Seven Ages of Paris (60 page)

In the upper-echelon music halls, Maurice Chevalier, the self-proclaimed ace French lover, epitomized the optimism of the jaunty, bright new era with his hit of 1921, his theme-song, “Dans la vie faut pas s’en faire” (In life you mustn’t worry), while for plebeian Paris Mistinguett, “the little girl from Belleville”—still renowned for her legs, though in her fifties—brought the message of the humble Parisienne risen to golden success, of Paris recovered from the wounds of war. To the popular halls of the faubourgs a performer simply called Georgius (a.k.a. Georges Guibourg) and his troupe brought the same message of cocky revitalization. At both ends of the music-hall spectrum American song-and-dance, le fox-trot, was all the rage, and by 1926 one French columnist was reckoning that at most two out of ten songs performed were French.

It was on to this scene that the nineteen-year-old Josephine Baker, the lithe and sensual mulatto from St. Louis, Missouri, exploded in 1925. Though so young, she was already well known on Broadway as a dancer with an ability to “make her body do almost anything and to keep her eyes crossed at the same time.” At first, on arriving in Paris, she refused to dance bare-breasted; but when she did she created a sensation. On the stage of the small Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, where Nijinsky had once so stunned pre-war audiences by his abandoned dancing in The Rite of Spring, “She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulder of a black giant … She was an unforgettable ebony statue.” After a moment’s silence, the audience screamed. Here, recorded Janet Flanner, was “a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black is beautiful … she was the established new American star for Europe.”

What stunned the Parisian audience (apart from the few who judged her obscene) was her extraordinary energy. Every part of her body seemed to fly in a different direction. One critic was awed by “her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm,” while the more sophisticated had brought to mind Rousseau’s apotheosis of the Noble Savage. The poet Anna de Noailles saw her as “a pantheress with gold claws,” a symbol of the most primitive sensuality. Boulevardiers became accustomed to seeing Josephine and her pet leopard, Chiquita, stalking, side by side, down the Champs-Elysées—two superb animals out of the same jungle—and they cheered her. Paris loved her style.

From the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées she moved up to the Folies Bergère, then at its peak of fame, where she electrified audiences by appearing out of the twilight, “walking backwards on her hands and feet, arms and legs stiff, along the thick limb of a painted jungle tree and down the trunk, like a monkey. A white explorer was sleeping underneath …” By the end of 1926 she had achieved a vogue unheard of for a foreign performer in Paris: “There were Josephine Baker dolls, costumes, perfumes, pomades,” wrote Phyllis Rose (in Jazz Cleopatra); “women’s hair was slicked down like Josephine Baker, and to achieve this look, they could buy a product called ‘Bakerfix.’ ” Coupled with Picasso’s recent “discovery” of African art, there was a sudden passion for everything black in Paris: “black orchestras, black fêtes, black balls, exhibitions of black art.”

What truly stole Parisian hearts, however, was when Josephine took to song. The trilling tones come down the years, evoking that frenzied age of brief, elusive pleasure, that short period of illusion called Peace—the spirit of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Sung in a high-pitched warble, with an unashamedly Churchillian accent, her “La Petite Tonkinoise” (“C’est moi qui suis sa petite …”) became the anthem by which everyone remembered the Paris of those years. But it was her nostalgic, highly emotive “J’ai deux amours” (“mon pai-yee et Paree”), proclaiming her special bond with the city and sung a thousand times over, that seduced audiences and hard-boiled critics alike.

Josephine’s love-life was as uninhibited and frenetic as her stage performances. She would dance over twelve hours a day, then make love all night; she had a legion of casual lovers, including the unstoppable writer and sexual braggart Georges Simenon. Her curiosity seemed boundless; reputedly she made love to the room-service waiter in the first Paris hotel she stayed at—to discover what French men were really like in bed. Of Parisian voyeurism she would remark scathingly, “The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks!”

Apart from Josephine Baker, it was black American jazz that predominated in Paris in the 1920s. But there was one notable exception—the immortal George Gershwin. Visiting Paris for two months in 1928, like the typical young American tourist of the time, the thirty-year-old genius climbed the Eiffel Tower, visited Shakespeare & Co., played a duet with Stravinsky and heard Rhapsody in Blue massacred. Then, so taken by the traffic noises of Paris, he explored motor-accessory shops down the Avenue de la Grande Armée, squeezing all the bulb horns until settling on those suitable for the score that was running through his brain. The result, An American in Paris, one of his greatest compositions, spoke eloquently of the spark of vitality which his fellow countrymen had brought with them at the beginning of the decade.

