AMERICANS IN PARIS: A Literary Anthology. Edited
by Adam Gopnik.Library of America, 613 pp., $40.
'ParisFrance."
These two words, famously lacking a comma, belong to
Gertrude Stein, the American writer and salon hostess. Stein lived in France
for most of her life. Why? "Because France has scientific methods,
machines and electricity," she wrote in 1940, "but does not really
believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of
living."
Touché. Stein was born in Oakland,
Calif., the last stop on the
transcontinental railway, and knew what she was saying: "America
is my country, and Paris is my
hometown."
One of the surprises and delights of the Library of
America's new anthology, "Americans in Paris," edited by Adam Gopnik,
is to know how many Americans, not just famous ones, have felt exactly as Stein
did. Think of Americans and Paris together and you think of Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Isadora Duncan, Charles
Lindbergh, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter,
Henry Miller, Irwin Shaw -- the list goes on, and they're all included here.
But who now remembers George Ticknor (1791-1871), writer,
lawyer and historian, whom Gopnik identifies as "perhaps the first
recognizably 'modern' American in Paris
... there for the conversation"? Who recalls that founding father Thomas
Paine -- whose radical politics and pamphlets today might run him afoul of the
Patriot Act -- once stood in the French Assembly and pled in vain for the lives
of the royal family, understanding, as Gopnik remarks, "that there could
be no justification of 'ends' or 'means,' even in a revolution"? And how
about James Gallatin, the son of an early American ambassador to France,
who discovered in 1814 "How pretty Frenchwomen are!" and confided to
a diary that still burns with expectation, "I know I shall get into all
sorts of scrapes"?
"For two centuries," says Gopnik, who spent five
years in France
as The New Yorker's correspondent and wrote a bestselling book about it, "Paris
to the Moon," "Paris has
been attached for Americans to an idea of happiness, of good things eaten and
new clothes bought and a sentimental education achieved." More than that,
"The Parisian idea is also an idea of happiness divorced, perhaps, from
any idea of virtue, or even of freedom. The islands of license and permission
that Americans find are surrounded by canals of order."
This is an idea at least as old as Emerson, who went to Paris
in 1833 and divined that "the limits of the possible enlarged."
Twenty years later, after the huge success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a
book that changed American history, Harriet Beecher Stowe sat in the Faubourg
St. Germain and felt that she had "come into dreamland; into the
lotos-eater's paradise; into the land where it is always afternoon."
"I am released from care," wrote Stowe. "I am
unknown, unknowing. ... In the heart of a great city I am as still as if in a
convent. ... My time is all my own." It may be, as James Baldwin later
affirmed, that you can be "enamored of Paris
while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French," but
the credit for that goes to them, not us. Unperturbed, in their natural state,
the French don't care what we think. "We are happy" among them,
Gopnik writes, "because we are free at last from censorious eyes, and we
are at last free of censorious eyes because nobody is looking."
Historically, not everyone has approved. Writing from Paris
in 1784, Abigail Adams complained to a friend, "If you ask me what is the
business of life here? I answer, pleasure. Ay, Madam, from the throne to the footstool
it is the science of every being in Paris
and its environs." Worse, it stank -- "I have smelt it," Adams
cried: "It is the very dirtiest place I ever saw." Only in the
mid-19th century, under Napoleon III, did a city that had stood since Roman times
knock down its medieval walls and turrets, empty its muck-strewn lanes, throw
up avenues, boulevards, parks, monuments, concession stands and an Eiffel Tower
and become the the "City of Light" -- a transformation Gopnik deftly
connects with the flowering of American literature.
"The Parisian achievement was to have made, in the 19th
century, two ideas of society: the Haussmannian idea of bourgeois order and
comfort, and the avant-garde of la vie de bohème. These two societies, at
famous and perpetual war in appearance, were in perpetual peace underneath, or,
at least, more deeply dependent on each other than might be immediately
apparent." Gopnik cites "the twin traumas" of the American Civil
War and the Paris Commune of 1870 as the fires that forged "something
new" in Franco-American relations.
"Paris
becomes not a place you visit but a place where you can stay and still be an
American writer," he states. "From then on, for almost a century, Paris
remains a kind of literary laboratory where American style gets made and
proffered in refined form." Indeed, without Paris
there might not be an American literary style, because, unquestionably, the
writers generally considered our greatest, with the notable exception of Walt
Whitman, all worked and lived there, and those who didn't learned from them.
As with all literary anthologies, there are omissions in
this one. Gopnik has limited "Americans in Paris"
to "experiences before the late '60s, if in a couple cases written
afterward," and emphasizes "older material, almost all of it long out
of print, that would be unfamiliar even to expert readers. ... A whisper of
uncertainty rises, because the story, one fears, is
incomplete without Diane Johnson or Edmund White." If there's too much
Henry James, it can't be helped -- there always is.
"On the whole," Gopnik writes, "it seemed
more important to make the invisible accessible than to make the available
canonical. ... We need someplace to go and pretend to be happy in, damn
it," and here, with a flair, he is right.
Peter Kurth's latest
book is "Isadora: A Sensational Life."
