Lost In Paris
Few cities have been as idolised and idealised as Poveable feast”. Ernest Hemingway gave the city this epigram, although it has not clung to it as tenaciously as Gearis. I am sure that I am not alone in having plastered the walls of my student room with black and white memorials to the iconic EiffelTower, Champs Elysses and Moulin Rouge. These images travel with me, “a mrtrude Stein’s famous claim that, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown”. Paris is a paradox - a moveable hometown, a mobile residence, a portable place of stability. Or so it seemed for Stein and Hemingway, living and working in the city during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
It was during these years, or more specifically, during the inter-war period, that a vision of Paris as a centre of literary, musical and theatrical output gained momentum. The city lured numerous expatriated writers from America to cross the Atlantic and enjoy the flamboyant, feverish transition from war to modernity. Much has been made of the importance of the cultural and creative contribution of these American artists, including their part in initiating European jazz music. For what epoch better suited Paris, a city renowned for sophistication, that the ‘Jazz Age’? It was during this period, bracketed at one end by the end of World War One and at the other by the Great Depression, that the streets of Paris housed the likes of Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Coco Chanel became a popular name in fashion, Henri Cartier-Bresson began taking photographs, and the first complete edition of Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how different the recent history of European art might have been had Paris not provided a space of convergence.
The assemblage of artists who inhabited Paris during this time is most often celebrated for its contribution to modernism. Indeed, it is modernism that owes the most to Paris. However, critics often have trouble stating this because the term ‘modernism’ is so inadequate to describe the divergent and eclectic body of works that it identifies. Kolocotroni et al. state the problems entailed by a “homogenisation of […] diverse practices”. They claim that even the fail-safe definition that “the essence of the Modernist impulse was the spirit of formal experimentation” ignores the nuances of many of the texts.
Another damaging simplification is the assumption that modernism is heavy-handedly masculine, although a number of interesting studies have been made possible by this premise. The art critic John Berger has extended this argument by suggesting that Paris itself if male: “Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. […] Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
It is only recently that the important work of female literati living in Paris during this period is beginning to be recognised and celebrates. Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1987) posed the important question “'What was it like to be a woman in literary Paris?” and goes some way to answering it. Basing her book on biographical research, Benstock attempts to recreate a picture of a collection of women living and working within a surprisingly limited radius. Andrea Weiss’ study follows along a similar route, providing a glimpse of their lives through a scrapbook of quotes, photos and commentary. Her title, Paris Was a Woman appears to be an indirect retort to Berger.
Women have not, of course, been entirely forgotten in the mapping of modernism. Virginia Woolf is frequently mentioned. Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton and Katherine Mansfield are also beginning to be recognised as significant voices. However, when we look to the Paris names are less familiar. Aside from Gertrude Stein and Jean Rhys, we might think – or fail to think – of Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Colette, H.D, Bryher, Mary Butts, and Anaïs Nin. And where these women are remembered, they are often described as a type. An unconventional type, but a type no less.
“You know that kind of woman.” Or so Djuna Barnes assures us in her short story Katrina Silverstaff. Such a woman is independent, creative, fashionable and thoroughly modern. Benstock describes the type as a “woman whose intellectual and sexual independence was secured by financial privilege and social distinction”. She is of the kind, as many of the writers of this generation are assumed to be, that has succeeded in overcoming the problem of modern city life. Georg Simmel claims that the modern metropolis caused the city-dweller to adamantly “preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence”. According to modern criticism, it would seem that women did the same, tenaciously asserting their individuality in a striking display of female capability.
Perhaps this accurately describes some of the above listed writers, but by no means all. Far from preserving and affirming a distinctive independence, many of these women worked tirelessly to further the cause of literature with little concern for their self image. Sylvia Beach is the most obvious example, ruining herself to support Joyce, despite his seeming indifference to her in later years. Benstock writes “Beach’s memoir is […] so self effacing that we are left with little sense of the woman who played such a pivotal role in Modernism”. Her companion Adrienne Monnier played the mother figure, welcoming customers into her own bookshop for a cup of tea as they perused the books. Jean Rhys avoided, or was denied, such domesticity. However, this was only because she practically obliterated the idea of self-identity and self-awareness in her novels. Her characters passively experience with little ability to establish an autonomous existence for themselves. For her numerous female protagonists, each occurrence “become[s] a disconnected episode to be placed with all the other disconnected episodes which made up her life” (After Leaving Mr MacKenzie).
At the other end of the scale was Gertrude Stein, so desperate to imprint the cultural scene with her own image that she practically re-invented herself as a husband. She is often remembered in memoirs and biographies sat round a table discussing art with Picasso and other male artists, or dominating her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. The feisty modern female imagined by literary and cultural critics is in many cases a fallacy. More often, women were self effacing or chose to assert themselves with a masculine presence. Perhaps this is why so few are regularly recalled beyond Gertrude Stein.
Stein was fiercely protective of her sense of self, and of her possessions and belongings. Perhaps this is unsurprising for a woman who owned the first Picassos. Nonetheless, her statement concerning her time in Paris is revealing: “It was not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important”. For Rhys, Beach and others, their literary output was so fervent that there was little left of themselves by the end. The existing histories and biographies of these writers often end rather bleakly, with them each existing separately, often ignorant as to the survival of any others. Paris drains them financially, emotionally, physically.
Such women did not strive to compete vigorously with their male counterparts, nor did they spend considerable effort making their mark as women. Beach and Monnier were both remarkable in owning their own bookshops, but perhaps they are ill remembered precisely because they were so little concerned with their own image. Rather, they nurtured talents such as Joyce that we now celebrate as the bedrock of modernism. Writers like Colette and Bowen honed the short story form so important to many writers labelled “modernist”. Barnes and Rhys explore the new terrain of the city as women and suffer the consequences; “those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city” (Barnes).