With the return home of Gershwin, the crash of ’29 and the decline in the 1930s in the popularity of Josephine Baker, the popular music of Paris tended to fall back more on its own resources. In jazz there was, for instance, “Django” Reinhardt (born in Belgium of gypsy origins). But as the world outside grew more menacing, so Paris embraced a kind of schmaltzy nostalgia, looking inwards.

Ah! qu’il était beau—mon village,

Mon Paris, notre Paris

On n’y parlait qu’un seul langage

Ça suffisait pour être compris!

sang Lucien Boyer. There were songs of passionate love, fighting and death, the violence of the Apache, the wistful romanticism of Vincent Scotto’s “Sous les ponts de Paris.” There would be Charles Trenet, Jean Sablon—both of whom covered most of the century—and the short-lived, tragic “little sparrow,” Edith Piaf, with her fiercely sad lines. Then, as the Front Populaire became more self-confident, there would be increasingly militant songs about the class struggle. “Tout va très bien, madame la marquise,” with its mocking of the upper classes, made its mark everywhere.

The young composer Virgil Thomson summed up the motives for the American invasion of Paris in the 1920s in robustly down-to-earth terms: “to get screwed, sharpen their wits and eat like kings for nothing.” In the first priority, Josephine Baker with her uninhibited, free-range sex life certainly set the pace. So too, as recorded in his Tropic of Cancer and other books, did the indefatigable Henry Miller. He put the allure of Paris in terms similar to Virgil Thomson’s:

I understand then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love … Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is … An eternal city, Paris! … The very navel of the world to which, like a blind and faltering idiot, one crawls back on hands and knees.

Operating an inventive triangular relationship with his wife, June, and that high-priestess of erotomania, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller spent a great deal of his time in Paris on hands and knees, leaving virtually no fantasy or combination unexplored.

As has already been observed, Paris had a Sapphic sub-culture going back a good many years, at least as far as Pierre Loüys’s Songs of Bilitis. Early in the century Colette had thrown herself into the arms of the Marquise de Belboeuf. About the same time, a wealthy American, Natalie Barney, belonging to the pioneer generation of cultivated lesbian expatriates, had settled in Paris. According to Colette, Natalie boasted “sea-blue eyes” and “implacable teeth.” Her appetite for conquest, apparently, was extraordinary, far in excess of any straight male’s, even a Henry Miller or a Frank Harris. Keeping a neat little book of them all, she once recorded making eighteen rendezvous in a single night. Few of her female acquaintances, single or married, escaped those “implacable teeth.” In and out they passed through the Greek temple at the bottom of Natalie’s garden at 20 Rue Jacob, their path strewn with petals scattered by a small boy hidden out of sight, or she would test out neophytes at her favourite pâtisserie, Rumpelmayer’s.

At the other end of the Sapphic spectrum was dumpy Gertrude Stein, rare among the expatriate lesbian patrons in being steadily monogamous to her faithful lover, Alice B. Toklas. She told a sympathetic young Hemingway of her distaste for male homosexuals: “they are disgusted with the act and are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.” In women, she declared, “it is the opposite.” She was renowned for her strong views. Hemingway recalled that he could not remember her ever “speaking so well of any writer who had not written favourably about her work,” while her dislike of the author of Ulysses was such that “if you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back.” Fulcrum of the serious anglophone literary world in Paris, she vigorously bought works by the up-and-coming Picasso (he left a famous, much worked-over portrait of her), though Braque was to observe rather damningly that “as an authority on the epoch it is safe to say she never went beyond the stage of tourist” and Matisse complained that she “understood nothing about art.”

