Paris under mellankrigstiden var ett Mecka för engelskspråkiga författare: fransmännen tog lättare på det här med osedlighet och hade en liberalare inställning i tryckfrihetsfrågor samtidigt som francen gjorde det billigt att bo i staden. Därför kunde man vid förutom Notre Dame och Eiffeltorn gå på spaning efter författare som Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald eller Pound. Ett av de ställen där man i händelse av sådan spaning hade störst chans att få syn på någon av dem var kring var Sylvia Beachs boklåda Shakespeare and Company. Förutom bokhandel var den mötesplats, bibliotek, postfack, bank och till slut även förlag: visserligen bara för James Joyce, och främst för hans Odysseus, men bara det är mer än nog för att ge den en plats i litteraturhistorien.

Den har dessutom gett namn åt hennes memoarer, vilka, föga förvånande, ägnar mycket utrymme åt just Joyce. Beach tycks haft en väl accepterande inställning till hans beteende, och som läsare undrar man om sättet hon ständigt sätter honom och hans författarskap i främsta rummet är riktigt sunt. Hans oförmåga att handskas med pengar gör att hon får nöja sig om hon får tillbaka de rent monetära utläggen, när hon kanske själv skulle behövt en viss inkomst för att få hela rörelsen att gå runt – till slut måste hon sälja av ett par förstautgåvor av Hemingway för att hålla butiken flytande.

Hemingway är annars den av författarna som får näst mest utrymme: han ser till att Odysseus kan smugglas in i högmoralismens förbuds-USA, han tar med Beach och hennes närmsta väninna Adrienne Monnier – som drev boklåda på andra sidan gatan från Shakespeare and Company – på boxning och cykellopp, och när andra världskriget håller på att ta slut och befrielsen kommer till Paris, vem är det om inte han som leder upprensningen på Beachs gata?

Den lätt roat överseende intsällning till perioden som präglar Hemingways skildring av samma tid, En fest för livet, saknas i Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia Beach tog vad hon sysslade med på yttersta allvar. Det gör inte berättande tråkigt, men det är heller inte lika roande som när Hemingway beskriver Fitzgeralds neuroser eller hur han sitter på cafe och skriver. Beachs bok är inte stor litteratur, men trevlig läsning för den med intresse för mellankrigstidens litteratur och litteratörer.

(sobre James Joyce)

Sua maneira de se expressar era desinflamada; não via utilidade em superlativos. Descrevia até os piores acontecimentos como “aborrecimentos”. Nem mesmo “um grande aborrecimento”; não passavam de “aborrecimentos”. Acho que ele não gostava da palavra “muito”. “Por que dizer ‘muito bonito’?, ouvi-o reclamar certa vez. “‘Bonito’ basta.”

It was January 1922 and Ernest Hemingway and his new bride Hadley Richardson had recently arrived in Paris. One of the first places Hemingway visited was the bookstore (and rental library) known as Shakespeare and Company on 12 Rue de l’Odeon. On the advice from Sherwood Anderson EH met with another American Sylvia Beach who had opened S&C in 1919. I always found it interesting what EH borrowed from Sylvia during that initial meeting – he had no money on him at the time and she said not to worry and that he could pay her back another time.  The books that he borrowed that very first time were:

-A Sportsman’s Sketches, 2 volumes, by Turgenev

-Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence

-War and Peace, Constance Garnett edition

-Gambler and Other Stories, Dostoyevski

Gisele Freund, Three generations of Joyces. James Joyce, seated, Giorgio standing, and Stephen playing with Schiap the dog Schiaparelli gave him, while Helen Joyce (Giorgio’s wife) looks on. Taken in the garden of Giorgio’s house in Paris, 1938

Gisele Freund, [James Joyce in Sylvia Beach's book shop], 1938

Gisele Freund, [James Joyce in Sylvia Beach's book shop], 1938

Today is Bloomsday.
The day when most of Ulysses takes place.
The day in 1904 when James Joyce first went for a walk with Nora Barnacle…

James Joyce can be heard here (with a text by Sylvia Beach)…

Here’s one of our favorite photography-related passages in the book, it’s Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus speaking by the sea…
“… Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.
Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure…”

(In ascolto: Faith/Void – Bill Callahan)

Immaginate un romanzo in cui i protagonisti hanno i nomi di Ezra Pound, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach o Gertrude Stein. Immaginate un uomo che ricorda. E date ai ricordi di quest’uomo i nomi delle strade di Parigi. Infine date all’uomo il nome di Ernest Hemingway, e vi troverete tra le mani le pagine di Festa Mobile. Un libro che si lascia amare per la malinconia di un tempo perduto, e con ostinazione ritrovato. Se poi si è giovani, e si ha un’insana passione per la letteratura e la scrittura, questo libro, come Martin Eden di Jack London, diventerà una guida esistenziale.

