Long before UNESCO dubbed Edinburgh the world's first "City of Literature" Paris was the undisputed and unchallenged holder of that title.
And so it remains. Flâneuring among its streets, long and narrow, broad and handsome, as the last days of winter are sloughed off and signs of spring sprout in the Jardins du Luxembourg, you are never far from references to books and writers. Cafes and bistros boast of their past illustrious patrons, even to the extent of insisting that "Hemingway never drank here". Moreover, in this city of museums, there are many dedicated to writers - Chateaubriand and Balzac, Victor Hugo and Ivan Turgenev - only a few of which one has time to tour on a short visit.
Paris has for centuries been a magnet to French writers in a way that New York and London never were. In the early 19th century, it was imperative to go there if you wanted to make your mark. The divide between the sophistication of the city and the provincialism of the rest of France was startling and seemingly unbridgeable. At the time that Balzac began to embark on his career, the population of Paris exceeded that of the next six biggest cities combined. As Graham Robb, Balzac's biographer, has noted, French literature in those tumultuous days really was Parisian literature. A novel might start in the boondocks but soon the action gravitates towards the capital, where fortunes were found and lost, fame and failure embraced, and anything generally went.
Paris was the great maw that could accommodate all-comers. It was elastically expandable and ever welcoming. What made it such a fantastic location for storytelling was its acceptance of people at face value. In Paris, there was always the possibility of renewal. You could cast off your old self and find a new one that suited you better. No one in Paris knew who your father or mother was. Like Balzac, you could add a dignifying 'de' to your name and before you knew it you'd be consorting with the titled and well-to-do. Art in such a society was held in high regard. It was not afterthought or diversion; rather, it was intrinsic to a way of life. Whether you were a writer or a musician, an artist or a dancer, Paris was ready to embrace you.
Well into the 20th century it retained its magneticism. It was especially attractive to Americans, many of whom were drawn by the favourable exchange rate. Others, however, such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Miles Davis and Sidney Bechet went there because, compared to their homeland, it was not so insistently racist. But the period which still casts the longest shadow is that of the 1920s, when Sylvia Beach opened her famous bookshop, Shakespeare & Co, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce were building their own monuments.
Lately, reading Calvin Tomkins's wonderful book Living Well Is the Best Revenge, which is about Gerald and Sara Murphy on whom Fitzgerald modelled Dick and Nicole Driver in Tender Is The Night, I was struck again by how Paris managed to enchant so many geniuses in an atmosphere of "rather self-conscious intellectual ferment". Competition, artists often like to insist, is anathema to them. But in Paris at that juncture one can't help but think that the pervasive spirit of competitiveness helped fire and inspire a generation to a level of creativity unequalled since the Renaissance in Florence. In the course of a couple of typical pages, Tomkins makes mention of Diaghilev and Stravinsky, Picasso and Miro, Pound and Poulenc, EE Cummings and George Balanchine, most of whom knew each other.
This is the Paris one senses as you wander its precincts or people-watch over an early evening glass of vin rouge. For the moment the other Paris, the one in which maniacs kill cartoonists and Jews, fearful of their lives, consider emigrating to Israel, can be put to one side. We are in Paris and have no desire to be anywhere else.
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