Book Marks

JAMES ATLAS

The New Expatriates in Paris

We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.

"It'spretty grand," Bill said.

—The Sun Also Rises

Paris is still pretty grand. Brasserie Lipp, Hem's old hangout, is thronged with tourists, and the Montmartre bistros where Henry Miller dined for a few francs have been discovered by the Michelin guide. But the myth is just as entrancing as ever. Strolling up the Boulevard Saint-Germain on a recent afternoon, I was amazed by how unchanged it was—not only since my last visit, but since the long-vanished days I'd read about in a shelf of literary memoirs. The Paris of Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, Morley Callaghan's That Summer in Paris, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, is virtually intact. The names on the cafS awnings—La Coupole, Le Dome, La Closerie des Lilas—still produce a frisson. This is where Fitzgerald punched out a waiter; this is where Joyce dined; this is where Ford Madox Ford drank his nightly cognac. You don't need a guidebook to find these places; sit down anywhere with your Herald Tribune and some writer's ghost is lurking.

"The golden age of the expatriate literary life is already well past,'' the founders of the Paris Review announced in 1953. Three decades later, the news hasn't gotten through. Americans, novel in head and spiral notebook in hand, are still arriving by the hundreds. They're not as visibly evident as they were in the sixties, when you couldn't walk down the Rue de la Huchette without being hit up for a franc by some long-haired freak clutching a guitar. But they're there, and you don't have to go pick up your mail at American Express to find them. The door of Shakespeare and Company is papered over with announcements of readings; the classified pages of Passion, the hip English-language newsmagazine, are filled with ads for all kinds of literary projects; the Village Voice, an English-language bookstore on the Rue Princesse, devotes a whole display rack to expatriate lit. mags published in Paris.

If George Plimpton and his Paris Review cronies thought they came late, they should try browsing through some of these magazines. Photocopied and stapled together, they have the messy, homemade look of a seventh-grade humanities project assembled at the kitchen table. (Look, Ma, I'm writing!) Some of the legendary magazines that came out of Paris in the twenties—transition, Broom, Secession—were pretty harriedlooking, too, but at least they were properly bound, with a stiff cover and a sewn spine. Literature is flimsy enough these days; why package it like some crazed Trotskyist cell's manifesto run off on a mimeograph machine in the basement?

Still, the contents pages are tempting. I didn't recognize many familiar names in Moving Letters, edited by Joseph Simas, a typewritten magazine that devotes each issue to the work of three or four young writers, or in Paris-Atlantic, edited by Michael Lynch, a bilingual poetry magazine printed by the American College in Paris. But Sphinx, edited by Carol Pratl, a young writer from Chicago who's lived in Paris for the last eight years, featured in its inaugural number an interview with the French novelist Marguerite Duras and a review of her best-seller, The Lover. There was also an excerpt, in English, from the new work by Russian 6migr6 writer Edward Limonov, whose lurid autobiographical novel about his travels through the New York sexual underworld, It's Me, Eddie, was published by Random House.

Then there's Paris Magazine, the house organ of Shakespeare and Company, a chaotic shop across from Notre Dame that gives its address, in the lowercase style of the avant-garde, as "kilometer zero paris.'' George Whitman, the grizzled proprietor, appropriated the name and the Sylvia Beach Memorial Library, a cabinet full of books salvaged from the celebrated literary patron's shop on the Rue de l'Od6on, when he opened for business thirty-four years ago. Upstairs is the Tumbleweed Hotel, a warren of rooms with floor-toceiling books, an assortment of lumpy beds, and a kitchen for the use of visiting writers. (George doesn't submit his guests' credentials to very rigorous inspection; all you have to do is say you're a writer, and if there's a spare bed you can stay.)