Next month brings the world an expanded edition of A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s look back on his life in Paris during the Twenties. Where the original edition opened with a rundown of the things Hemingway wasn’t going to talk about, this feastier Feast will finally clue us in on “the Stade Anastasie where the boxers served as waiters at the tables set out under the trees and the ring was in the garden” (I’ll bet nobody ever complained about the food at that joint) as well as the training with  fighter Larry Gains. I’m eager to see what else.

A Moveable Feast was completed shortly before Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 and was heavily edited by his widow, Mary Hemingway prior to its publication in 1964. ”Heavily edited” in the sense that Mary, as The Fourth Mrs. Hemingway, felt free to whittle away many references to previous wives and amours, particularly the long apology to Hadley, the First Mrs. Hemingway. So by all means, let’s have more.

Apparently there are even more wounding references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who paved Hemingway’s path with editor Maxwell Perkins and publisher Scribner, and was rewarded for his generosity to literature’s preeminent macho man with this sublimely bitchy description: 

He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

There is also the famous chapter in which Fitzgerald seeks reassurance from Hemingway about the size of his wedding tackle, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

The second chapter of A Moveable Feast, “Miss Stein Instructs,” deals directly with writing, and in typical Hemingway fashion it sets something brilliant alongside something posey and ridiculous. The most famous passage shows us the young lion dealing with a snag in the day’s work:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then . . .

That one passage has probably done more damage to tyro writers than even the collected works of Hunter S. Thompson. In his quest for one true sentence, Hemingway came up with a lot of truly awful sentences — go read Across the River And Into the Trees if you don’t believe me. But offending passage is preceded by a nugget of wisdom that can help any writer:

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hemingway’s work, A Moveable Feast is not the place to begin, but it’s a fine place to visit after you’ve read the short stories, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and some of the later work. A Moveable Feast is where you go for the gossip, the glimpses of a long-vanished Paris where Sylvia Beach turned Shakespeare and Co. into a combined bookstore, rental library and cafe for struggling writers, where it was still possible for a young couple not only to get by on a few dollars a day but afford a cook, have a few drinks every night and go on skiing trips. Like Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage, A Moveable Feast can make you wish you’d been born a lot earlier.  

If you’re a Wyndham Lewis fan, you will not like Hemingway’s descriptions of the man. If you’re a Gertrude Stein fan, you may learn a bit more than you like. And if you’re a Fitzgerald fan, you really won’t like the sketch in which Fitzgerald confides this to Hemingway:

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

If we are to believe Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s doubts could not be assuaged by manly talk, or even a fact-finding trip to look at the male statues in the Louvre.  

You can learn a lot of thing by reading A Moveable Feast, and many of them are probably true. You’ll also learn that while it was certainly a scary thing to be in a feud with Ernest Hemingway, it was probably even worse to have him feel he owed you something. Like a literary career, for example.

Jeanette Winterson on Shakespeare and Company:

‘It was Hemingway, as a major in the US army, who at the liberation of Paris in 1945 drove his tank straight to the shuttered Shakespeare and Company and personally liberated Sylvia Beach. “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me,” he said later, rich, famous and with a Nobel prize.’

Oh my.

‘”At present, small bookshops in France can thrive because the chains aren’t allowed to undercut the cover price of any title by more than 5%. But Sarkozy doesn’t like that, and if he changes the rules, we’ll be in the same position as all those independent stores in England. So we need to diversify now.”

It will be depressing if the Mad Hatter “wisdom” of the “free” market manages to do in France what it has done in the UK – that is, close two-thirds of independent bookshops. Anyone can buy cheaply online if they wish, but consumer evidence in France is that people prefer small stores and patronise them enough to keep them open. If the market is allowed to distort this preference, no one wins but the anonymous bully-on-the-block bookstores with their bored assistants and bestsellers. Writers suffer terribly because big bookshops don’t backlist any more. Browsing a writer’s backlist is a thing of the past, except in independent stores committed to the idea of books, rather than just selling books.’

And:

‘While there are plenty of readers who are not writers, there are no writers who are not readers, and one of the great gifts of this extraordinary bookshop is to keep writers and readers on the same creative continuum. Writers are not reduced to small-time semi-celebrities, and readers are not patronised as consumers.’

Anyway, I’d like to visit.  Why didn’t I visit?

YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear…

Ulysses’ Homecoming by Honore Daumier, 1842.

