04/11/2006
Cécile Alduy on American writers in Paris
A former student at the École Normale Supérieure rue d’Ulm, Professor Alduy received her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in June 2003, where she wrote her dissertation on Renaissance poetry. Entitled “Nation, Self, and the Lure of Unity. Poetics and Genesis of a New French Genre, the “Amours” (France, 1544-1560),” her […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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[ Music ]
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If I were to say there are cities that well up from the unconscious
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or that some cities are sworn to secrecy,
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or that every city has a distinct timber to its noise quotient,
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or that some cities laugh while others bleed, some profess,
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others chant, some stutter, some bellow, some exhort,
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and others whale.
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Or if I were to quote invisible cities where
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Elvino says, arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his
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that he did not know he had.
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Or if I were to affirm that the reality of a city resides in its imagination,
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that its waking life hovers on the surface of a dream,
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none of this remarkably enough would get us anywhere.
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[ Music ]
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If I not get us anywhere, but before you get somewhere,
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you have to get ready to go, and that's what we're doing now, getting ready to go.
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Where to?
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To Paris, Miss Ami.
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Paris.
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To visit the American writers who lived or sojourned there during the 20th century.
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I have a guest with me in the studio, Cecela Dree,
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who is uniquely qualified to serve as our guide on this pilgrimage.
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But before I introduce her to you, let me throw out one of my innocuous,
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entitled opinions to the effect that Paris is the one European city,
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where the American soul, if there is such a thing as the American soul,
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and I believe there is, is least likely to recognize itself.
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In fact, this irreducible dissimilarity may be exactly why so many American writers
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went to Paris at critical junctures in their careers.
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Here's how I see it.
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The American soul is fundamentally wild, isolationist, not quite at home in the world.
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It's true homeland is some impossible place beyond society, beyond language, beyond the law,
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perhaps even beyond the body.
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Proudly inarticulate when it comes to expressing what moves and matters to it,
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the American soul is pledged to its native aphasia.
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So much so that at its best, modern American literature gives voice to this aphasia
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and renders it eloquent instead of overcoming it.
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But Paris.
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Ah, well, Paris is the most articulate city in the world.
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It masters all forms of expression and is completely beyond all set pull,
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or at home in its skin, as the French say.
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Nothing could be further removed from the American way of being,
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than being beyond all set pull.
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Which is why we Americans have an irrepressible need to jump out of our skins from time to time.
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Usually with the aid of spirits, or psychotropes of some sort,
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or else with the aid of preachers, healers, fantasticators, or firearms.
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Paris.
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Paris.
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Paris.
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Paris.
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Paris.
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The word itself is in cantatory.
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You voking a host of accessory images and sentiments,
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even for people who have never been to the city.
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Ie-Ie Cummings describes it best in his 1922 novel, The Anormous Room.
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As a crowded night train transporting prisoners of war and other unfortunates,
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pulls into the station during wartime,
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"Some permissionaries cried Paris."
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The woman across from me said, "Paris. Paris."
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A great shout came up from every insane drowsy brain that had traveled with us,
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a fierce and beautiful cry, which went the length of the train.
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Paris, where one forgets, Paris, which is pleasure,
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Paris in whom our souls live, Paris the beautiful.
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Paris, all fair.
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Someone once said of Rome that it is an eternal idea in the mind of God.
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The same could never be said about Paris.
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Paris is consummately human.
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It's a garden where life in its human self-realizations, blooms and primary colors,
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even under gray skies.
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Ee- Cummings again.
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Everywhere I sense the miraculous presence of living beings,
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everyone alive, alive, alive.
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There are many places in the world where one senses an exuberant presence of life,
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but Paris conjugates life with form like nowhere else on earth.
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In Paris, the presence of life is never riotous, tropical or overflowing,
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but always contained in a flowering multiplicity of forms.
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Forms that intensify life by bringing its mastered energies into the radiance of appearance.
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It is impossible in Paris not to feel that this is the one place that gets life right,
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and maximizes its potential for being lived.
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Unlike the French, we Americans don't know what it's like to be uninhibited,
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even as we submit to a regime of form.
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We're insufficiently humanized for that.
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We spend too much of our time either maintaining our inhibitions or looking for ways to shed them.
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But again, it's this quintessentially American ill-at-easeness in the world,
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and that means in the American homeland as well,
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which made Paris such an asylum for 20th-century American writers,
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who were typically even more ill-at-eas in spirit than their compatriots.
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For these writers, Paris was anything but a mirror reflecting an image of themselves.
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It was the opposite of that.
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In Paris, they saw a city which, by contrast, put their own nation in sharp perspective,
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and allowed them to take their distance from it.
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Nothing is more essential to American writers probing the murky depths of their own culture
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than gaining such a distance.
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And it seems that Paris offered them just the right distance from America,
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neither too far nor too close.
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Of course, these are just my own breezy speculations
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to find out what was really going on with American writers in Paris.
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We'll turn now to my guest Cecilandri,
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herself a Parisian who teaches French literature here at Stanford,
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Cecil welcomed to the program.
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Thank you, Robert.
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I should mention that just this past fall, Cecilandri taught a course in Paris at the Stanford Center
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on American writers in Paris, which must have been quite a class.
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How did that course go, Cecil? Can you tell us what you did in it?
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Yes, of course. It was wonderful because what we did was we used Paris as the classroom for the class.
