We'll Never Have Paris Read online

  As a subgenre, the expat memoir or novel frequently follows a narrative arc that takes us on a journey from euphoria (the possibility of escaping, and reinventing oneself elsewhere) to disillusionment (the failure to escape oneself and go native). Fittingly, Jonathan Gibbs’s piece is entitled “Every Story of Paris is also a Story of Disillusion” (p. 67). Tristan Foster parodies the impossibly high expectations of the honeymoon period: his character, we are told, expected nothing less than “sleepy cherubs from the fluffy clouds of Renaissance paintings. Expected to be welcomed by them, almost as if they would be reclining on the linoleum at Charles de Gaulle when she walked through the gates, chubby and rosy-cheeked” (p. 110). Christiana Spens’s heroine states that “Paris had always been a good escape [for her], the best escape of them all” — until now (p. 147). This theme is actually so prevalent that Gavin James Bower fears he may have become a walking (or running) cliché: “I run away to Paris — am I sure I’m not a trope?” (p. 151).

  In Dream Machines (2017), Steven Connor observes that “one travels to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Taj Mahal in order to be transported, in order to experience an intensity of being there that is a kind of transport, a departure from oneself”. Paris often seems to hold out that promise of radical transformation. When asked why he moved there, Luke, in Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance, responds, “To become a different person”. Natalie Ferris points out that Christine Brooke-Rose also conceived of Paris as “a place of renewal, rejuvenation, even rebirth, offering her the chance of a ‘second career, a second life’” (p. 284). For the narrator of Heidi James’s story, the idea of going to live in Paris is an existential choice as opposed to a simple career move: “The other girls were talking about hairdressing, or office work or even going to university, but they were just choosing a career. I felt that I had a choice about what kind of girl I would be, about the persona I could inhabit. That I could choose a me” (p. 74).

  “I should never be a Frenchman, never be one of them,” laments the protagoniwst in Daphne du Maurier’s tale of Anglo-French doppelgängers, The Scapegoat (1957), echoing all those for whom the metamorphosis fails to materialise. In Love Like Salt: A Memoir (2016), Helen Stevenson comes to realise that her move to rural France was “hopelessly English,” just as D.H. Lawrence was aware that his stridently anti-English sentiments were, in fact, a typically English form of self-loathing.7 Disappointment, according to Stuart Walton, is actually a “constitutive factor” in English speakers’ experience of France, and its capital in particular: “It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it” (p. 332).

  In a 1964 letter to Diana Athill, Jean Rhys railed against what she dubbed “America in Paris” or “England in Paris”, dismissing Hemingway and Miller’s take on the city as inauthentic: “The real Paris had nothing to do with that lot. As soon as the tourists came the real Montparnos packed up and left”.8 Where to, she fails to say. In L’Assassinat de Paris, published in 1977, the historian Louis Chevalier also attacked this process of gentrification which, in his view, was turning the city into “a place only Americans could love”. One may wonder, however, if that had not been the plan all along, or at least since the Second Empire (1852-1870)? Perhaps the “real Paris”, if there ever was one, disappeared with Baron Haussmann, whose sanitised, homogenised City of Light — partly designed to prevent the erection of barricades9 — strives a little too hard to be beautiful. For Walter Benjamin, Paris, in the nineteenth century, had been the capital of modernity (understood as reality “dominated by its phantasmagorias”) on account of the “dreamworlds” conjured up by its shopping arcades.10

  An early subtitle to his work, that would grow into The Arcades Project, was “A Dialectical Fairyland”. It was also in this Ville Lumière11 that the Frères Lumière showcased the very first motion pictures. Even May ’68 — ostensibly an insurrection against the society of the spectacle — started at the Cinémathèque. Dylan Trigg thus argues that the tourists who repair to the Starbucks in Montmartre’s Place du Tertre do so “not with a view on effacing the soul of Paris, but precisely in order to preserve the city’s genius loci. Theirs is a Paris that is best viewed from behind the veneer of artifice, and for this reason, theirs is a Paris that is more Parisian than the city itself” (p.). Tom McCarthy conjectures, in a similar spirit, that the nostalgia for a “real Paris” may actually be “built into the experience of being (that is, of failing to “be” authentically) in Paris in the first place” (p.342). The Paris we know was always already a beguiling simulacrum, a facsimile of itself, and possibly a dream — “the fever dream of Paris,” as Julian Hanna puts it — from which we should try to awake (p. 168).