Above is a scene from the 2004 film adaptation of Ulysses entitled  Bloom. It’s part one of Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy, wonderfully delivered by actress Angeline Ball.

You can find part two here.

And don’t forget Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World,” which is lyrically inspired by Molly Bloom (Bush wanted to use the soliloquy itself but was refused permission by the Joyce estate, so she altered it).

And the full text of Chapter 18 of Ulysses, “Penelope,” can be found here.

“I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it… Joyce has single-handedly killed the 19th century.”

-T.S. Eliot, on reading Ulysses.

The sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know…

“I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces’ and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.”

-Sylvia Beach, pictured up above with Joyce, standing in the doorway of her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris. She was the publisher of Ulysses. (taken from this amazing site.)

That is Nora Barnacle up above, who was, and I love the way that Wikipedia words this, “the lover, companion, inspiration – and eventually – wife of author James Joyce.” An episode from her real life would inspire the epiphanic moment from “The Dead” and the date of her first romantic liason with Joyce – June 16, 1904 – would be forever immortalized in Ulysses as Bloomsday.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

from here.

Also from Wikipedia: “Joyce noted in a 1921 letter to Frank Budgen that ‘[t]he last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope.’ The episode both begins and ends with ‘yes,’ a word that Joyce described as ‘the female word’ and that he said indicated ‘acquiescence and the end of all resistance.’

Não existe publicação que se assemelhe aos guias de viagem, mas que trate, de forma específica, exclusiva, de livrarias. Ao menos, não que eu conheça. (No Brasil, o que mais se aproxima disso é o excelente Guia de Sebos, elogiável iniciativa de Antonio Carlos Secchin, publicado pela Lexikon.)

Não existe publicação impressa, devo me corrigir. Porque há, na internet, o Bookstore Guide, que se apresenta como “um guia amador para compras de livros Europa afora”. Isso já esclarece algo sobre o guia e sua abrangência, mas é interessante saber que ele nasceu das mentes de Sonja (sérvia) e Ivan (eslovaco), quando eles passavam férias em Sarajevo, na Bósnia. Fruto da reunião de duas paixões — a de viajar e a de ler —, o BG apresenta as descobertas que o casal vai colecionando sempre que passeia pelo velho continente. Já são mais de 70 cidades visitadas e a lista continua crescendo.

Livraria Bertrand em Lisboa, Portugal: rumo aos 300 anos de existência.

O último local visitado foi a Livraria Bertrand, localizada no bairro do Chiado, em Lisboa, Portugal. A história da Bertrand daria um livro: fundada em 1732, destruída pelo terremoto que assolou a capital portuguesa em 1755, foi obrigada a se mudar para junto de uma capela enquanto as partes afetadas da cidade eram reconstruídas; demorou quase duas décadas, mas finalmente a livraria pôde voltar para a região em que havia sido fundada, desta vez na Rua Garret, por onde, diz um texto institucional no site da livraria, costumavam passar e permanecer em “acesas tertúlias” eminentes figuras da intelectualidade lusitana como Alexandre Herculano, Antero de Quental e Eça de Queirós. Sede do que hoje é uma cadeia de 52 livrarias espalhadas por todo o país, a Bertrand do Chiado arrebatou o primeiro posto no Top 5: Oldest Bookstores on the Continent, elaborado por Sonja e Ivan.

Parece um palacete, mas é uma livraria.

Aliás, também é portuguesa a livraria que encabeça outro ranking (o Top 5: Impressive Appearance) mantido pelos criadores do BG. A suntuosa Lello & Irmão, localizada na cidade do Porto, poderia facilmente ser confundida com um palacete, de tão indescritível que é a beleza de suas também centenárias (abriu as portas em 1906) dependências. (Confira um tour virtual, provavelmente clandestino, pela livraria. E, no blog O Leitor, mais fotos da Lello, juntamente com um link para matéria do The Guardian em que o jornal inglês também exalta a beleza da livraria portuguesa.)

A lendária Shakespeare and Company também está no Bookstore Guide.

Não se engane. O aparente domínio de livrarias portuguesas é apenas isso: aparente. Desde a lendária Shakespeare and Company (para quem não a conhece, vale a dica de dois ótimos livros que têm a livraria como personagem principal: Shakespeare and Company: uma livraria na Paris do entre-guerras, de Sylvia Beach, escritora e editora que fundou a livraria; e Um livro por dia, do jornalista canadense Jeremy Mercer, que seguindo o hábito de alguns assíduos frequentadores do local, viveu alguns dias literalmente entre livros) até uma pequena livraria na capital da Armênia, Yerevan, o BG traz inúmeros achados, capazes de deleitar até os que não são assim tão apaixonados por livros.