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We had, of course, a serious syllabus with a list of American writers from Gertrude Stein,
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who was brought up to Henry Miller, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller,
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N.A.'s Neen, the bead poets, and even a modern-day New Yorker,
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Adam Gopnik, who lived in Paris just a couple years ago.
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But what we really did was explore the relationship between the texts and the place itself.
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So we spent a great deal of time actually going to the cafes and the streets
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and the bookstores where these writers got their liking for Paris and got their inspiration from.
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And I think the students also really like the fact that I tried to put them in the position of writers themselves.
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Yeah, in what sense?
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Well, among the so-called assignment they had to do,
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where, for instance, to ghost an anaphton in a cafe and try to
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just to for what will be a good cafe to write as Hemingway puts it in a movable feast.
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And they also were writing diaries, reporting on their extremes of being abroad and feeling.
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At times, as you said, Eli Ease with a place where they're outside of their comfort zone, basically.
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And what it meant for the sense of their self-identity is Americans.
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Do they get a sense of what it must have been to be a writer in Paris and the first thing?
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Yeah.
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There's this whole idea that the cafe culture that writers had to do all their writing in cafes.
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Do we know that this was more the norm than not the norm that American writers would do a lot of their writing in cafes, actually?
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I think that the mystic of the American writers in a cafe, you know,
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a constricting in his little paragraph while sipping a beer comes mostly from Hemingway's movable feast.
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More than beer, no, with Hemingway.
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Yeah, depending on what time during the day and the morning he starts with a real cafe,
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and then very quickly switched to a rum or a kongak.
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But Gertrude Stein obviously was writing not that much, actually, a half an hour day at home.
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And other writers, like Isra Penn, were not writing in cafes at all.
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But there's the scene of the cafe, even that they're not writing there.
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So, yeah.
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Good. Well, there are successive generations of American writers.
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We're talking about the 20th century, because we could also go back into the 19th,
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and even into the 18th century would be fascinating.
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Maybe we can talk about how Jefferson and Franklin had this very productive relationship with France.
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But concentrating on the 20th century, we have successive generations that go to Paris
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and do some of their most interesting creative work in the city.
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So why don't we enumerate, who does it start with?
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I think for the 20th century, it really starts with Gertrude Stein,
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who leaves Oakland, not from here, in 1903, to join her brother in Paris.
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And they live with the Floches.
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And that's just a parenthesis of the also court experience of teaching in Paris
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for the students here to go and the overseas campus that is situated right at the heart of the American district in Mumbai.
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So we are like one block from who the Floches were Gertrude Stein,
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her the most famous salon in the 20th century, basically.
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So she arrives at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Did she have a specific motive for going to Paris originally?
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She actually to collect art.
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Her brother introduced her to do so.
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So she started collecting art with her brother and the art she was collecting was mostly young printers that no one else wanted to buy as Picasso and Matisse.
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So of course she had a really interesting eye for art.
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The other reason for going to Paris though was that she discovered she could also have the personal life as a lesbian that she wanted to have and could not in Oakland.
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So that's a second aspect that she doesn't talk about in her writings, but is a peer from her life.
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Her salon was a welcoming place not only for American writers, but also for the French artistic scene at the avant-garde.
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Completely avant-garde.
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She wanted to be seen as the mother of modernism.
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In the autobiography of Alice B. Talkles that she wrote, although it's supposed to be written in the name of her companion,
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she says speaking in the name of Alice that she met three great geniuses Picasso, Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
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And of course people can disagree and the third one, but Gertrude Stein invited and sponsored basically all the painters, the keepest painters from Picasso to Bach, Duh-huh, Matisse of course, Cézanne and so on.
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She also welcomed French poets, like Apo-Dine for instance, and Mahélor Haunson and the surrealist poets, but she really became like the gut mother of the next generation of American writers who came in the 20s.
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And here I'm talking about Hemingway, Duh-s-Passos, a William Carlos Williams, EE Cummings that you just quoted.
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Also, Lesernan poets as Anderson Sherwood and so on, and Fitzgerald's of course.
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When you say that she was a godmother, do you mean that as just being the hostess of the salon or was she a godmother also in terms of the aesthetic that she promoted herself?
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That's a very good question. I think that the influence she had was that her salon was the place where all this writers created a community.
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And it's not that much that she herself was that influential by her writings or her advice, like she discussed Hemingway's writings with him, but very soon he just initiated himself from her advices.
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But she was the person who gathered all this community together and also set the tone for an avant-garde mentality, I would say.
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And the idea or the murder almost to go beyond what's been done before in terms of forms and content.
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And this raises the question that we want to explore a little bit about how much what was happening in France and in Paris in terms of the artistic literary movements had a direct influence on modern American literature of those writers went to Paris.
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Certainly it would seem that Stein Gertrude Stein herself was very influenced by it, but we have to remember it was a very rich moment.
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In European modernism, Paris being the real centre of it, you have foveism, cubism, data, surrealism and so forth.
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How much of these movements did Gertrude Stein herself actually appropriate and transform into her distinctive American avant-garde literary style?
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I think that she consciously wanted to become a cubist writer.
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So she took her discussions with Picasso, but he's hard.
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The concept that you have to get rid of a monolithic vision of an object or a situation and put flat on the table or the aspects of, for instance, a thing and describe it from different perspectives.
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And the other thing that is really determinant in her writing is the importance of form over content, of meaning also in rationality.
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And that probably has been influenced by the surrealist movement as well as Apo-de-Nair, who started these kilograms and calligraphic poems just before World War I.
