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Exiled in Paris
Paris in the 1950s, “après le deluge”, when the City of Lights once again burned bright with ideas
For the past month or so, I’ve been reading Exiled in Paris by James Campbell as well as Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin by Marion Meade. The former tells the story of four turn-of-the-century (20th) women writers thought their letters: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Zelda Fitzgerald—more on this in another review. The latter tells the story of literary figures that migrated to Paris at the end of World War II from Britain and the U.S.
The latter is far more a critique of authors and their works while the former is more of a biography of four interesting writers. Campbell begins with Richard Wright, the black writer known for his books Native Son and his autobiography Black Boy. Wright is welcomed and sponsored by Gertrude Stein and he arrives a few weeks before the Grande Dame of the Lost Generation dies. Wright is first of two black writers Campbell chronicles in detail—the other being James Baldwin. He also describes other black artists more peripherally, including Chester Himes, Ollie Harrington—the cartoonist and artist, among others.
The first part of the book is an exploration of Richard Wright’s self-imposed exile from the U.S. where the atmosphere of racism had created in the black American a sense of total alienation. It expands on this theme with the arrival of Wright’s far more successful literary successor James Baldwin. Campbell describes these black writers among others in flight from a world that had suppressed their spirit. In Paris they found the tolerance and acceptance that they had not ever experienced in America. It allowed Baldwin to flourish as a writer. Wright, however, had already done his best work and Paris provided him a respite to reflect on the emergence of the black race, both in the civil rights movement in the south and in the release from colonial rule of many African nations.
For so long had the black person in America been repressed that the repression itself created a separate nation within a nation. This black nation had its own language born of a common experience that white American could never conceive nor understand. It was a language spoken among blacks and was largely misunderstood by whites. Combine this separate nation with the civil rights movement and the result was a black nation in revolt against the mental slavery they experienced after the physical slavery had been outlawed a century before. But Campbell concentrates on the language of black writers describing the black experience using words that had meaning to black readers but were meaningless to whites—still true to this day— Eminem and Vanilla Ice, notwithstanding.
In this regard, of the two major black writers Campbell chronicles, Baldwin is the more complex for not only is he black he is also homosexual. Thus, he is confined to an even smaller subset of outcast than the black nation, though this smaller group comprises both black and white and unsaid by Campbell likewise have language used by the initiates that is largely incomprehensible by the rest of society. When Baldwin writes he brings the language of both cultures to bear and the result is a richer body of work.
Campbell’s narrative unfolds in Paris at the time that Jean-Paul Sartre was holding forth in the Café de Flore at the corner of Boulevard St.-Germain and rue St.-Benoit nearby the Deux Magots the other café that Sartre and company frequented. The father of Existentialism was an influence on Wright and the other expatriate writers and artists arriving in France in the late 1940s. The world view was influenced by the catastrophic war the world had just experienced and the French were conflicted by the citizenry who had collaborated or made accommodations with the German—Sartre’s companion Simone de Beauvoir possibly among them?—and those who had resisted. In such a climate, the notion of existentialism could have almost defined itself: the person during the occupation being sympathetic to the German conquerors and acting the part and the same person after the occupation being unsympathetic with all those who were clearly identified as being collaborators—the Vichy Government and all those who had been part of it. The definition of that person being defined by his existence and that definition changing with time.
The concept is brought into sharp relief by the national crisis of the World War, but the same principle applies to living things universally: an innocent child at age two, a less naïve being at 15 and a more knowledgeable person at 30. Here is an instant of a living thing existing in entirely different forms over a 30-year span. Furthermore, one’s political and economic definition likewise changes: the 16-year old likely to be a left wing liberal while that same being at age 30 drifting slowly toward a more conservative stance. In the presence of conflict as overwhelming as a war, what does one become, traitor, patriot…? To his credit, Sartre remained a lifelong communist, never wavering in his position.
Campbell’s narrative broadens to include the small English literary magazines formed and published during the late 1940s in Paris: Merlin, Points, Paris Review, and Zero. Merlin began by Jane Lougee published the works of Samuel Beckett and its editor Alexander Trocchi became an underground novelist of note himself—as well as a member in good standing of the Beat Generation. Its contributors included poet Christopher Logue, Richard Seaver, and Austryn Wainhouse—the American student who translated Marquis deSade, among others into English.