Não se trata de um guia impresso, mas em tempos de pequenas e maravilhosas engenhocas como iPhone e similares, o Bookstore Guide pode se converter num precioso companheiro de viagens.

Escrito por Ronoc ¦

Check out these mp3s of James Joyce reading selections from his novels (that word, “novel,” it doesn’t seem right…) Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Lovely lilting rhythm. Mostly, it’s just cool to hear his voice. From the original liner notes by Sylvia Beach to the 1924 album (courtesy The Modern World):

In 1924 I went to the office of His Master’s Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from ULYSSES. But they would agree only if it were done at my expense. The record would not have their label on it, nor would it be listed in their catalogue. I accepted the terms: thirty copies of the recording to be paid for on delivery.

Joyce himself was anxious to have this recording made. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from ULYSSES. Recording was done in a rather primitive manner in those days. All the same, I think the ULYSSES recording is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved.

James Joyce reads from Finnegans Wake (part I)

James Joyce reads from Finnegans Wake (part II)

Jams Joyce reads from Ulysses (from the “Aeolus” episode)

Or, if you prefer, check out Jim Norton reading the first few pages of Finnegans Wake (from the audio book version, which who knows if listening to counts as reading the thing–but it’s pretty cool to hear an adult man make these noises and think that such a thing might be Great Literature).

Según afirma Jean Pierre Vasconcelos, pseudo-filósofo galo de notable éxito, no hay tarea más provechosa para el análisis certero de lo que nos ocurre que jugar a los detectives. Por ello, tras unos días de agotador trabajo, hemos seguido su consejo y nos hemos lanzado a contarles nuestras pesquisas acerca de una de las mujeres más enigmáticas, excepcionales, fascinantes, innovadoras y silenciadas del panorama creativo europeo: la francesa Claude Cahun.

Nombre mítico, aunque durante largo tiempo marginal y olvidado, de la rutilante nómina surrealista gala, Claude Cahun (Nantes, 1894 -Jersey, 1954) fue una artista que hizo de los autorretratos fotográficos toda una investigación estética sobre la identidad. Bien lo merece quien hizo de su vida y obra un ejemplo permanente de cómo “la poderosa conciencia del vértigo, la asunción de la inestabilidad y de la precariedad, conllevan un juicio claro, una conspicua posición existencial”. Y Claude Cahun nunca escondió su mirada crítica ni su compromiso insobornable frente a los discursos hegemónicos, monolíticos  y esencialistas.

Pero la actualidad de Cahun no terminó aquí. Las últimas informaciones que hemos obtenido, procedentes de Francia, son aun más halagüeñas para quienes seguimos con devoción la obra de esta sacerdotisa del narcisismo, de esta combativa detractora de cualquier falso precepto reaccionario sobre la condición humana y sobre la dualidad masculina/femenina que marca nuestra identidad: acaban de editarse todos los escritos de quien fue, en opinión de André Breton, “uno de los espíritus más curiosos” de su tiempo. Y, por si el notable rescate editorial nos supiera a poco, en París se incluyó a Cahun entre las celebridades artísticas que merecen los honores y el disfrute de unos sugerentes recorridos literarios que hacen las delicias de esa sufrida, curiosa y melancólica figura que es el turista cultural.

Estas recomendables rutas –que podemos fácilmente recorrer si viajamos a la Ciudad Luz– nos muestran los escenarios urbanos que protagonizaron la vida cotidiana de aquel mítico grupo de artistas vinculados a la mítica exposición “La revolución surrealista”. La oferta incluye, además de “Claude Cahun, una mujer en el surrealismo”, las opciones que siguen: “Philippe Soupault, flâneur entre dos orillas”, “René Crevel, el arcángel del surrealismo” y “André Breton y el recorrido de Nadja”. Y se anuncian como novedades, ante la buena acogida de la iniciativa, paseos protagonizados por el dadaísmo y el situacionismo. Más allá del instructivo valor simbólico acerca de cómo el sistema comercia, engulléndolos, con los hasta ayer personajes malditos y/o famosos, ¿se imaginan algo parecido por estos lares?

