Paris of Hemingway, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation

On November 11, 1918, the armistice was singed between the Entente-The Allies and their last remaining opponent, Germany, bringing the World War 1 to an abrupt end. The War had ruined France. It has been estimated that close to eight million acres had been reduced to desert, as well as major portions of transport system, virtually destroyed.¹ For more than 4 years, Parisians had yearned for peace and peace had finally arrived, albeit, with adjustments to make to bring normalcy back to life. The economic boom was underway.

The Jazz Age (1918-1929)

In America, it is called the “the Roaring Twenties”, however, in France it is called the Les Annees Folles, or “the Crazy Years.” Sultry parties lit up the city of lights accompanied with Jazz music and unabated pouring in of liquor. For fleeting moments, at night, the war became a distant memory in the minds of people. During these years, the city of light enjoyed its reputation as the cultural centre of the world, whether in literature, art, architecture, or music.² The falling franc made Paris an affordable as well as a glamorous destination for the people to come and drown out their sorrows inflicted by the war. The Americans visited and settled in Paris at an unprecedented rate, creating a growing expat community that swelled from eight thousand in 1920 to thirty-two thousand by 1923.³ Contemporaneously, America was going through the prohibition era and far right activism which further gave impetus to the Americans to seek solace in Paris where their foolhardy pursuits were welcomed. In contrast to America, Paris in the 1920s offered a much more liberal and tolerant landscape to lead a life in. Racism, which remained a bitter fact in America, almost disappeared in a Paris in love with African-American Jazz Bands and Josephine Baker. Similarly, homosexuals and homosexual relationships, were accepted, if not with enthusiasm but at least with a shrug.⁴

Montparnasse

Much of the scene was set out in a neighborhood called Montparnasse, located on the left bank of the river Seine. It became the heart of the intellectual and artistic life in Paris. Famous for its bohemian cafes, Jazz Clubs and not to mention the liquor, the place offered an escape from reality not only to the Americans but also to the aboriginal inhabitants of the city. Not long ago, it was a town called Montmartre which was the beholder of the above reputation, where artists wanted to live and work, however, Pablo Picasso’s, relocation from Montmartre to Montparnasse, in 1912, marked the cultural shift.⁵ By this time Picasso had become a force to be reckoned with, establishing himself as one of the most sought-after artists in the world, his reputation preceded him. Americans and other foreigners may have gravitated to Montparnasse for its cafes and freewheeling night scene, but artists and writers came for its cultural dynamism and possibilities it offered for success. Montparnasse held the reputation for publishing works that could not be published anywhere else, and where artists could find buyers for their most avant-grade works.

Sylvia Beach, James Joyce and the Ulysses

Sylvia Beach, like the other Americans, was enamored and enchanted by the city of lights. Along with a passion for France, she also had a passion for books from a very young age. It had been her dream to open a bookstore. Where, how and when, were questions that often distressed her as she did not come from a well to do family. Initially her mother dissuaded her from pursuing her dream but eventually gave in and risked her life savings on her daughter’s venture. Her parents’ disintegrated marriage back home coupled with the affordability offered by Paris, played a pivotal role in her decision to open a bookstore in Paris. After months of hard work, she finally opened a bookstore at a small street near Rue de L’Odeon on November 17, 1919.⁶ and named it “Shakespeare and Company”. Would anyone come? she wondered. She needn’t have worried. The shutters on the little shop were scarcely removed when the first friends arrived. “From that moment on” she later wrote, “for over twenty years, they never gave me time to meditate”.⁷ Shakespeare and Company bustled with the visits of then- aspiring writers and poets, Ernst Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound to name a few. Gertrude Stein, who, by now, had firmly established herself in Paris as a renowned writer and art collector also visited the bookstore.⁸ Her bookstore reverberated with heartthrob of various artists and writers who would be remembered for generations to come. Besides lending and publishing books, she also provided accommodation and money to the writers who found it difficult to ease into the Paris scene.

Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia Beach can be seen outside

James Joyce, during this time was working on his Irish odyssey, Ulysses. His American publisher – The Little Review decided to release it in a serialized form in 1918. The Little Review had serialized almost half of Ulysses by mid-1920 when the New York District attorney brought obscenity charges against the review’s editors. His book was not met with splendour and rapture that he had expected. Rather, it proved to be far too provocative for America which invited the ire of the American morality police, leading to it getting banned. James Joyce, in his pursuit of producing a classic, found himself enmeshed in the censorship uproar that Ulysses had created for the brave editors of Little Review. In his defence, he had never intended to write a dirty book. Instead, he had proceeded from the assumption that social order is based on lies and that it was necessary to smash through its web of deceit to show what life was really like.⁹ The prospects of publishing Ulysses were growing dim. He was turned down from every publisher as nobody wanted to take a chance of running afoul of obscenity laws either in Britain or America. It is when he had lost all hope, that he had a chance encounter with Sylvia Beach. “My book will never come out now” he exclaimed to Sylvia in completely discouraged tone.¹⁰ Sylvia and her bookstore, although not equipped with the resources to publish the mammoth work of James Joyce, offered to publish Ulysses. Unlike the publishers who turned down Ulysses deeming it too vulgar to be sold, Sylvia Beach did not lack any conviction in the work of James Joyce. She writes to her sister Holly Beach¹¹ “Ulysses is going to make my place famous. Already the publicity is beginning, and swarms of people visit the shop on hearing the news. I’m getting out a bulletin announcing the publication in October of the book and you will soon receive one. All American and English subscriptions are to be sent to me and if all goes well, I hope to make money out of it, not only for Joyce but for me.” Publishing the book was no small feat in itself due to the size of the book and regular corrections in the drafts done by Joyce which proved to be a tedious and daunting task for Sylvia Beach.