Points was published by Sinbad Vail, son of heiress Peggy Guggenheim—who was intent to perpetrate the tradition of English literary journals in Paris begun by the Lost Generation in the 1920s. Well financed it had the longest publishing run and attracted many English literary lights of the 1950s living and working in Paris. Zero, published by Americans Thermistocles Hoetis and Asa Benveniste had the distinction of being the first of the English journals begun in 1948 but first printed in 1949 when the son of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg Jr. helped Hoetis double his money to pay for the magazine’s first printing in 1949.
From Merlin Campbell’s work segues into a the French publishing company Olympia Press, which had the distinction of publishing Henry Miller’s work under Miller’s own name, Samuel Beckett, The Story of O, as well as Nabakov’s Lolita, among other works that were then considered pornographic but today are lauded as works of art. The defiant publisher Maurice Girodas followed in his father’s, Jack Kahane, footsteps. Kahane had started producing “dirty books” after World War I, finding a large market in Paris among American and British troops eager to read Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and other lesser known writers. Girodas saw the same opportunity peddling pornography to the American and Brits after World War II.
Merlin and Girodas formed an alliance of convenience, with the magazine providing a marketing channel for Olympia Press as well as a stable of writers to provide dirty books under pseudonyms to feed Olympia Press’ insatiable demand for pornography. As with Kahane, Girodas had the same good fortune of having talented writers producing what they considered pulp fiction for the masses only later to be discovered as work that continued to find a readership. For the writers, who sold the rights to the publisher, he/she achieved notoriety but little economic benefit. The affiliation with Merlin also brought Girodas into contact with the literary circles that formed around the magazine. Thus, Girodas publish Samuel Beckett’s English novel Watt, as well as the English translation of his French novel Malloy., when Girodas partnered with Merlin to published the magazine’s Collection Merlin book list.
Girodas forms a center around which a large part of Campbell’s book revolves. He sought to publish works that drew criticism from the establishment—especially those that were charged with indecency and brought into court. Such books had large built-in audiences driven by the controversy surrounding the work. And authors who wrote works that push the envelope of what the public considered decent sought Girodas out. One of the most famous was Vladimir Nabakov and Lolita. Others included William Burroughs—Naked Lunch and J.P. Donleavy’s—The Ginger Man.
The Chapters that Campbell devotes to Nabakov tells a story of struggle between author and publisher over control of a work that at the time of its publication became an instant hit. The struggle continues with Donleavy’s work though this struggle was the one that Girodas lost and in the process the publishing company he had built.
In the closing chapters of Campbell’s book the reader is treated to a description of the forces driving the Beat Generation. The reader briefly meats Allen Ginsberg and his two friends Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso—Ginsberg pushing the limits of poetry with his “in the establishment’s face” lines that offended Ginsberg’s alma Mater Columbia University when the poet returned from Paris for a recital of his work. In the way the beats lived their lives and in their work, they were intent on shaking the establishment out of its complacency.
No one succeeded better at rocking the establishment than William S. Burroughs and his work Naked Lunch. It was such a departure from literature as everyone perceived literature to be that even Girodas initially turned it down. Girodas, however, changed his mind after a portion of the book appeared in the American magazine Big Table, whereupon the work was deemed obscene and taken to court. Girodas rushed the entire manuscript into production.
What the reader sees in the Beat Generation that Campbell describes is a group of artist revolting against the established form literature had taken up until then. They sought anything that would expand their mind and taking a cue from Black Jazz musicians sought the muse in heroin, marijuana, and any other drug that could get them beyond themselves. In fact, in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch the author seems to have found that secret muse as the books appears written by a man completely out of his mind.
This nexus of commonly shared experimentation to expand their creativity, white beats saw in the black artists the rebels they had sought to become. Only, as Campbell so clearly points out, the blacks were forced into their outcast stated. The beats chose to make themselves outcasts. Norman Mailer glimpses in the black artists the hidden language they speak among themselves. As the blind person feeling an elephant’s trunk, Mailer believes that he has perceived the entire animal.
In describing this perception in an essay entitled “The White Negro,” written for the Village Voice, which he founded, Mailer created the notion of “hipster” and suddenly anyone “with it” was speaking the words—“man,” “cool,” etc.—but without a clue of their true meaning.
This is a great read.
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