Mientras la madurez, la inventiva y el glamour llegan al turismo cultural parisino, seguimos con la defensa de nuestra recomendación de hoy día. Acérquense a Cahun. Disfruten de esta fotógrafa, novelista, actriz, traductora, poeta, ensayista y agitadora permanente del muy a menudo tedioso y convencional panorama creativo de nuestra época, que fue la suya. Tuvo una vida turbulenta, intensa, brillante y peligrosa, como suele ocurrir con todos los adelantados a su tiempo. Una trayectoria poseedora, pese a su radicalidad desafiante y visionaria, de una rara coherencia. Aunque nada hacía presagiarlo si atendemos a sus orígenes. Porque Lucy Schowb, ése era su auténtico nombre, nació en el seno de una familia de la alta burguesía intelectual y se educó en Oxford y París, donde cursó Filosofía y Letras en la Sorbona. Pero la sobrina de Marcel Schwob, aquel escritor que tanto admiró Borges, cultivaría otras estéticas, otras ideologías y amistades menos convencionales y ortodoxas. Y, entre ellas, debemos citar a Robert Desnos, Henri Michaux, Sylvia Beach, Georges Bataille o André Breton. Las décadas de los años veinte y treinta fueron especialmente intensas para esta defensora de la libertad sexual y de costumbres. Durante la II Guerra Mundial fue detenida por la Gestapo y condenada a muerte. A su término, reanudaría el contacto con sus amigos parisinos sin dejar la isla de Jersey, a la que se había trasladado en 1937 y donde residió hasta su muerte.

Inédita durante años no sólo para el gran público sino para los eruditos y estudiosos del arte del siglo xx, fue redescubierta en Francia durante la década de los noventa, en gran parte gracia al tesón de un experto como François Leperlier y a la ruptura del tabú de misoginia y machismo que convirtió el influyente movimiento surrealista en un mero inventario varonil cuando mujeres de la valía de Claude Cahun no fueron la excepción.

Hoy, convertida ya en una de las referencias inevitables de la modernidad artística, su labor en el ámbito de la fotografía nos la muestra como autora de un trabajo singular e innovador, capaz de convertir el autorretrato en una gran y liberadora metáfora sobre las posibilidades del arte fotográfico para subvertir la realidad. Las múltiples exposiciones individuales y colectivas celebradas en París, Nueva York, Tokio, Washington, Munich o Ginebra durante los últimos años así lo avalan. Ahora, con la edición antológica de sus textos, será también el momento adecuado para recuperar y revalorizar como merece su tarea como escritora. Porque, según escribe en Confesiones sin valor, uno de sus libros fundamentales: “La excepción confirma la regla, y asimismo la invalida. Tengo la manía de la excepción. La veo más grande de lo normal. Sólo la veo a ella. La regla no me interesa más que en función de sus desechos que convierto en alimento. Así me desclaso adrede. Peor para mí.” Su investigación artística sobre la identidad, que no abandonaría nunca, la llevó a tomarse a sí misma como principal objeto de estudio, como modelo para ejemplarizar sobre la constatación de la multiplicidad, de la diversidad de identidades del ser humano moderno.

Lo importante es saber que “no hay que dejarse emparedar por el entorno”, según anota Cahun. Por eso rescribir la realidad mediante la creación artística fue la gran aventura de su vida y el motor que guió su actividad. Es la suya la obra de una artista que gustaba de flirtear con la ambivalencia, que practicó la rebelión permanente contra esas falsas objetividades y etiquetas que nos sojuzgan y limitan, incapaces de reconocer la pérdida de identidad del hombre moderno y de constatar, por tanto, que no hay verdades absolutas y que somos seres múltiples, complejos, en permanente metamorfosis y reinvención.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing.

A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 with his young wife, Hadley, and baby son, Bumby (John), and the ambition to be a great writer. In that small tranquil world there was no need for a formal introduction. Everybody frequented the same cafés and ate in the same restaurants. Acquaintances were easily made and in a very short time Hemingway knew everyone who was someone÷or destined to be.

This was three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe’s cultural landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses; Gertrude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of une génération perdue; and T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London.

According to Hemingway, there was nothing lost about his generation. There was no movement, nor any tight bands of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for a cause. There were a lot of people of the same age who had been through the war, and they came to Paris to write or compose or do whatever they had in mind. Paris gave them the freedom they needed.

His territory ran the length of the Boulevard Montparnasse from the Closerie des Lilas at the Observatoire to the Restaurant du Petit Trianon opposite the railway station, and by one route or another down to Saint Germain-des-Prés and the Seine.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway’s rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Some of the prominent people to make an appearance in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Hemingway spends a great deal of time in the cafes, drinking and eating rather well for a pittance. His kindest comments are about Sylvia Beach, the American who ran an English bookstore called Shakespeare and Company — it was a hangout for English-speaking authors and others, and was an oasis for individuals seeking English-language books.