To say that Paris Magazine appears intermittently is putting it mildly; the first number appeared in October 1967, the second in October 1984. "I just got distracted by one thing and another," Whitman explains. The current issue features an account of Margaux Hemingway's recent visit to Paris for the filming of a documentary about her grandfather (him again), a walk through Paris literary locales by William Wiser, and a memoir of the Paris Review in its early days by John Train, one of the magazine's founders. Paris Magazine may well be appearing more regularly in die future, Whitman says glumly. "We've got all these damn subscribers now."

Paris Exiles, founded by John Strand and Randall Koral, is a handsome oblong journal offering "fiction, poetry, images and private tragedy.'' Two issues have appeared, with new work by Limonov, the vaguely notorious East Village "post-punk'' writer Kathy Acker, and Edouard Roditi, an American who's resided in Paris on and off since the twenties. A special feature of the second number, published last fall, was a translation of the work in progress of Pierre Guyotat—"an eccentric French writer and language innovator,'' I learned from an article in Small Press: The Magazine of Independent Publishing, "who is being compared to Joyce." (It wasn't specified by whom.) How does this precarious venture intend to support itself? "Advance orders, subscriptions, financial contributions of any kind will be welcomed," declares the brochure. "Profusely."

The associate publisher of Paris Exiles is Jim Haynes, a somewhat weathered veteran of the expatriate scene who has known (or claims to have known) everyone; the list of dedicatees in his autobiography, Thanks for Coming!, brought out in 1984 by Faber and Faber, runs to twenty pages. Haynes, who has been in Europe since 1956—during his Amsterdam days he was a co-founder, with Bill Levy and Germaine Greer, of the infamous Suck—publishes occasional chapbooks from a courtyard atelier on the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire. Handshake Editions is a highly informal enterprise; when I arrived unannounced one morning, the editor was in his kitchen with a half-clad girl on his knee. On the wall was a gigantic plastic ice-cream cone. Haynes calls himself "the fastest publisher in the West," and I can believe it; the blurred mimeographed pages have a distinctly fugitive aura. But he's hawked his work at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and one of his authors, Michael Zwerin, whose work has appeared under the Handshake "imprint," is now publishing with Quartet Books in London. Not that Haynes is in it for the money. "I don't know if we're in the black or in the red," he says, "and I don't care. For me, publishing is therapeutic."

The most promising new magazine is Frank, edited by David Applefield, an eager young American working on a doctorat at the Sorbonne. Applefield arrived in Paris two years ago with a literary gleam in his eye and a journal he'd started as a teaching fellow at Northeastern University in Boston. "Everyone told me nothing interesting was happening here," he recalls. "The scene was dead." Applefield called on writers, solicited manuscripts, posted notices in bookshops— "and this tremendous quantity of work started showing up at the door." The problem wasn't a lack of writers, Applefield contends. It was "a lack of editors willing to invest their time and energy." Operating out of a sixth-floor walk-up on the Rue Monge, Applefield does all the work himself—editing, layout, correspondence—and pays for the magazine out of his own pocket. "I have seven jobs." He translates, teaches in the European division of the University of Maryland (that's only two, but never mind), and turns over his "little paychecks" to the printer. Applefield's entrepreneurial zeal has paid off. Contributors include Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack Kerouac— represented by a previously unpublished poem. The latest issue features a note on "Writers Who Draw" by the late Italo Calvino, with original drawings by Milan Kundera, John Berger, and Breyten Breytenbach and a portfolio of other notables. So far the magazine is making its way; everyone in Paris knows about it, and circulation has climbed to two thousand—highly respectable for a little magazine.

"Paris was a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses," Malcolm Cowley recalled in Exile's Return. "Paintings and music, street noises, shops, flower markets, modes, fabrics, poems, ideas, everything seemed to lead toward a half-sensual, half-intellectual swoon." It still does. Whatever else these new literary ventures are, they're a testament to the city's undiminished allure. Sitting in a cafe on a warm spring afternoon with a cup of espresso at your elbow and a notebook open on the table, it's hard not to feel inspired. "There isn't any James Joyce around," George Whitman admits, "but there are plenty of fellows who think they are."