Literary Paris

Lovers of literature are prone to bang on a bit about Paris, especially concerning the Lost Generation. I’m with Hemingway; when Gertrude Stein told him he and his colleagues were a ‘lost generation’ he thought she was talking crap. But it’s interesting to see where so many great writers hung out (or should that be ‘hanged out’?) and try to pick up a scent of what inspired them.

I’ve already mentioned the literary significance of our flat, and that near it is Baudelaire’s birthplace in the Place Saint-André des Arts. Just around the corner from us you can pick up a copy of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal at Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop started by George Whitman in 1951 as Le Mistral which attracted many writers of the Beat and earlier eras like Henry Miller.

In the 1960s George renamed the shop after Sylvia Beach’s legendary shop of the interwar years at 12 Rue de l’Odeon (6th arrondissement). It was there that she published James Joyce’s Ulysses, which makes it a must-see on my list. Alas, that building has been completely remodeled and none of the original fabric of the shop exists.

But some of the places where Joyce wrote that book still stand. He wrote the Ithaca and Penelope sections in the latter half of 1921 at 71 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine in the 5th. Around the same time Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris and spent two years just up the road on the third floor of number 74.

To work off the hunger Hemingway often spent long periods of time walking in the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg, where he would often meet Gertrude Stein walking her dog. Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas on the western side of the Jardin at 27 Rue de Fleurus (6th), where she had a legendary salon for writers and artists until the war.

One of those who attended Stein's salon, and any other party that was going, was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived with zany Zelda worlds away in the wealthy 8th arrondissement, at 14 Rue de Tilsitt near the Arc de Triomphe.

Mind you, none of this is a substitute for sitting down and reading their books. Except Gertrude’s - utter rubbish.