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So she said there are three modernists, so it was Picasso and Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
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I would put Stravinsky in there too because he was the other in music, the other great modernist.
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And I would not, myself, put Gertrude Stein in that company.
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In fact, I don't know where I would put her myself.
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So she is the godmother in certainly the Salah, and do the writers that come in the subsequently, which I guess is in the 20s, no, after the First World War.
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In fact, many of them that came in the 20s had gone to Paris or to France originally during the First World War, is that correct?
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Absolutely. And that's one element of their sense of exile within American society when they came back from World War I.
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Joyce Possos, E.E. Cummings, Hemingway flew to Europe to serve as soldiers, and the Ravi 1917 and really experienced the worst of World War I.
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Then we're kind of left addressed when they came back to the United States, having experienced something that they could not relate in so many words, and feeling this distance within the country that was supposed to be home.
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So the desire to go back to Europe, which was the origin of their exile in the first place, and the destruction of their sense of the meaning of civilization, was probably the kind of pilgrimage to, like the traumatic place of their sense of who they were.
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Well, let's take one at a time, not all of them obviously, because it's a whole profusion of people that were not even mentioned on this show, who would fall into the category of American writers in Paris.
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But clearly some of the major figures Hemingway is not someone that I would in any way associate with the avant-garde aesthetics of Stein and her, the French avant-garde movements, either literary or artistic.
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So he goes to Paris, I don't know how much he learns from the French in that regard, but clearly he recalls those years that he spent in Paris in the 20s as the happiest and the most creative of his life.
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But is it fair to say that he took his own baggage with him?
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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And that's a very interesting thing about the Americans' writer that come to Paris is that for all of them, it's Paris is really the cradle of their birth as writers.
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And what Hemingway describing in a movable feast is really his working sessions in cafes and how he crafted the style.
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He has a whole ethics about the one true sentence that he has to start every paragraph was.
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So he fashions this persona of the new author learning the craft, but he adheres completely to the work ethics of American values.
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And he's extremely dismissive of the bohemian life, of other American writers that hang out in cafes.
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He doesn't want any sexual promiscuity, was the French actual sexual, intellectual promiscuity, either, since he doesn't read any French book really.
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He doesn't mingle with the surrealist or the French avant-garde.
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So Hemingway basically finds a heaven for his growth as a writer, but not a place where he would be transformed from the outside.
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That's well put, yeah.
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And learning the craft, and we know that Hemingway was a master of the short sentence.
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And what I was alluding to in my opening remarks as giving a style to aphasia, if that's not putting it too dramatically.
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But very American in that regard, one is at odds with this medium that's called language.
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One doesn't inhabit it in a serene way, but always in a nervous tension with its constraints.
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And part of the distinctive American style that you get in Hemingway, I think, is this undercurrent of illiesness there within the sentences themselves, no?
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Absolutely. And he developed the theory of the iceberg in a movable feast, which saves basically that for to get a really good short story, you have to leave out the important part of the story.
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And that's exactly what you said, that very short sentence where you say less than what you want to say, and that's where the tension lies basically, and that's what makes it ill-quint.
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But you can totally write Hemingway de-stinceded himself from sign in that matter.
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And what's fascinating is that the American literature was born in Paris in the 20th century.
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Was he on good terms with Stein?
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Up to a certain point, he benefited from her patronage to get his ways in the world of Paris.
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But almost all of these writers, when they recollect their memories, try to surpass each other in the art of blaming others for not being the right writer in Paris.
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So Stein dismissed his joys and is repound and as really ironic against him, and Hemingway does the same with the Christian Stein in his own book.
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So they had a cold, I would say, at some point in their relationship.
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He has a major presence there for a few years, at least.
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He was already in London since 1912, I believe.
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And after what he decided that London was dead intellectually, and that the only place in Europe where you could still save American literature from potential suicide was to go to Paris.
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So he stood there from 1920 to 1924.
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And he had his own kind of salon, sort of.
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Yeah, and it was, so some of these were not for dentists, also the same, never heard of Muh-Bannaz.
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And he set himself in the role of the nice uncle, I would say, who would invite, he was extremely kind to young writers in encouraging.
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Very generously.
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Extremely generous of his time and his advice.
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He would never really promote himself as a writer.
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He would always try to show off the furniture he was crafting himself in his little studio instead of showing his art, which is an interesting stance as a poet.
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Yeah.
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Pound then subsequently leaves France for Italy, and Italy becomes his true, let's say adopted homeland.
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Yes.
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And it's quite interesting because I know that T.S. Eliot, from what I understand, only spent about a year there in 1910.
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And yet was much more influenced by French literary modernismism in particular.
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Absolutely.
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Whereas Pound, we had a show on Pound a few months ago with Margie Pearloff, and she remarked that you read his can't those.
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You know, you have all sorts of traditions that are worked into it, you know, from the Chinese, especially the Italian, Dolce Ciedenola.
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But strangely enough, you know, the French don't, it's not a big presence in Pound.
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I think he turned more to Italy than in the class.