  “Is it possible to become blind to a place?” enquires Owen Booth, “Doesn’t everyone remember going up the Eiffel Tower, at least once, whether or not they actually ever did?” (p. 44). Paris is either too much of a cliché, or not enough (in which case it is no longer recognisably Paris). G.K. Chesterton established a cogent distinction between travellers, who see what they see, and tourists, who see what they have come to see. A traveller, like Jonathan Gibbs, will see that Paris’s famed walkability “is made possible by the shoving of huge swathes of its population, including many generations of immigrants, to the outskirts” (p. 68). In so doing, Will Ashon observes, the French capital has “hollowed itself out and become a theme park, a Disneyland of beauty and culture, a palimpsest of a living city” (p. 301). Although the museumification of Paris is often overstated, perhaps the city, like Eurydice, can only be contemplated nowadays by turning away from it. It is striking how the following pages abound in alternative versions of the French capital, from filmmakers’ “parallel worlds” (Richard Kovitch, p. 185) like Godard’s “futuristic dystopian landscape” in Alphaville (Jeremy Allen, p. 202) to Ian Nairn’s 1968 guidebook, with its tantalising insights into another Paris glimpsed at in the interstitial spaces between the tired tourist attractions (p. 294). Susan Tomaselli outlines the decoy Paris “built during the First World War to confuse German bombers, complete with a sham Champs-Elysées, Gare du Nord, wooden replica factory buildings, illuminated by Fernand Jacopozzi (the man who went on to light the Eiffel Tower with the Citroën logo)” (p. 392).12 C.D. Rose describes Tativille, “a vast Potemkin city, a facsimile Paris, not only with its own concrete buildings, tarmacked streets and functional traffic lights, but also a number of huge trompe l’oeil facades. The scenes at Orly are stage sets with backdrops made entirely of giant blow-ups of the airport. The images reflecting in the endlessly swinging plate glass doors of Playtime (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysées) are photographs. Playtime takes place in a replica, a city of maquettes and projections, one more like the city it needed to be” (p. 224). Jeffrey Zuckerman is more familiar with the “pixel city” on Google Maps than the “real-life one” (p. 509). The Orphic underworld of the Catacombs — that subterranean, “secret version” of Paris, which Sophie Mackintosh describes as “the ghost of the city like a photographic negative” underneath our feet — continues to exert a great deal of fascination (p. 111). It is high time we made our descent.

  I give you Paris, en anglais dans le texte.

  1 This gilded statue is now a rallying point for far-right activists on May Day. See Richard Kovitch, p. 190.

  2 Caroline de Bendern was disinherited by her grandfather because of this photograph that was reproduced the world over, losing an estimated £7.5 million in the process.

  3 As reported in The Times, there were 23 British showgirls at the Moulin Rouge in January 2019 — out of a total of 60 — against only 6 from France. See Heidi James’s short story, p. 74.

  4 See Stewart Home: “‘literary’ ‘Paris’ is a simulation, a series of signs that have no relationship at all with a so-called ‘reality’” (p. 273).

  5 Hilaire Belloc was Anglo-French, but spent most of his life in E
ngland.

  6 Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which marked a revival of interest in experimental fiction in the UK, was first published, in 2005, by Metronome Press, a small Parisbased publishing house inspired by Maurice Girodias.

  7 The move to rural France by many British people does not take place in space so much as in time, the cliché being that their new rural idyll is like a prelapsarian Britain from fifty years ago.

  8 Quoted in Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse. Vintage, 2016, p. 52. See Susanna Crossman’s story (p. 144) and Anna Aslanyan (p. 280).

  9 Barricades reappeared during the Paris Commune and in more theatrical/referential form in May ’68 and at regular intervals ever since.

  10 Two versions of “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (which was the working title for The Arcades Project) were written in 1935 and 1939.

  11 Paris’s sobriquet, la Ville Lumière (the City of Light), is often said to have originated in London.

  12 See Xavier Boissel, Paris est un leurre : la véritable histoire du faux Paris. Editions Inculte, 2012.

  Even As We Plunged Down the Hill

  Max Porter

  Ce qui est marrant, on leur a dit, c’est de descendre la colline à fond, vers les lumières de la ville. Les Anglais étaient défoncés et surexcités; ils essayaient de nous impressionner et on les a regardés s’élancer dans la pente, s’éloigner de la fête et des lumières de l’école, et ils riaient, ils criaient, ils couraient en file indienne comme des animaux en fuite.

  Vous les avez prévenus, pour le grillage ? demanda Magalie. Non, on n’en avait pas parlé. On n’en parlait jamais du grillage. Même à ceux qu’on aimait bien. C’était génial d’entendre le grillage s’étirer à mesure qu’ils rentraient dedans, les uns après les autres. La surprise et puis les rires. Tous les ans ils s’écrasent contre le grillage, dans le noir.

