Americans in Paris (Five Things, 17/12/20)
image source (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
1. Someone on Twitter described this week as “the Friday afternoon of the year” and that feels right.
2. I was recently gifted a beautiful volume of James Baldwin’s collected essays, edited by Toni Morrison. It is fat and the pages are thin, like a Bible. I often think of Baldwin when I am in Paris, perhaps because he so vividly encapsulates the vision of America, and of an American abroad, that I am always trying to see more clearly. I believe it helps to think about America if one can first get away from America. To understand her particular hopes and terrible cruelties by experiencing their absence, by escaping them or letting them fall away from you for a time (even though any destination will have its own cruelties, its own terrors). I think of Baldwin arriving on the Left Bank with virtually nothing, just after the war, and how almost immediately he fell gravely ill. He lay in his grim hotel room and might have died if the Corsican woman who owned it had not decided to nurse him; to climb the stairs each day and make sure that he had food, that he was still alive. To wave his rent for the three months that it took for him to recover.
3. This summer as I was trying to edit the latest draft of my book, for a few weeks I enacted an embarrassingly American ritual. The cafés were still open then, albeit with social distancing measures put in place, and I realized that the least crowded of these would be the ones usually thronged with tourists. There were no tourists in Paris this summer, to the point that shopkeepers and others I encountered in my daily life would often exclaim with a kind of longing nostalgia at my Americanness. “An American!” they would say. “There are no Americans in Paris right now!” Of course that isn’t true, but it has seemed like nothing compared to the usual sightseeing hoards. I figured that the safest places to go and sit with my hot chocolate and my work would be some of the famous haunts of dead American writers, like Baldwin and Hemingway. I figured they were the most likely to be empty, and I was right. This is how I ended up for a time spending every afternoon at Café de Flore. I would arrive after lunch, and there would be almost no one at the tables, save for a scattered selection of other writers. And so I indulged. Every day, before opening my own wounded manuscript, I would reread the first chapter of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It acted as a kind of tether. The rain, the wind, the “good café on the Place Saint-Michel,” the white wine and the oysters, the work and the sexist leering, and the plans he made with Hadley to get away from the city, to sleep in a country auberge in the snow with the windows open at night, and to be warm and safe in bed together, with each other and with their books. I would stay in the café doing my own work until it was dark, and then I would walk back through the deserted Latin Quarter, its empty restaurants like ghost ships, towards my own neighborhood.
4. I’ve forgotten how to really read books for much of this year. I’ve read some, but not as many as I usually do. My focus has been shot. It is so much easier to fall prey to the frenetic dash of social media, half reading the start of two dozen different articles, angry one moment, then laughing at a joke in the next. Most of the time, with no libraries or cafés to escape to where I can steal an hour for a novel away from my work and my life, books have fallen by the wayside. I keep forgetting how to just sit down, shut up, and dive in. There is always something else I’m supposed to be doing. It’s a bad way to live, and I hate when it takes over, although the online social scrolling can also have the feel of a dormitory kitchen late at night during finals week, when everyone finds themselves all stress-eating and getting hysterical at nothing together. There’s a camaraderie in the madness, but I have missed the steadiness of books.
5. I realized this week that I will never again set foot in an America where Trump is president. Everything he represents is still there, and his dangers have not passed, but at least there is this. When the news cuts to footage of the Oval Office—finally, in just over a month—he won’t be in it.
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References: James Baldwin: Collected Essays