He depicts his genteel poverty and his obsession with gambling on horse races. He is deeply in love for most of the book with Hadley, who loses all of his manuscripts at a train station. He courts influential people such as Ford Madox Ford, who is described very unfavourably, and has great admiration for war veterans. His artist friend Pascin invites him to share his models, but he declines.

His friend Ezra Pound is trying to get up a collection for T. S. Eliot to rescue him from mundane bank work. He teaches Pound boxing. He cuts off his friendship with Gertrude Stein, repulsed by her lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas. He debates the merits of Dostoevsky with poet Evan Shipman. Ezra Pound charges him with delivering opium to the addicted poet Ralph Dunning, but Dunning rejects the help. Hemingway devotes three chapters to the very annoying F. Scott Fitzgerald and his hawkish and manipulative wife Zelda.

In the bittersweet final chapter, he describes an idyllic time spent in the Austrian Alps with Hadley. Pauline Pfeiffer arrives and an affair develops which eventually destroys his marriage.

It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

This is the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man – a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafés and bookshops that made up the city where he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A Moveable Feast is considered by many to contain some of his best writing.

A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 with his young wife, Hadley, and baby son, Bumby (John), and the ambition to be a great writer. In that small tranquil world there was no need for a formal introduction. Everybody frequented the same cafés and ate in the same restaurants. Acquaintances were easily made and in a very short time Hemingway knew everyone who was someone÷or destined to be.

This was three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe’s cultural landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses; Gertrude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of une génération perdue; and T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London.

According to Hemingway, there was nothing lost about his generation. There was no movement, nor any tight bands of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for a cause. There were a lot of people of the same age who had been through the war, and they came to Paris to write or compose or do whatever they had in mind. Paris gave them the freedom they needed.

His territory ran the length of the Boulevard Montparnasse from the Closerie des Lilas at the Observatoire to the Restaurant du Petit Trianon opposite the railway station, and by one route or another down to Saint Germain-des-Prés and the Seine.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway’s rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Some of the prominent people to make an appearance in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, John Dos Passos, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Hemingway spends a great deal of time in the cafes, drinking and eating rather well for a pittance. His kindest comments are about Sylvia Beach, the American who ran an English bookstore called Shakespeare and Company — it was a hangout for English-speaking authors and others, and was an oasis for individuals seeking English-language books.

He depicts his genteel poverty and his obsession with gambling on horse races. He is deeply in love for most of the book with Hadley, who loses all of his manuscripts at a train station. He courts influential people such as Ford Madox Ford, who is described very unfavourably, and has great admiration for war veterans. His artist friend Pascin invites him to share his models, but he declines.

His friend Ezra Pound is trying to get up a collection for T. S. Eliot to rescue him from mundane bank work. He teaches Pound boxing. He cuts off his friendship with Gertrude Stein, repulsed by her lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas. He debates the merits of Dostoevsky with poet Evan Shipman. Ezra Pound charges him with delivering opium to the addicted poet Ralph Dunning, but Dunning rejects the help. Hemingway devotes three chapters to the very annoying F. Scott Fitzgerald and his hawkish and manipulative wife Zelda.

In the bittersweet final chapter, he describes an idyllic time spent in the Austrian Alps with Hadley. Pauline Pfeiffer arrives and an affair develops which eventually destroys his marriage.

It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

This is the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man – a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafés and bookshops that made up the city where he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.

A nice friend gave me a copy of of Julia Child’s My Life In France a few weeks back, because I asked for it.

Paul Cushing Child, 1948

And now it’s mine! I read it hard, in a matter of days, in subways and at kitchen tables and in other shockingly alternative venues like class. I tend to slow down right before I reach the ends of books I love, so the other weekend I brought My Life In France over to Fred & Thessaly’s with the expectation that we’d drink wine and cook dinner while Julia sat idly in my bag.

Mama, I say, Julia is always writing things like “we began with a half-carafe of Médoc 1929 and then finished a lovely bottle of Pouilly Fumé 1942 with dinner” and I want to know how does she even remember that dinner? My mother laughs not entirely approvingly. She would pour several glasses of wine during the course of one PBS episode, my mother tells me, and I regard her with the awe of one bearing witness to history.

The book did not sit idly in my bag. Thessaly had invited us over because she had a domestic potato surplus; to cope with them, she thought we should make Alice Waters’s garlic mayonnaise.

Alice was going to demand that we emulsify two different kinds of oil and act out other obscure verbs too. I wasn’t sure if that was necessary. I had just read about Julia’s manic efforts to keep her first real culinary victories from prying eyes while still getting them tested by her little sister, Dorothy, back in the U.S.