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| 00:24:30.000 |
Yes, in class, this is him, in a way.
|
| 00:24:32.000 |
Class, this is him, right?
|
| 00:24:34.000 |
So, Fitzgerald.
|
| 00:24:36.000 |
That's another one.
|
| 00:24:39.000 |
Well, Fitzgerald is a good example because you have, you know, the positive thought of Paris and the negative thought of Paris.
|
| 00:24:47.000 |
So, if it was a heaven, it could be also hell for others and a place of doom and failure.
|
| 00:24:52.000 |
And Fitzgerald, when he visited France, was already under the decline of his LaRéd Gienes.
|
| 00:25:00.000 |
And this is clearly how he's depicted by Hemingway in a movable feast.
|
| 00:25:05.000 |
He didn't really produce much when he was in France.
|
| 00:25:08.000 |
He hated France saying that it was not a good place to write, which is really the country to what Hemingway was thinking.
|
| 00:25:18.000 |
He led the life, you know, the Bohemian life, the nightlife, and the United States,
|
| 00:25:26.000 |
the Chinese, the Chinese basically.
|
| 00:25:28.000 |
Yeah, he did that.
|
| 00:25:30.000 |
It's all the life.
|
| 00:25:31.000 |
What years was he there?
|
| 00:25:33.000 |
He arrived in '24 and stayed almost until the beginning of the '30s.
|
| 00:25:37.000 |
Beginning of the '30s.
|
| 00:25:38.000 |
And he traveled from Paris to the Riviera to Switzerland, or something.
|
| 00:25:42.000 |
I was thinking of Tender as the night, which is a novel that takes place in France, Paris as the big then the Riviera.
|
| 00:25:49.000 |
And he seems to at least in that novel, pretend to have a perfect command of French.
|
| 00:25:56.000 |
Yes, not absolutely sure it was true.
|
| 00:25:59.000 |
The good thing about Tender is the night for the purpose of her topic is that it really just picks the American community as this completely,
|
| 00:26:07.000 |
in close community that doesn't communicate with a French at all.
|
| 00:26:10.000 |
Was that the case actually?
|
| 00:26:12.000 |
It was pretty much the case for the people like Hemingway in the '20s.
|
| 00:26:17.000 |
It's a complicated friend with Henry Miller in the '30s.
|
| 00:26:21.000 |
And Gertrude Stein profess not to read French, although she was fluent in French, but she had this murder that French is an oral language.
|
| 00:26:31.000 |
And English is a written language.
|
| 00:26:33.000 |
And that's another element that's really important, I think, for why they would leave the United States to become writers is that
|
| 00:26:39.000 |
immersed in the foreign language that they could not master and understand and be influenced by that complete freedom to discover their own new forms.
|
| 00:26:49.000 |
They were not under the pressure of a large tradition.
|
| 00:26:54.000 |
They had complete free range of styles and forms in front of them.
|
| 00:27:02.000 |
So did they spend a lot of time among themselves, the Americans and the cafes, and were they insulated?
|
| 00:27:10.000 |
Did they take their own American probability and actually perpetuate it in Paris by just saying among themselves?
|
| 00:27:18.000 |
I do think so.
|
| 00:27:19.000 |
I did that, yeah.
|
| 00:27:20.000 |
Yeah, actually there's a quote from this writer, Sinclair Lewis came to Paris in the '22s, but he was already really famous and authorized.
|
| 00:27:29.000 |
And he was not well welcome by the American community.
|
| 00:27:33.000 |
And so he, in a retaliation, described them as going to this café l'odotme, which is conveniently located at the intersection of Wurvermuparnez and Avenue Hazpay, which actually looks like the crossing of six avenue and eight feet in New York and where the waiters speak Americanese.
|
| 00:27:52.000 |
So basically he was, um, per capturing the American writers, speaking among themselves the same language and for producing, like pretending to avoid standardization, but legislating another kind of standardization in Paris.
|
| 00:28:09.000 |
So we have Gertrins Steind, who's the godmother, then the '20s is a big, a big generation.
|
| 00:28:16.000 |
And then Henry Miller comes subsequently to that, no?
|
| 00:28:21.000 |
Absolutely. He comes in 1931, and he comes completely isolated as opposed to the crowd of American writers, who actually talked to each other like Hemingway came because Sherwood Earnison told him this is the place to go and he has yet letters of introduction to go to Gertrins Steind Salon.
|
| 00:28:39.000 |
Henry Miller comes with $5 in his pocket, he's sent by his wife, wants to get rid of him, and he's been the first two years in complete despair and poverty until he'd just be the same.
|
| 00:28:50.000 |
Until he discovers the form of the book is going to write, which is 'Tropic of Cancer'.
|
| 00:28:56.000 |
So it's a completely different scene, it's the depression, the American dollar is not anymore this past-pert to any kind of high-life in Paris, which is the case in the '20s.
|
| 00:29:08.000 |
And Henry Miller also reads the French, he reads everything from 'Rabblet to the Young and Proost and Hugo', which is also another contrast to the form of generation.
|
| 00:29:21.000 |
Yeah. So he actually inhabits a different Paris, is it Mont Patinas as well, but his Paris is very CD, and it's a much darker, and boldy in Paris, if you like.
|
| 00:29:34.000 |
If he's an inhale, absolutely. I was looking for a quote that I got from your course readings, but I'm not finding it here where he's talking about how you can't even find the way to the horror district or something.
|
| 00:29:49.000 |
Yes, yes, yes, I don't. I don't, well, I'll find it.
|
| 00:29:53.000 |
Well, the description of Paris, the other thing is Paris should always be in quotation marks for these writers, because there's as many Paris and their authors.
|
| 00:30:03.000 |
And although Henry Miller lived in Mont Patinas in the exact same neighborhood as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he's description of Paris is completely different, and it's seen that he's Paris is this dark place of marginals and prostitutes, the leading metaphor and
|
| 00:30:23.520 |
The top of cancer is that of disease, Paris is this gigantic body, a womb that expels excremence and sweat and blood and all characters are
|
| 00:30:34.520 |
outcast or marginals, the dominant feelings are despair and alienation and acceleration out of that, because he found he's way as a writer.
