Summer Teen Workshop Day 2 : American expats in Paris

Excerpt from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

"In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.
I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.
There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.
I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches and an early book of D.H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace , and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.
“You won’t be back very soon if you read all that,” Sylvia said.
“I’ll be back to pay,” I said. “I have some money in the flat.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You pay whenever it’s convenient.”
“When does Joyce come in?” I asked.
“If he comes in, it’s usually very late in the afternoon,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen him?”
“We’ve seen him at Michaud’s eating with his family,” I said. “But it’s not polite to look at people when they are eating, and Michaud’s is expensive.”
“Do you eat at home?”
“Mostly now,” I said. “We have a good cook.”
“There aren’t any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?”
“No. How did you know?”
“Larbaud lived there,” she said. “He liked it very much except for that.”
“The nearest good cheap place to eat is over by the Panthéon.”
“I don’t know that quarter. We eat at home. You and your wife must come sometime.”
“Wait until you see if I pay you,” I said. “But thank you very much.”
“Don’t read too fast,” she said.
Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container, not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse. With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, and pictures we liked on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat. When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.
“But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay,” she said.
“Sure I will,” I said. “We’ll both go. And then we’ll walk down by the river and along the quais.”
“Let’s walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.”
“Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.”
“We can have two drinks.”
“Then we can eat somewhere.”
“No. Don’t forget we have to pay the library.”
“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.”
“And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.”
“No. Never.”
“What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we’d better have lunch.”
“I’m very hungry,” I said. “I worked at the café on a café crème.”
“How did it go, Tatie?”
“I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?”
“Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart.”
“And we’re going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them.”
“Would that be honest?”
“Sure.”
“Does she have Henry James too?”
“Sure.”
“My,” she said. “We’re lucky that you found the place.”
“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too."

Portrait of Hemingway by Henry Strater, 1922/23

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.” 

                                   -Hemingway’s 1958 statement about his writing

Strater omitted one side of Heming way’s face, his gaze, his hands, etc .

Discuss the effect of the Strater’s omissions . What do the omissions suggest about Hemingway’s personality or Strater’s opinion of Hemingway?

Great Walk: Artists and Writers of the Left Bank

Some of the greatest artists and writers of the 20th century were attracted to the winding streets and bustling boulevards of Paris's Left Bank between the end of WWI and the social upheavals of the 1960s.

Winding Streets of the Quartier Latin

The streets around Place de la Contrescarpe have hardly changed since they were immortalized in Hemingway's Moveable Feast. He lived at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine (down the street from James Joyce at No. 71) and worked at 39 rue Descartes. George Orwell lived nearby, at 6 rue Pot de Fer, while writingDown and Out in Paris and London. The famous bookshopShakespeare & Co. recently lost its owner, George Whitman, in 2011, but his daughter Sylvia continues his legacy in a medieval house at 37 rue de la Bûcherie; many of the Beat Generation writers who frequented it in the '60s, like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, stayed in the Hôtel de Vieux Paris,aka the "Beat Hotel," at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur. Pablo Picasso perfected his cubist style at 7 rue des Grands Augustins from 1936 to 1955.

The Heyday of St-Germain-des-Près

Follow Rue St-André-des-Arts and Rue de Seine to Rue Jacob, home to American writers like Djuna Barnes, who stayed at the Hôtel d'Angleterre at No. 44. On the corner of Rue Bonaparte isLe Pré aux Clercs, where Hemingway and Fitzgerald shared many a drink. Henry Miller lived up the street at 24 rue Bonaparte and later at No. 36. Pass the home of Jean-Paul Sartre at No. 42 to the square that now bears his and Simone de Beauvoir's names. Along noisy Boulevard St-Germain are theDeux Magots, Café de Flore, and Brasserie Lipp, legendary establishments frequented by the couple as well as by Faulkner, Camus, Apollinaire, André Gide, Giacometti, Cocteau, Duras, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and André Breton. Bookshops like La Hune still give the area intellectual character despite the proliferation of fashion boutiques.

Odéon and Luxembourg Gardens

At 12 rue de l'Odéon a plaque commemorating Sylvia Beach's publication of James Joyce's Ulysses marks the original location of Shakespeare & Co., which closed in 1944. On Rue de Vaugirard, Faulkner lived at No. 42 and Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda at No. 58. Man Ray's studio is still intact at No. 2 bis, rue Ferou. Hemingway lived at No. 6 for a year, writing often about the Luxembourg Gardens.

Montparnasse

Leaving the Luxembourg Gardens, follow Rue du Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived at No. 27, entertaining artists and writers such as Picasso, Matisse, Erik Satie, and New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner. Stein's friends Ezra Pound and Hemingway—who moved a lot—lived nearby on Rue Notre-Dame des Champs (at No. 70 and No. 113, respectively), near Boulevard Montparnasse, the expat epicenter a decade before St-Germain held that distinction. Some of the establishments still here are Closerie des Lilas No. 171), Le Sélect (No. 99), Le Dôme (No. 18), La Rotonde (No. 105), and La Coupole (No. 102), where Modigliani, Dalí, Samuel Beckett, Colette, and Miró rubbed shoulders. Rue Delambre leads to the Cimetière du Montparnasse, the final resting place for many of the illustrious names of the Left Bank, including publishers Hachette and Larousse; artists Man Ray, Kiki de Montparnasse, Brancusi, and Brassaï; and writers like Baudelaire, Ionesco, Sartre et Beauvoir, Beckett, and Duras.