With the letter I included a number of ‘regular’ recipes, but also a special batch of three recipes that were hidden between pink cover sheets and labeled ‘DOROTHY COUSINS– EYES ALONE– CONFIDENTIAL– to be kept under lock and key and never mentioned.’

These were the Top Secret Confidential Censored pages; our revolutionary recipes for hollandaise, mayonnaise, and buerre blanc. We’d never seen those recipes in print before, and the methods for making the first two were revolutionary.

typed on a Royal Portable, 1952

It was the age of Hoover and McCarthy, and a 6′2″ graduate of Smith College could perhaps not be too careful, nor use the word “revolutionary” too many times.

Thessaly! I said. We can make Julia Child’s mayonnaise legere!

Lily looked skeptical.

What does ‘legere’ mean?

I said I was sure it didn’t mean anything. As it happened, “legere” meant “exceptionally drippy” but we didn’t very much care because it tasted like olive oil and garlic and we’d beat it with the hand mixer ourselves.

L’École des Gourmettes, 1951

My Life In France inspired only a middling amount of cooking in my life–there was the mayonnaise, and a quiche that tasted just like any other quiches I’ve made–but it did reinvigorate a desire to expatriate myself in dapper company.

Julia and her husband, Paul, arrived in France on Wednesday, November 3rd, 1948, after Paul had been posted there as a cultural liaison for the U.S. Information Agency, the USIA.

The Scheelds–as they were called by Francophones and as I have come to call them in my head–were essentially propagandists, but bohemian ones. Paul was a painter and photographer, and the couple entertained figures like Sylvia Beach, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude must have been caught up in an unending sentence that rendered her unable to join her wife at the dinner table.

Alice was a cookbook author, and Julia doesn’t seem to have taken her very much. She describes the mustachioed bottom as an odd little bird in a muslin dress and a big floppy hat.

Toklas (or Stein?) once wrote:

In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.

Young Julia, however, doesn’t seem to have been much interested in climaxing at all. She and Paul never had children, and they slept in separate beds. I am willing to bet that our girl Julie was the one who snored.

Maine, 1955

Rumors of dual gayness followed Julia and Paul throughout their lives; they were like the European version of my favorite sexless union, that of Paul and Jane Bowles. The principle difference between the two pairs other than their respective sides of the Straights of Gibraltar is that John Ashbery wrote an obituary for Jane and William Grimes wrote one for Julia.

In April 1955, Paul was suddenly called back to Washington from France. When he arrived in D.C. and realized that he was not there to be given an anticipated promotion after all he sent a telegram to Julia:

Situation here like Kafka story.

He spent an entire day being interviewed by USIA agents associated with J. Edgar Hoover. Julia writes:

The investigators had a fat dossier on Paul Cushing Child. They attacked him with questions about his patriotism, his liberal friends, the books he read, and his association with Communists. When they asked if he was a homosexual, Paul laughed.

Paul was ten years older than Julia; by 1974, after they had begun living part-time in Cambridge, Paul had moved to a nursing home. His character appears less and less in Julia’s narrative as her celebrity grows; he is occasionally mentioned as kind of a book-tour roadie:

In between shows, we signed books, sat for interviews, and made the right noises to dozens of VIPs. Meanwhile, the esteemed former American cultural attaché…crouched behind some old scenery flats trying to wash out egg- and chocolate-covered bowls in a bucket of cold water.

I started to feel very sorry for Paul Child, especially because I’d completely swooned for an early photograph of him with sunshine on his chest.

Maine, 1946

I showed Christina. Emma, she said, him? You are hard up.

Christina! I gasped at her irreverence. Whatever! She is gay and so was Julia and clearly neither of them would understand. In a last-ditch attempt at cross cultural communication, I chose the verbal over the visual and referred her to a letter Paul had sent to his twin brother soon after arriving in France.

What follows is my favorite part of the book and also the most translucent prose to be found anywhere in it:

Lipstick on my belly-button and music in the air–thaat’s Paris, son.

What a lovely city! What grenouilles à la provençale. What Chateauneuf-du-Pape, what white poodles and and white chimneys, what charming waiters, and poules de luxe, and maitres d’hôtel what gardens and bridges and streets! How fascinating the crowds before one’s café table, how quaint and charming and hidden the little courtyards with their wells and statues.

Those garlic-filled belches! Those silk-stockinged legs! Those mascara’d eyelashes! Those electric switches and toilet chains that never work! Holà! Dites donc! Bouillbase! Au revoir!

Bonn, Germany, 1956

Idag tillkännagavs vem som fick årets nobelpris i litteratur. Doris Lessing. Det är bra. Jag blir glad. Det känns bra. Doris är född 1919. Hon skriver fortfarande. Det får mig att känna mig riktigt glad. Snart 90 bast and still going strong. Så ska det vara!