Perhaps it is time for these women to stop being a source of shame to literary history, and for them to be recognised for their selfless contribution to Paris at a time when modernism was flourishing.
It was during these years, or more specifically, during the inter-war period, that a vision of Paris as a centre of literary, musical and theatrical output gained momentum. The city lured numerous expatriated writers from America to cross the Atlantic and enjoy the flamboyant, feverish transition from war to modernity. Much has been made of the importance of the cultural and creative contribution of these American artists, including their part in initiating European jazz music. For what epoch better suited Paris, a city renowned for sophistication, that the ‘Jazz Age’? It was during this period, bracketed at one end by the end of World War One and at the other by the Great Depression, that the streets of Paris housed the likes of Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Coco Chanel became a popular name in fashion, Henri Cartier-Bresson began taking photographs, and the first complete edition of Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how different the recent history of European art might have been had Paris not provided a space of convergence.
The assemblage of artists who inhabited Paris during this time is most often celebrated for its contribution to modernism. Indeed, it is modernism that owes the most to Paris. However, critics often have trouble stating this because the term ‘modernism’ is so inadequate to describe the divergent and eclectic body of works that it identifies. Kolocotroni et al. state the problems entailed by a “homogenisation of […] diverse practices”. They claim that even the fail-safe definition that “the essence of the Modernist impulse was the spirit of formal experimentation” ignores the nuances of many of the texts.
Another damaging simplification is the assumption that modernism is heavy-handedly masculine, although a number of interesting studies have been made possible by this premise. The art critic John Berger has extended this argument by suggesting that Paris itself if male: “Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. […] Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
It is only recently that the important work of female literati living in Paris during this period is beginning to be recognised and celebrates. Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1987) posed the important question “'What was it like to be a woman in literary Paris?” and goes some way to answering it. Basing her book on biographical research, Benstock attempts to recreate a picture of a collection of women living and working within a surprisingly limited radius. Andrea Weiss’ study follows along a similar route, providing a glimpse of their lives through a scrapbook of quotes, photos and commentary. Her title, Paris Was a Woman appears to be an indirect retort to Berger.
Women have not, of course, been entirely forgotten in the mapping of modernism. Virginia Woolf is frequently mentioned. Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton and Katherine Mansfield are also beginning to be recognised as significant voices. However, when we look to the Paris names are less familiar. Aside from Gertrude Stein and Jean Rhys, we might think – or fail to think – of Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Colette, H.D, Bryher, Mary Butts, and Anaïs Nin. And where these women are remembered, they are often described as a type. An unconventional type, but a type no less.
“You know that kind of woman.” Or so Djuna Barnes assures us in her short story Katrina Silverstaff. Such a woman is independent, creative, fashionable and thoroughly modern. Benstock describes the type as a “woman whose intellectual and sexual independence was secured by financial privilege and social distinction”. She is of the kind, as many of the writers of this generation are assumed to be, that has succeeded in overcoming the problem of modern city life. Georg Simmel claims that the modern metropolis caused the city-dweller to adamantly “preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence”. According to modern criticism, it would seem that women did the same, tenaciously asserting their individuality in a striking display of female capability.
Perhaps this accurately describes some of the above listed writers, but by no means all. Far from preserving and affirming a distinctive independence, many of these women worked tirelessly to further the cause of literature with little concern for their self image. Sylvia Beach is the most obvious example, ruining herself to support Joyce, despite his seeming indifference to her in later years. Benstock writes “Beach’s memoir is […] so self effacing that we are left with little sense of the woman who played such a pivotal role in Modernism”. Her companion Adrienne Monnier played the mother figure, welcoming customers into her own bookshop for a cup of tea as they perused the books. Jean Rhys avoided, or was denied, such domesticity. However, this was only because she practically obliterated the idea of self-identity and self-awareness in her novels. Her characters passively experience with little ability to establish an autonomous existence for themselves. For her numerous female protagonists, each occurrence “become[s] a disconnected episode to be placed with all the other disconnected episodes which made up her life” (After Leaving Mr MacKenzie).
At the other end of the scale was Gertrude Stein, so desperate to imprint the cultural scene with her own image that she practically re-invented herself as a husband. She is often remembered in memoirs and biographies sat round a table discussing art with Picasso and other male artists, or dominating her relationship with Alice B. Toklas. The feisty modern female imagined by literary and cultural critics is in many cases a fallacy. More often, women were self effacing or chose to assert themselves with a masculine presence. Perhaps this is why so few are regularly recalled beyond Gertrude Stein.
Stein was fiercely protective of her sense of self, and of her possessions and belongings. Perhaps this is unsurprising for a woman who owned the first Picassos. Nonetheless, her statement concerning her time in Paris is revealing: “It was not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important”. For Rhys, Beach and others, their literary output was so fervent that there was little left of themselves by the end. The existing histories and biographies of these writers often end rather bleakly, with them each existing separately, often ignorant as to the survival of any others. Paris drains them financially, emotionally, physically.
Such women did not strive to compete vigorously with their male counterparts, nor did they spend considerable effort making their mark as women. Beach and Monnier were both remarkable in owning their own bookshops, but perhaps they are ill remembered precisely because they were so little concerned with their own image. Rather, they nurtured talents such as Joyce that we now celebrate as the bedrock of modernism. Writers like Colette and Bowen honed the short story form so important to many writers labelled “modernist”. Barnes and Rhys explore the new terrain of the city as women and suffer the consequences; “those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city” (Barnes).
Perhaps it is time for these women to stop being a source of shame to literary history, and for them to be recognised for their selfless contribution to Paris at a time when modernism was flourishing.