|
| 00:30:45.520 |
And there's the force of life in decay itself, almost, for Henry Miller.
|
| 00:30:50.520 |
Here's it's not the quote I was thinking of, but here's another one of his, where he says, "This Paris to which I alone had the key hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best of intentions.
|
| 00:31:01.520 |
It is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it."
|
| 00:31:14.520 |
So the Tropic of Cancer, I think, has some reference to this cancer, which was a productive one, I created one, it was a matrix.
|
| 00:31:24.520 |
It's exactly, I mean, cancer is this, can we see that something very negative, but at the same time it's expanding and growing and multiplying in all those different forms, and it's actually the form of the book itself,
|
| 00:31:39.520 |
of trafficking of cancer, which has no narrative, but it explains in all different divergence, and what Henry Miller really embraced his experience of Paris was the flow of life.
|
| 00:31:54.520 |
But life in all its forms, high and low life, the bloody and the mystic.
|
| 00:32:02.520 |
So there's this all-encompassing book that is produced out of it, and he also describes Paris as the cradle of all artificial birth.
|
| 00:32:13.520 |
Like this is his gigantic wombs from which everything is masyrated in reborn in different ways.
|
| 00:32:21.520 |
Yeah, well I think that's a Paris more in his own mind, yeah.
|
| 00:32:25.520 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:32:26.520 |
Well he arrived in Paris alone without introduction, but he didn't say alone all the time, no, because he had a famous affair with another American writer, Anais Nien.
|
| 00:32:38.520 |
Who was Anais Nien?
|
| 00:32:40.520 |
Well Anais Nien is interesting, because she's in between, she is born in France actually, from a French father and a Venezuelan mother, and she's American too.
|
| 00:32:52.520 |
She lived in the United States from 7 to 24, and she was raised in New York schools.
|
| 00:33:01.520 |
She decided to write in English, it's a very intentional choice, so she's an American writer from French descent, if you wish.
|
| 00:33:09.520 |
What's interesting is that she arrived in the 20th with her husband, and first in her diary's describe as she wants to be the perfect wife, and she hates the promiscuity that she finds in Paris in this entraality.
|
| 00:33:21.520 |
And then, here she goes, in 1931 she meets Henry Miller, and they have this "Tour de Fair" that has been disclosed much much later in the 70s after everybody died, basically.
|
| 00:33:32.520 |
It was so, it was Contales.
|
| 00:33:34.520 |
And she discover herself as a writer, and as a woman writer, almost through sexuality with Henry Miller.
|
| 00:33:42.520 |
This was discovered in the 70s through what sort of documentation.
|
| 00:33:46.520 |
Well, at her diary, the her diary's were published in '65, I believe, and she had edited them already, so it was already cut from almost half of what she had already written, and she left in her will that the remainder would be disclosed after the death of her husband and after the death of her second husband.
|
| 00:34:07.520 |
So that was much later.
|
| 00:34:10.520 |
So it's just her full diary was disclosed after the primary protagonist of her life could not be affected.
|
| 00:34:18.520 |
How long did they, how long did they refer last?
|
| 00:34:21.520 |
At their physical affair lasted for three to four years, but then she switched to other leading intellectual figures among them, Antonin Aftol, and the psycho-analyzed-oto-rank.
|
| 00:34:35.520 |
So she was a much nurtured by strong intellectual minds.
|
| 00:34:41.520 |
I've tried to read her diary's.
|
| 00:34:44.520 |
I've spent years since I tried.
|
| 00:34:46.520 |
I never got into them for some reason.
|
| 00:34:48.520 |
It's something about, I mean, you can't love everyone, obviously.
|
| 00:34:51.520 |
Do you like her diary?
|
| 00:34:53.520 |
Actually, I do.
|
| 00:34:54.520 |
Just because you see the evolution of her, well, first you really see what it is to the American woman in the 20s, coming from New York.
|
| 00:35:03.520 |
And she was all this inhibitions she were talking about.
|
| 00:35:06.520 |
And she was refusing to adhere to what she calls "front sensuality."
|
| 00:35:12.520 |
But you see the temptation.
|
| 00:35:14.520 |
She keeps reading it, basically.
|
| 00:35:16.520 |
Oh, it's so bad.
|
| 00:35:17.520 |
She keeps reading it.
|
| 00:35:18.520 |
And then at some point she just succumbs.
|
| 00:35:21.520 |
And really develops her talents once she embraces her more mature self, I would say.
|
| 00:35:29.520 |
So in that sense, it's an interesting writer.
|
| 00:35:32.520 |
Well, you have a number of quotes for hers on that handout you gave to your students.
|
| 00:35:36.520 |
I'm looking at some of them.
|
| 00:35:38.520 |
This one strikes me as particularly American.
|
| 00:35:41.520 |
I am at home in the marvelous, absolutely at home, the unknown, the mysterious, the exotic, the strange, the never lived before the difficult.
|
| 00:35:49.520 |
I am uncomfortable and paralyzed in the common.
|
| 00:35:52.520 |
The common is unfamiliar to me.
|
| 00:35:55.520 |
Whereas my experience of Paris, I'm not talking about the 20s and things, but I think there's the wonder of Paris.
|
| 00:36:01.520 |
The wonder of Paris is the way in which the common is so marvelous.
