discussing ideas.
It is easy to see why this Paris was so much more congenial to Henry than the New York he had fled—a New York dominated by the crash of 1929, and the decade of mad optimism about business that had preceded it. Here Henry’s inability to keep a job, about which he always had guilt feelings, was the precursor of art. Henry was enough of his mother’s son to wonder whether he was a genius or a ne’er-do-well. In Paris, at least, that question was settled.
Even Georges Belmont (known in those days as Pelorson), a good boy from the Ecole Normale Superiéure, fled both the Sorbonne and the intellectual life and went instead to Montparnasse.
Montparnasse got particularly interesting late. It was after eleven that the real things began. You had the kind of people who didn’t care if they got up at twelve—who had absolutely no positive reason to get up at six o’clock or seven o’clock to go to work. And it’s very difficult to capture this—there was life , there was movement , all the time.
Despite the economic collapse, there were plenty of Americans in Paris “and the Americans were still jolly,” according to Georges. They continued to act as if they were on holiday. “They were important because they still had money and they liked to spend it.”
Paris was also the center of sin. Opposite La Coupole was the Select, a gathering place for homosexuals of both sexes. And there was a kind of tolerance there still unknown in New York. In fact it was the sort of place where one was embarrassed to be straight. Again, in Georges’s description:
It was a kind of zoo. Lots of people didn’t dare enter the place because they didn’t feel at ease. I had a very good homosexual friend whom I had known at school, so I was accepted. My friend lived with one of the queens of the lesbians in Paris—and they were in love. They never made love—but they were in love and they were both terribly jealous. Once I saw a marriage there. Two men got married. One was dressed in a long, white gown, a crown of orange flowers, a veil, everything. They exchanged rings, received a religious blessing from a pseudo-priest. That was the essence of Montparnasse in those days.
“Montparnasse in those days.” A different sense of time. The contrast between the New York of Crazy Cock and Moloch and the Paris of Tropic of Cancer is just this. And it is this different sense of time that creates freedom. Paris breathes freedom into Henry and Henry responds by breathing it into his prose.
I think few of us in the world of the nineties are aware of how much we have lost now that such leisure has gone. Most of us are imprisoned in our own schedules, our days broken into half-hour fragments like the rulings in our Filofaxes. It is almost as if our notebooks rule us, rather than us ruling them. The life of the cafés, of talk, of walk, of leisure, of dolce far niente seems an indulgence to us, as does reading, dreaming, sleeping. There are “successful” people in our world who boast of how little sleep they get, who compete at being busy. But the truth is that all creativity takes idleness; when we lose it, we lose our ability to invent the next phase of problem-solving for the human race.
There was a vast difference between prewar and postwar days in Paris. World War I had turned Europe upside down and left an unparalleled despair in the writers and intellectuals who flocked to Paris in its wake. Inner and outer weather had changed—as had fashions. Bowler hats, celluloid collars, gas lamps, and horses had disappeared. Women had finally been liberated from whalebone and now wore comfortable clothes—what would later be called a unisex look. The Jazz Age had liberated both bodies and minds.
Now, suddenly, the boom atmosphere of twenties’ Paris was gone, and with it the superfluity of parasites (designers, art dealers, courtesans) who live on the reverberations of boom.
The change between 1928 and 1930 was abrupt—suddenly
It is easy to see why this Paris was so much more congenial to Henry than the New York he had fled—a New York dominated by the crash of 1929, and the decade of mad optimism about business that had preceded it. Here Henry’s inability to keep a job, about which he always had guilt feelings, was the precursor of art. Henry was enough of his mother’s son to wonder whether he was a genius or a ne’er-do-well. In Paris, at least, that question was settled.
Even Georges Belmont (known in those days as Pelorson), a good boy from the Ecole Normale Superiéure, fled both the Sorbonne and the intellectual life and went instead to Montparnasse.
Montparnasse got particularly interesting late. It was after eleven that the real things began. You had the kind of people who didn’t care if they got up at twelve—who had absolutely no positive reason to get up at six o’clock or seven o’clock to go to work. And it’s very difficult to capture this—there was life , there was movement , all the time.
Despite the economic collapse, there were plenty of Americans in Paris “and the Americans were still jolly,” according to Georges. They continued to act as if they were on holiday. “They were important because they still had money and they liked to spend it.”
Paris was also the center of sin. Opposite La Coupole was the Select, a gathering place for homosexuals of both sexes. And there was a kind of tolerance there still unknown in New York. In fact it was the sort of place where one was embarrassed to be straight. Again, in Georges’s description:
It was a kind of zoo. Lots of people didn’t dare enter the place because they didn’t feel at ease. I had a very good homosexual friend whom I had known at school, so I was accepted. My friend lived with one of the queens of the lesbians in Paris—and they were in love. They never made love—but they were in love and they were both terribly jealous. Once I saw a marriage there. Two men got married. One was dressed in a long, white gown, a crown of orange flowers, a veil, everything. They exchanged rings, received a religious blessing from a pseudo-priest. That was the essence of Montparnasse in those days.
“Montparnasse in those days.” A different sense of time. The contrast between the New York of Crazy Cock and Moloch and the Paris of Tropic of Cancer is just this. And it is this different sense of time that creates freedom. Paris breathes freedom into Henry and Henry responds by breathing it into his prose.
I think few of us in the world of the nineties are aware of how much we have lost now that such leisure has gone. Most of us are imprisoned in our own schedules, our days broken into half-hour fragments like the rulings in our Filofaxes. It is almost as if our notebooks rule us, rather than us ruling them. The life of the cafés, of talk, of walk, of leisure, of dolce far niente seems an indulgence to us, as does reading, dreaming, sleeping. There are “successful” people in our world who boast of how little sleep they get, who compete at being busy. But the truth is that all creativity takes idleness; when we lose it, we lose our ability to invent the next phase of problem-solving for the human race.
There was a vast difference between prewar and postwar days in Paris. World War I had turned Europe upside down and left an unparalleled despair in the writers and intellectuals who flocked to Paris in its wake. Inner and outer weather had changed—as had fashions. Bowler hats, celluloid collars, gas lamps, and horses had disappeared. Women had finally been liberated from whalebone and now wore comfortable clothes—what would later be called a unisex look. The Jazz Age had liberated both bodies and minds.
Now, suddenly, the boom atmosphere of twenties’ Paris was gone, and with it the superfluity of parasites (designers, art dealers, courtesans) who live on the reverberations of boom.
The change between 1928 and 1930 was abrupt—suddenly
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