On February 2, 1922, Sylvia Beach presented the first copy of Ulysses to Joyce as his birthday present. Then she placed the other in the window of Shakespeare and Company where a crowd had gathered to see it. The rest is history. Publication of Ulysses put Shakespeare and Company on the map and made Sylvia Beach the best-known woman in Paris.

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzerald

Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921 along with his wife Hadley Hemingway. Unable to eke out a career in writing in America, he too, went to seek his fortunes in Paris. Apart from being a promising writer, he had also volunteered in the World War 1 by this time.

Initially, they put up in a small squalid apartment which had no gas or electricity. They did not have to live that way. Unlike Hemingway, his wife was seemingly well off and had the money to lead a comfortable life, however, Hemingway (with macho pride) did not want to use it. Hemingway and Sylvia Beach formed the warmest of friendships. Apart from enjoying Sylvia’s company at the bookstore, he used it as a great opportunity to mend serious gaps in his education by borrowing books from Shakespeare and Company¹². In his book, ‘A Moveable Feast’, Hemingway records that “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’Odeon. 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. Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as 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.”¹³

Hemingway was known to confabulate frequently. He convinced Sylvia Beach that he had received a war wound from fighting in Italy, “that they thought he was done for,” and that it had taken two years in military hospital for him to recover. He also convinced Sylvia that his “father died in tragic circumstances,” leaving Ernest a gun as his sole legacy and forcing him to drop out of school to support his dependent mother and siblings by money earned in boxing matches. It was a good story but complete fabrication. Hemingway did serve time in the great war but not as a valiant soldier but as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. There, he was wounded while handing out chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers in a forward observation post. However, Hemingway used to completely transform himself in a war hero when telling people, the stories of the great war. The influence of war is also seen in much of his writings.¹⁴

Hemingway is also noted for not respecting the feelings of his friends and exhibits a tough guy personality who is blatantly honest. It can be firmly extrapolated from his first novel The Sun also rises. The novel is about his time spent in Paris, among other places and is loosely based upon characters of his real-life friends.¹⁵ The intention was good, the result, not as much. As soon as the novel released, the word got around that a few people were looking for an author in Montparnasse– with a gun. He derisively wrote about a few people in the book, who proved to be easily identifiable in the town. The book did incur a murderous rage from the people it did not sit well with, however, The Sun also rises is considered as Hemingway’s greatest novel.¹⁶

Scott Fitzgerald arrived on the scene much later. He had briefly visited Paris earlier in 1924 until he finally settled in Paris in the spring of 1925 along with his Wife Zelda Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald met Hemingway, he was fresh from the success of his novel The Great Gatsby and a lauded author of two other novels, This side of Paradise and The beautiful and damned. Hemingway on the other end was still facing rejection after rejection, to the point that he even contemplated quitting writing. Nevertheless, Hemingway had, by this time, established himself as a literary person of promise among the cognoscenti of Montparnasse. Both the writers went on to form great comradeship with one another. Fitzgerald was notorious for his drunken exploits, much to the dislike of Hemingway who thought it took very little for him to get drunk. They both saw a lot of one another. One night, sitting at a café, Fitzgerald expressed disappointment with the sales of The Great Gatsby. Hemingway thought it was his wife Zelda who was to be blamed for it with her incessant attempts to undermine her husband’s confidence. Despite Hemingway’s fixation on the negative impact of wives on their husbands, he had a point: Zelda’s mental instability was already apparent, and together, she and Fitzgerald would eventually destroy one another. But that still lay in the future, although hints of the tragedy were already apparent.¹⁷

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Midnight in Paris

The movie Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen comes close to capturing the Paris scene in the 1920s. The movie is about an aspiring writer Gil Pender (the Protagonist) who settles in Paris, France to pursue a writing career. He firmly believes, Paris in the 1920s was the best era to live in. One night, while taking a midnight stroll in the streets of Paris he finds himself transported back to the 1920s Paris where he meets Adrienne (the Antagonist) who believes, it is not the 1920s but La Belle Epoque¹⁸ which is the best era to live in. Woody Allen accurately captures the vanity and flawed nature of human beings- nobody is happy with the present. He encapsulates it in a few a lines spoken by one of the characters in the movie- Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present, the name for this denial is golden age thinking- the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as shown in the movie

The Bubble Burst

All good things must come to an end they say. The party ended when the wall street crashed in October 1929 leaving the expats with little or no money in an abyss of uncertainty. Although it did not immediately impact the Paris scene, but the effect of the crash had begun to surface on the city of lights. That October, Sylvia arranged a twenty-fifth anniversary party for James Joyce and his common law wife Nora. Renowned personalities of the crazy years attended the celebration including Hemingway. None of the participants realized it, but this marked the last time all of them would be together under one roof. The wall street crash did not deter Sylvia to shut down Shakespeare and Company, but the World War 2 did. In December 1941, Shakespeare and Company closed its doors to the world, never to open again. Shakespeare and Company¹⁹ as it stands today in Paris has no nexus with the aboriginal bookstore opened by Sylvia in 1919.²⁰ Nevertheless, it serves as a pleasant reminder of a bygone era.

The Lost Generation

Gertrude Stein is accredited for usage of the term “lost generation.” She particularly refers to the Artists/writers who entered the Paris scene post world war, completely directionless, wandering and disoriented. “You are all a lost generation” she said to Hemingway, who popularized the term by using it in the epigraph for his first novel The Sun also Rises.

Here it was, an entire generation indulging in nights filled with passion, booze and sounds of Jazz. That generation may truly seem lost. Be that as it may, there is no gainsaying that it is that very “lost generation” that has produced some of the greatest Artists and writers of all time. Perhaps, not all those who wander are lost?

By Daksh Pandit