|
| 00:36:06.520 |
And the common is where everything is really happening the every day.
|
| 00:36:12.520 |
And this opposition between the marvelous and the common is, you know, might be typically American, but I don't think it applies to the way the French live, you know, the wonder of the common.
|
| 00:36:25.520 |
But it's interesting in terms of choosing to live abroad though, that wherever you live, if you live abroad is this constant overload of new sensations and new perceptions just from being in a place that you don't know.
|
| 00:36:46.520 |
And being immersed in a language that you don't master either brings this, the shattering of your identity and expansion of yourself because you discover all those new things.
|
| 00:36:58.520 |
Yeah, I think it was Gertrude Stein who said that every writer needs two countries or two homelands, one where you're from and the other where you live.
|
| 00:37:10.520 |
And that the one where you live should not be your native.
|
| 00:37:16.520 |
Yeah, there's one where you belong from and you write about that you write about.
|
| 00:37:19.520 |
And you had another place to be able to see that.
|
| 00:37:22.520 |
So in that sense, Paris was like the matrix for writing about America.
|
| 00:37:28.520 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:37:29.520 |
And America reveals itself at a distance, at this distance, whatever that distance is, it separates America from Paris.
|
| 00:37:36.520 |
That one can see into the American soul things that maybe back home don't reveal themselves to the writer.
|
| 00:37:48.520 |
Yeah, it's particularly true for people who came after World War II like James Baldwin, for instance.
|
| 00:37:56.520 |
Yeah, let's talk about James Baldwin.
|
| 00:37:58.520 |
There are also these African-American generation of writers.
|
| 00:38:02.520 |
James Baldwin, Richard Wright.
|
| 00:38:04.520 |
First, he was invited by Kurt Tristan.
|
| 00:38:07.520 |
That's how he managed to get a passport to go to France and was welcome with Simon de Beauvoir and Joppo Stock.
|
| 00:38:13.520 |
So this is this huge contrast right from the first step, he takes in the city of Paris.
|
| 00:38:21.520 |
Having to fight to get a passport to get out of the United States and then being welcomed by the leading intellectuals of France when he arrives in France.
|
| 00:38:29.520 |
So he has Richard Wright and then James Baldwin arrives a couple years later.
|
| 00:38:34.520 |
But this time he arrives completely alone and poor.
|
| 00:38:39.520 |
And he stays for almost ten years and discovers what is his American-ness by being in Paris.
|
| 00:38:48.520 |
And he has this whole reflection about the fact that he's more distant from Africans from Africa.
|
| 00:38:58.520 |
And Europeans than he's from a white American.
|
| 00:39:01.520 |
And that being an expactor is the American experience, so being enruded, uprooted and algae-nated from any past.
|
| 00:39:10.520 |
And that what he learns is that he shared a common history with white Americans he thought he was fighting.
|
| 00:39:19.520 |
Yeah. That's interesting because I guess I was trying to suggest in my own words in my opening that
|
| 00:39:26.520 |
the American soul is fundamentally expatriate. Whether it leaves the home or not.
|
| 00:39:34.520 |
And that the literal condition of being expatriate can reveal what is quintessentially American in the self.
|
| 00:39:45.520 |
In fact, there's a quote here of Baldwin, which I think is interesting.
|
| 00:39:50.520 |
It's almost in a spirit of disappointment or delusion.
|
| 00:39:56.520 |
If I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be the same self from which I had spent so much time and flight, I would have stayed home.
|
| 00:40:06.520 |
Yes. It's a great quote. It's from this book, "Jovani's Room," which is a novel.
|
| 00:40:11.520 |
Which doesn't deal with the black condition, which was what expected from an African-American writer.
|
| 00:40:19.520 |
What also James Baldwin really appreciated in his Dainthairs is that he was confronted to the root question of the self, not the self, like American, but just the self.
|
| 00:40:31.520 |
Yes.
|
| 00:40:32.520 |
He was liberated from the gaze of the others and how the look of the others defined himself at the core of his own intuition of who he was.
|
| 00:40:42.520 |
And, rather than in Paris, he was stripped bare of any social preconception of who he was and was confronted with the real question. Who am I?
|
| 00:40:52.520 |
Right. Apart from all the identity politics that we were always all that noise about it in America, that we're always being defined by a category rather than a
|
| 00:41:02.500 |
self. Yeah. And actually, I thought again about the quote you had in your introduction by E.E. Cummings about the human-ness that you find in Paris.
|
| 00:41:13.500 |
And this universal quality of just being human beings.
|
| 00:41:18.500 |
And I wonder if Ken be related to the famous universalism of the French who don't want to look into differences.
|
| 00:41:25.500 |
And it's not a source of problems that maybe Americans can be really liberating to be looked at as just human beings and not the woman, again, lesbian, African-American.
|
| 00:41:37.500 |
Well, let me make a confession here because a lot of people find that French universalism is something objectionable about it that is related to imperialist ambitions.
|
| 00:41:47.500 |
So I'm a big fan of French universalism. And that one has a sense. I always ask myself as an American when I go to Paris, why can't America not be like France where everyone is a human being first and foremost?
|
| 00:42:05.500 |
And that the categorization is completely secondary if not tertiary or if not irrelevant.
|
| 00:42:11.500 |
And where, especially for example, the ex colonized groups seem French first and foremost.
|
| 00:42:22.500 |
And that's what they say actually.