  I insist on buying him a beer by the empty canal; he insists on a discussion of the newest electronic music, the wittiest rappers, the way he turned my story inside out, so the girls were laughing at us, as we laughed at Arcadian wallpaper, French kitsch, at the ever-foolish English, and my translator knows I’m joking, this hasn’t happened yet, I’m simply on pilgrimage to L’Oeil cacodylate, and I know this was years ago anyway, before Océane from Egly, before Abdelhamid Abaaoud, before our honeymoon when my parents paid for us to stay in the smart hotel on the Île de la Cité, and we were so lost and my publisher — this is fifteen years before I wrote a word that might be published — took us for a meal made of coloured mousses, and said sorry, again and again, for the ridiculous traffic, for the Americans, and I thought a high-heel fetish would be the saddest thing here, and I spent an hour in Musique Musique, before the men with scarves around their mouths started throwing bottles at the police, and I said please, really, I loved seeing that, I loved that they let me sleep in George’s room, with the cat, I loved that Magalie wrote to me, it only breaks my heart I lost the letters, it pains me to think of how good I was, back then, aged thirteen, at ping-pong, in the Marly-le-Roi gymnasium, when my name was Michel and my legs were browner, and I strolled past myself, years later, clutching my Cixous, smoking a Camel, kidding myself, I couldn’t know about Journiac’s mass before I was born but I took it as a sign, something unpleasant was coming, such clarity, such glorious wandering loneliness, the English boys were giggling at L’Origine, trying to impress us, but the pollen blocks the French kids crumbled into their little pipes were so strong, the nervous son of the American diplomat was sick, pretty cool, she kept saying, pretty cool, this new way of presenting the colonial art of the past, my friends have long gone, lost in Pantin, and she said she didn’t think we had a future but we should enjoy Paris and we had such nice sex after that, running our fingers along rows of identical beige spines, stopping for a little beer on the way home, the ever-burning shame of the Eurocentric Englishman abroad, the sense of the swelling drill scene, the clumsiness of GCSE French, of the terrible poem “Bodies in the Seine”, of the flimsy memory that perhaps we could hear them laughing even as we plunged down the hill in the darkness, desperate to impress, collecting memories like Victorian diarists, and the taxi driver said They are not Parisians They are Africans ruining this great city, and I fancied saying Let me out I’d rather walk, but I didn’t, because I was pathetic, in Paris, and late for the train.

  French Exchanges

  Chris Power

  My whole family went to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange.

  My brother’s French exchange lived in Meudon. His name was Christophe. My memory of the house is a lot of wood, and a living room on the upper floor, which was something I hadn’t ever seen before. Looking back, I think the house, and the leafy street it was on, were built in a style informed by the Bauhaus.

  But why did we go to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange?

  Christophe’s mother, Uti, was the most European woman I’d ever met. I never saw her without a cigarette, even when she was eating. But my memory of her almost certainly bears no relation to who she is now, or maybe even who she was then. She is a fiction I’ve created by remembering, by forgetting, and by inventing what was forgotten. At one time I thought about her a lot, but now, when I really think about her, I find she barely exists, and the more I concentrate the less of her remains. She is a name and a pair of clogs, a denim skirt, a cigarette and a tanned but indistinct face. I have neglected her and she has disappeared like breath on a mirror. Or like the reason why we went to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange.

  A couple of years after we went to Paris, when my father was working overseas for several months, Lutz, Uti’s husband, told my mother she should take a lover. Lutz said this over the phone, from another country. It would have been different if he and my mother had been face to face, within reach of each other.

  I have never been unfaithful, but I have been with people who were being unfaithful. This is adultery, but is it also infidelity? And does it bring us any closer to working out why we went to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange?

  I text my friend Bart and ask him what his French exchange was called. Laurent Sulpice, he texts back. Nice guy, odd clothes. He disapproved of a lot of things. He came back when he was sixteen and I took him to the Tumbledown Dick a few times. After that I never saw him again.

  A streetlight could be seen from the long, large window in the living room of Christophe’s house, glowing yellow and shrouded by leaves that were black in the night, lime-flesh green near the light, and black again when they were positioned directly between the light and anyone who looked out of the window after nightfall, whether in admiration or anticipation or sorrow or horror, or lost in thought, not even aware of the streetlight, or the street, or the Bauhaus.

  If the reason why we went to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange were a leaf, it would be one that is either too far from the light to be seen, or one positioned directly between the light and myself, standing at the window staring out with an indeterminate expression on my face.

  I text my friend Rob and ask him about his French exchange. Fadil Aimetti, he replies. He has not the stature of a rugbyman. That’s what Fadil wrote in his introductory letter, Rob reminds me: I have not the stature of a rugbyman. He was pretty, with long brown hair. I remember wishing my face was like his face. He was a nice fella, Rob writes of Fadil. My two weeks in Paris were good. Great house. Lovely sister.

  Sister? I text.

  No, Rob replies, that’s not what I meant.

  It was hot in Paris that summer, and our hotel on Rue La Fayette was a shithole. So we didn’t go to pamper ourselves.

  I email my friend Ben about his French exchange. He says he never had one, but I know he did. I was the only one who didn’t have one. I was useless at French, and dropped it before the exchanges ever happened. I know he had one, I just can’t remember who he was.

  I do remember watching Dallas at the house in Meudon. JR spoke in an incredibly deep French voi
ce. Have you ever thought about how the careers of some voiceover artists are tied to the actors they voice? Will Smith or Robert Downey Jr. stop getting hired, and some Frenchman who they never met, or even thought about, has to sell his house and drinks himself to death. Why did we watch Dallas? How much time do you need to spend at a stranger’s house before watching a soap opera becomes viable? You don’t just get through the introductions and then, when the first awkward silence comes along, say, “Well…Dallas?” Not even in the Eighties, when everyone watched it and one of my brothers had a “Who Shot JR?” T-shirt.