Men jag tänkte skriva om en annan författargärning. James Joyce och hans bok Ulysses (eller Odysseus på svenska). Den där tjocka boken som alla gärna skulle vilja skryta med att de har läst men som få orkar sig igenom. Den som kom ut redan 1922. Då fyllde James år. Han fyllde 40 och samma dag ringde det på hans dörr, den 2/2 år -22 och hans förläggare och vän, Sylvia Beach, stod utanför med det allra allra första tryckta exemplaret.

- Ha den äran, Joyce! sa hon säkert.

Säkert är iallafall att James blev glad. Det hade nämligen inte varit en lätt match att skriva Ulysses. Han hade hållit på i åratal. Han var fattig som en kyrkråtta. Han och hans fru Nora hade bott i Italien i flera år, fått ungar att försörja, men nu tagit sig till Paris och levde ur hand i mun. Sylvia Beach var en ung amerikanska som också dragit till Paris och öppnat bokhandel för amerikaner i exil; Shakespeare & Co. Den bokhandeln finns kvar än idag. Den fungerar fortfarande som bokhandel för amerikaner i exil.

Men tillbaks till Ulysses. Under en längre tid hade James, som höll på att bli blind, plitat och plitat på sitt mastodontverk och sålt boken kapitelvis till prenumeranter runt om i världen. Det fanns nämligen ingen som ville trycka boken, den ansågs vara alltför osedlig. (Det var därför Sylvia ryckte in, trots att hon inte visste ett smack om förläggarverksamhet). Men prenumeranter fanns det och dessa väntade med spänning på den färdigtryckta boken.

Men när den kom ut så beslagstogs den i tullen, både i Storbritannien och USA. Där ordnade man gigantisk korvgrillningsbrasa av Ulysses och alla som köpt boken i förväg fick stå där med lång näsa. Nu var goda råd dyra!

James Joyce familj gick på knäna. Sylvia Beach hela verksamhet gick på knäna (hon hade i flera år försökt försörja både sig själv och hela Joyces familj på sin lilla inkomst).

Men en ung Ernest Hemingway klev in i bokhandeln Shakespeare & Co och visste lösningen. Raskt kontaktade han en vän i Chicago, som i litteraturens namn flyttade bakom kanadensiska gränsen, till Toronto, där han hyrde en magasinbyggnad och ordnade dit ett lass av boken Ulysses. För se kanadensiska tullen gav blanka fan i Joyce och hans bok så där var det fritt fram att importera. Men nu kom det svåra och omständliga: att frakta boken över gränsen in i USA.

Denne namnlöse man och hjälte fick helt sonika, en gång om dagen, stoppa ett exemplar av Joyce i brallan och lösa färjebiljett över floden och in på amerikansk mark. Det fanns hundratals böcker att leverera så det blev många flodfärder. Minns också att detta var under förbudstiden och folk smugglade sprit för allt vad tygen höll. Gränspolisen var alltså alert och det fordrades stort mod att varje dag korsa gränsen. Utan bagage som kunde genomsökas. Låt vara att man “bara” smugglade litteratur, men det var brottsbelagt. Ulysses var svartlistad i USA.

Till slut fick mannen hjälp av ytterligare en kompanjon och strategin blev djärvare; en bok över röven och en bok framtill i brallan. Fyra böcker om dagen! Man undrar om de inte förbannade Joyce i tankarna för att han skrivit en sån veritabel tung lunta. De ådrog sig också myndigheternas misstänksamhet men lyckades få över hela boklasset! I sanning en kulturgärning!

Idag lever vi i en värld då “ordet är fritt”, vem som helst har rätt att ta till orda och göra sin röst hörd i det offentliga rummet. Men jag funderar ibland över vad slags bok som skulle kunna bli  totalförbjuden idag. Kan det ske? Vad skulle isåfall vara orsaken? Det tål att tänkas på.

James Joyce fick aldrig nobelpriset. Men Ernest Hemingway fick det. Han lär, enligt Sylvia Beach, ha varit en hyvens ung grabb, då i Paris på 20-talet när hon lärde känna honom. Det var till Sylvia han gick med sina första noveller och bad henne läsa.

Om Doris Lessing vet jag inte så mycket ännu. Jag har inte läst alla hennes böcker och de jag läst, läste jag för många år sedan. Men nu har hon fått nobelpriset. En seg kärring, vad jag förstått, och en ärlig och modig sådan. Det känns bra. Jo, idag känns det bra.