|
| 00:42:24.500 |
And being French doesn't mean necessarily being belonged to a particular nation, but having an allegiance to a certain idea that humanity is a universal.
|
| 00:42:36.500 |
And you start with that as the given and all the rest then becomes these sort of minor differences that add to the diversity and richness of the human community.
|
| 00:42:51.500 |
Absolutely.
|
| 00:42:53.500 |
So I'm not going to deny you since I am French.
|
| 00:42:57.500 |
I've been raised in this idea.
|
| 00:42:59.500 |
But I think from James Baldwin it was particularly liberating to plus if you think about it.
|
| 00:43:05.500 |
He's a very different French.
|
| 00:43:06.500 |
He did. He speaks really well French. We have interviews of him and French he speaks really well French.
|
| 00:43:12.500 |
And also for a writer, any limitations on your identity is going to be a limitation of what you can write and how it can write.
|
| 00:43:22.500 |
So this sense of getting back to the core question of the self is also getting back to the source of your inspiration and your originality as a writer.
|
| 00:43:34.500 |
Yeah, that's interesting. He didn't write in French.
|
| 00:43:37.500 |
No, no, no, no.
|
| 00:43:38.500 |
And this is also interesting.
|
| 00:43:41.500 |
It confirms what you've been suggesting, which is that Paris was a place where Americans went to discover themselves as Americans and get a perspective on America.
|
| 00:43:52.500 |
And although they're expatriate, they never expatriate themselves in a truly radical sense in the way that someone like Samuel Beckett expatriated himself.
|
| 00:44:03.500 |
By not only going to Paris but expatriating himself linguistically and writing in a language which was not his native tongue.
|
| 00:44:14.500 |
And neither was he just trying to become a French author. It wasn't that he was just trying to appropriate for it.
|
| 00:44:20.500 |
But that he would write French in order to retain a certain foreignness even in the linguistic idiom that he was writing.
|
| 00:44:32.500 |
As he said, in order to avoid all the embedded cliches that come with your native tongue.
|
| 00:44:38.500 |
So I think it would be interesting. It would have been interesting if some of these American writers had actually gone all the way and left us some interesting works in French.
|
| 00:44:48.500 |
I don't only won, which is Jean-Grena, who really felt he was almost French and decided to write in French.
|
| 00:44:59.500 |
But if you think about it, the Samuel Beckett's attitude is in a way, not completely similar, but in both the American writers' attitude in Samuel Beckett's, you see this need to gain this distance and go beyond the norms and what is already, as you said, embedded in your head as what you should write.
|
| 00:45:24.500 |
And Gretchen Stein and Hemingway and these other men who were extremely inventive in terms of forms, did manage to go beyond the American language even if they chose it as their really linguistic way.
|
| 00:45:41.500 |
They transformed it, they made it their own, they expanded its linguistic possibilities.
|
| 00:45:48.500 |
But from Beckett's point of view, they never really left their homeland in so far as they never left their English as such.
|
| 00:46:00.500 |
So, Sissy, we have a few other generations, at least one other generation that we want to talk about, and that's the beat generation.
|
| 00:46:09.500 |
Yes. Is that in the sick, I don't know if it's in the report.
|
| 00:46:12.500 |
They arrived at the beginning of the '60s and what?
|
| 00:46:17.500 |
And we're talking here about the Caroac.
|
| 00:46:19.500 |
Well, all of them. Jack Caroac, Alan Ginsburg, Baro, Corso, the old end up in this very small Shabby Hotel, Nothrujiluca, and the '60s small, and don't go and try to find it because it didn't exhibit anymore, and it's now in the very rich neighborhood.
|
| 00:46:37.500 |
But it was completely shabby, they had no money, basically.
|
| 00:46:40.500 |
And they didn't spend time writing that much, I have to say. They experimented a lot more with substances than words in language.
|
| 00:46:50.500 |
But what's interesting about them is that the whole beat generation movement seems to find it's too habitated in a place like Paris, where there's this acceptance of the poet, of the poet, moody tradition, and they're re-enacting 100th century,
|
| 00:47:09.500 |
100 years afterwards, what Hambou and Vallende did in the same place.
|
| 00:47:14.500 |
Another thing that Wallace took me is that a number of these writers got published in Paris, even if it was in English, because their books would be forbidden in the United States.
|
| 00:47:24.500 |
Well, Henry Miller for sure.
|
| 00:47:26.500 |
And we made it for sure, and it was not after, 30 years after the original print that it was published in the United States.
|
| 00:47:32.500 |
But also Lolita, for instance, even if the book of didn't stay in Paris as such.
|
| 00:47:37.500 |
But the naked lunch was also published in Paris before it could be published in the United States.
|
| 00:47:43.500 |
And when the beat poets were hanging out in Paris, they were hearing from the suit that the trial of Feltengeti, the St. Francisco.
|
| 00:47:55.500 |
Yeah, poet and publisher, he was sued because of the public performance of Hall by Ginsburg.
|
| 00:48:04.500 |
And so there's this whole contrast between either a permissive note of freedom that he found in Paris, and the American constrain on thoughts and expression.
|
| 00:48:17.500 |
And that's another element of freedom that could find in Paris too.
|
| 00:48:21.500 |
But you're saying that they spent more of their time doped out rather than...
|
| 00:48:27.500 |
And actually writing? Yeah, actually writing were immersed in that.
|
| 00:48:31.500 |
And of course their heroes were in many ways the symbolists of Bodle and the poet Modi, Hambo, and...