ESCAPIST ART AND LITERATURE

Escapism, of one form or another, was the name of the game throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, of which sex—in its variety of contortions and distortions—was but one facet. Art was another. Born of the war, Dadaism was (fortunately) short lived but was demonstrative of the move away from the happy realities of the Impressionists. In the late 1920s it was succeeded by Surrealism, the declared “enemy of reason.” Pointedly it was spawned from a wartime hospital for shell-shocked poilus where the poets André Breton and Louis Aragon, both in their early twenties, had served as medical orderlies. Equally pointed, both founders of the new movement, which painters like Dalí and Magritte were to take over, started life in the Communist Party. Surrealism stressed the priority of sexual freedom removed from religious constraints, and liberation of the unconscious. Symbolic, too, was the spectacle of Braque returning from the war with a turban of bandages covering his head wound. It was the horror of trenches which made many like them recoil from the traditional world that had taken the road to Verdun, embracing instead an idealist fantasy—just at the time, ironically, when Lenin and Stalin were perpetrating their worst excesses in southern Russia.

Geographically, too, the art scene had moved. From being the rural outpost that it had been pre-1914, Montmartre was now filled with apartment blocks, making it too expensive for struggling artists. Many, like Chagall (his work influenced by the bellowing of oxen in the nearby abattoir), moved back to form new ghettos in Montparnasse; only a Picasso, however, could afford to spend his honeymoon in the de luxe Hôtel Lutetia, on Boulevard Raspail. More the norm were artists like Brancusi and Soutine, working in the La Ruche (or “beehive”) studio complex in the 15th arrondissement. The studios were so narrow that tenants dubbed them coffins; they had neither heating nor running water. So great was the impoverished squalor in which Soutine worked that, when he was painting three stolen herrings, two rotted while he worked and a rat made off with the third.

In literature Dadaism and Surrealism were matched by the fairy-tale world of Cocteau and Giraudoux. Another form of escapism in the post-war era emphasized the humour of cuckoldry, a genre designed for the middle-aged male, known as le démon de midi, though there was compensation for their female opposite numbers in the form of bestsellers like Raymond Radiguet’s brilliant novel Le Diable au corps (1923). But of much more profound significance for French literature in the late 1920s was the spate of anti-war literature that swept Europe. In Germany, Hitler had been swift to stifle such books as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but in France that particular novel had become a number-one bestseller, challenged only by the terrifying novel by Henri Barbusse, Le Feu (first published in 1916, winning the Prix Goncourt, and selling 300,000 copies by the war’s end). For France’s Verdun generation, Le Feu provided an indelible reminder of what it had really been like, and for their juniors a nightmare fantasy the re-enactment of which had to be avoided at all costs. Wielding enormous intellectual influence were various anti-war associations formed by such giants of France’s literary left wing as André Gide, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and Romain Rolland. Barbusse was the torch-bearer; when he died in 1935 more than 300,000 mourners followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Striking an altogether lighter note were the multitudinous novels about Inspector Maigret by Georges Simenon—102 titles published between 1930 and 1972—which succeeded so well in reflecting the humdrum life of the ordinary Parisian. Then there were the cheap romantic novels sold by the stack from newspaper vendors for between 25 centimes and 1 franc 75; and in a very special class of his own, Pagnol, with his tales of a Midi so very far from Parisian experience.

For all its philosophy of “engagement,” no form of literature set its face against reality more than the existentialism of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his fellow hot-house inmates of the Café Flore in the later 1930s. In her autobiography, Sartre’s mistress Simone de Beauvoir provides a frank account of the mind-set of French left-wing intellectuals. In the autumn of 1929 she felt she was living through a new Golden Age: “Peace seemed finally assured; the expansion of the German Nazi party was a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance … It would not be long before colonialism folded up.” Of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, she writes: “like everyone else on the French left, we watched these developments quite calmly.” In their film-going, this escapism, or detachment married to a dread of war, led Sartre and de Beauvoir to miss Jean Renoir’s classic La Grande Illusion (1937) and to watch instead such American farces as My Man Godfrey and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

Despite having given birth to the cinema, France got off to a slow start in the interwar period. Of 430 films opening in Paris in 1934, less than a quarter were French and few survive. Spectacular exceptions were Abel Gance’s eight-hour silent epic Napoléon of 1926—which narrowly escaped the bin because of Gance’s Pétainist sympathies in the Second World War—and Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. If Gance’s tour de force was possibly the most outstanding silent film ever made, La Grande Illusion comes close to being the greatest anti-war film. Its impact was such that, when the French prisoners-of-war sang the Marseillaise in one extraordinarily moving scene, Parisian audiences—regardless of political hue—also rose to their feet to sing.