).

  Paris used to have the added advantage of offering a rather laissez-faire attitude in matters of morality that was conducive to artistic creation, especially if you were writing in a foreign language. Jack Kahane, the self-styled “booklegger” from Manchester launched his Obelisk Press in 1929, just as the Lost Generation were packing up, in order to circumvent and cash in on Anglo-American censorship. Subsidising serious, albeit often risqué, literary works by flogging “db’s” (dirty books) — some of which he tossed off himself — Kahane published the likes of Cyril Connolly, James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin and, perhaps most famously, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) that was banned in the United States. His son, Maurice Girodias, went on to launch the Olympia Press, which released the first editions of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), as well as the works of that notorious Scottish émigré, Alexander Trocchi.6 National characteristics are not set in stone, however, as Stuart Walton reminds us: “If the perduring English cultural temperament is a rumbustious pleasure in living, its French counterpart is seen as glacial contempt, the aridity of an over-bureaucratised polity, notwithstanding the fact that Victorian England invented the chilly reserve in social manners for which the British have been noted ever since, while pleasure in living went by its proper name, joie de vivre, across the Channel” (p. 334). Jeremy Allen recounts how, in a surprising reversal of stereotypes, it took “some rosbifs from across the Channel” (Ian McEwan and Andrew Birkin) plus a fervently Francophile Scot (Gilbert Adair) “to juice things up and consummate the relationship” between Cocteau’s terrible twins (p. 198).

  Due to a variety of factors — the laun
ch of the Eurostar in 1994, the growing presence of American and British universities, the rejuvenation of Shakespeare and Company, Brexit — Paris is once again at the heart of the anglophone literary scene. It is increasingly a sort of neutral meeting ground for writers and readers from across the Anglosphere, hence, I think, the timeliness of the present experiment. Out of seventy-nine authors included here, only eight currently live in Paris. Many of the others have resided in the French capital for a period of time (running from several weeks to several years), either recently or, in some cases, decades ago, often seeking out a sense of cultural and linguistic estrangement. The remainder is split between those who have at least visited the city and those who have not. The inclusion of the latter category was essential to the overall project, not only because they are very talented writers, but also because the remit would, of necessity, become an Oulipian-style constraint in their case. (Incidentally, Georges Perec is a recurring figure, notably in Andrew Robert Hodgson’s comic quest for the ever elusive “Perec café” on Place Saint-Sulpice, p. 345). In Wendy Erskine’s short story, probably set in Northern Ireland, a schoolboy seeks daily refuge in the Parc des Princes stadium on his FIFA video game (p. 83). In Ashton Politanoff’s contribution, Paris makes a cameo in the guise of a French movie watched by a character on TV (p. 88). Under Kathryn Scanlan’s pen, Paris fades further into the background, only appearing through the brief mention of street scenes on lithographic prints (p. 94). “There are many ways of not going to Paris,” writes C.D. Rose (p. 218), and one of them is to claim — like Nathan Dragon’s protagonist — to have gone there without actually going (“None of the fuss and trouble”). The City of Light he imagines is like “three famous monuments from different parts of town stuck in a snowglobe all next to each other in yellowing water” (p. 80). In Midnight in Paris (2011), Woody Allen uses a similar technique, juxtaposing bits of the Left Bank with bits of the Right Bank, thereby cutting out the boring, unpicturesque bits in the middle, so that the characters might be in Montmartre one minute and the next strolling along the river Seine.

  Francophilia is often linked to what Jeremy Allen describes as English speakers’ “undisclosed inferiority complex” vis-à-vis French culture — a feeling that may well date back to the Norman Conquest (p. 201). It is symbolised, in Susanna Crossman’s story, by the contrast between Hélène’s sophisticated lingerie and Charlotte’s “mismatched bra and pants” (p. 141). Max Porter evokes the “ever-burning shame of the Eurocentric Englishman abroad” (p. 36). Stuart Walton argues that what “the Anglo-Saxon temperament hopes to find in Paris is the apotheosis of high culture, of a culture it is sportingly willing to admit he lacks, for a weekend at least, in the encounter with its essence” (p. 334), or as Stewart Home puts it, somewhat more bluntly, “Francophilia is so often a silly snobbery cultivated by rich idiots and would-be social climbers who want to project an image of being refined” (p. 274). S.J. Fowler’s boyhood antics in a city he experienced as “full of itself” and inimical to kids from Cornwall are “vividly placed in cultural terms” by his “aspirational working-class family”: “What will the French think of English children?” (p. 56). At Les Deux Magots, Greg Gerke’s narrator replays the opposition between robust New World vulgarity and effete Continental sophistication in ironic mode: “The popular cliché about the French, a cliché restated by my countrymen, is that they think Americans don’t know how to live. We are savage and deficient in certain refined aspects pertaining to composure, compunction, and, certainly, culture and its expression. As I primped for my wife’s picture of me, tipping my miniature cup of coffee with my pinky pointed out and cheeks sucked in, we could come close to the pitiful, ugly American, miming the etiquette he is so destined never to encompass” (pp. 56-66).