|
| 00:48:39.500 |
Yeah, and when there's and nomads, there are really people traveling and traveling with no senses at home.
|
| 00:48:48.500 |
Sure.
|
| 00:48:50.500 |
Well, this raises the whole question of the, in general, the relations between France and American, how much America owes in terms of its inspiration to France, if not to Paris directly.
|
| 00:49:04.500 |
And I mentioned earlier the pounding fathers, I mean the framers of the Costa Jefferson and Franklin, who for whom their sojourn in Paris was so incredibly important.
|
| 00:49:17.500 |
In terms of their thinking about the essence of a republic, about what is a republic, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the way there was...
|
| 00:49:29.500 |
Well, there was a mutual sort of influence there.
|
| 00:49:34.500 |
And admiration.
|
| 00:49:35.500 |
And admiration, because the French Revolution is actually subsequent to the American Revolution.
|
| 00:49:40.500 |
And in many ways the American Revolution, which does have a strong component of French inspiration, then in turn becomes a model of inspiration, at least an inspiration is its own right for the French Revolution.
|
| 00:49:55.500 |
And of course we have our Statue of Liberty and so forth.
|
| 00:50:00.500 |
It's something that continues from what I gather with writers that still to this day, I think are going to Paris in the Ultra.
|
| 00:50:14.500 |
Something might be a little bit cliche now for...
|
| 00:50:16.500 |
I think it's a little bit over-diet.
|
| 00:50:18.500 |
I think probably the consummate, and maybe Jim Morrison, who, when he got sick of being a pop star in America, goes to Paris to be a poet,
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| 00:50:29.500 |
thinking that he's finally going to do what he always wanted to do, which is be taken seriously as a poet, not just a singer.
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And of course he dies in Paris in '71, he's still buried there in Pérez.
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I don't know if it was a whole cult on his tomb.
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Exactly, yeah.
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But that seems to be almost a kind of end to...
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I wouldn't call it a myth because it's far more than a myth.
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It's as real as you can get in terms of what American literature in the 20th century owes to the Parisian influence and hospitality.
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Yes, that's a lot of the hospitality in that sense.
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And it's typical also that they could go to Paris, that part of the hospitality of Paris would be that liberalism by which the Parisians would not...
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That Paris doesn't insist on colonizing anyone who comes there.
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You can do what you want.
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That's either tolerance or indifference.
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Actually, Gertrude sign, and up to this day, I know, an American poet who comes back to Paris, and he's always amazed at...
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how intellectuals are really admired and respected in France, in French culture at large, and have a place in society.
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And Gertrude sign was saying that there was a little anecdote where she wanted to park in this garage and the guy who managed to the garage.
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Oh, yes, of course, you're a writer, you need to place.
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And so she got a parking slot when a politician next to her and a common-day person would not have one.
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That's my kind of place.
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Yeah.
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The poet first, politician.
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The politician.
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Last.
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Last.
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You know, to see someone listening to our program would naturally assume that what we're talking about is your area of specialization.
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That you're in modern French and the influence of France, but actually we should tell our listeners that you're not at all in that field by Fort Macillon.
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Yes.
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But you're both a medievalist and a Renaissance scholar, you know?
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Absolutely.
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It's the whole paradox.
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I was teaching American writers in Paris, although I am a Parisian expatuate in Stanford, and I'm specializing in Renaissance poetry in particular.
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So, yes.
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And this is your third year here with us?
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Yes, absolutely.
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And what courses are you teaching now here?
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I'm teaching an undergrad, introduction to a medieval and Renaissance literature called "Athership, Book Culture and National Building in Media of
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a Renaissance France."
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And it's a lot of fun.
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Fantastic.
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We also congratulate you.
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You've been recently married and you, this is, continues the theme of the Franco-American relations because your husband is an American, not only an American, but he's also a musician.
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Yes.
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Jazz musician at that and a composer, and I know that you've brought in some of his music that we're going to end our show on.
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Can you tell us something about your husband and his music?
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Yes, well, so his name is Ken Berman, and you're going to listen to an as-it unreleased song called "It's Over," which is not about our relationship.
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Oh, that's about our show.
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Our show today, probably, which is from a CD album to be released in air-fool called "In Mind," and he's a pianist and composer.
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And you lift with me in Paris in this fall, so we did continue the tradition of the American artist going to Paris for inspiration.
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How did you like it?
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He loved it.
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He loved it.
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And the jazz in Paris is really transcend.
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Yeah, that's another thing we haven't know.
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We could talk about the jazz and the blues.
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Yes, and also...
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Yeah, so Jean-Man, for sure.
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Yes, there's this whole other aspect of Paris.
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Is he learning French?
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We're trying.
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Yeah, okay.
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So we're going to listen to a song called "It's Over" on a CD of his...
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Yes, called "In Mind."
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"In Mind."
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Yes, to be released in April, by King of Herman.
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Thank you, Brian.
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So before we turn to that, thanks again for coming on.
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So, I want to remind our listeners that we have a web page for this program.
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If you log into the Stanford's French and Italian department's home page, click on entitled "Pinions."
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There you can access all our previous shows.
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There's about 30 of them, or close to 30 by now.
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| 00:55:14.500 |
You can also leave your comments, look for our shows also in the iTunes store.
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| 00:55:20.500 |
And I don't know if we're going to be with you next week due to baseball, but we'll see with the weather being on the show.
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We may well be with you next week, otherwise we'll be with you the week after that.
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Thank you again.
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Bye-bye.
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Thank you.
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