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francofile chronicles

Jan, 14th 2000 "Yanks in Euroland" Part Two

by David Applefield

I wanted to set out and see the world.

Song of Myself and the Beat Poets were itching at my innards. I wanted to know where I really came from. And it couldn´t have been Jersey! (A few years ago I did return to Elizabeth and tracked down a frightfully shabby Elizabeth General Hospital, now tucked behind a dangerous-looking Wendy´s and an abandoned parking lot littered with broken shopping carts.) At BookExpo a few years back the African-American poet Amiri Baraka, a resident of Newark, joked: "If you were born in Elizabeth, I know why you live in Paris!"

It took me ten years to realize that Singer was right. I´m not a European. And my voice belongs to a guy who grew up eating Cheerios, wearing Keds, and watching Gilligan´s Island. The problem, of course, is that in the time you stop to figure out who you are, you become something else. In my case, a Parisian of Cuban and German parents entered the picture, and today we have three polyglot kids all born at La Pitie Hospital in the 13th arrondissement, essentially Parisians. The circle has closed and the process has reversed itself. My kids are now growing up thinking of the United States as the old country where "Papa" came from . Donc, Elizabeth becomes the schtetl!

In 1978, in any case, with paperback copies of Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy in tow, I guiltlessly took the TWA flight back to Europe, completing a torturous and drawn-out round-trip journey that began in March 1947 when my Polish speaking grandfather and his 11 year old daughter walked down the gangway at Pier 47 in New York off a Salvation Army boat chartered to carry Holocaust survivors and displaced souls out of a ravaged Europe.

It wasn´t until I took notice of a frayed snap shot of Ernest Hemingway at age 2 that it really dawned on me that the real driving force behind expatriatism is not so much what awaits the traveler in search of new digs, it´s not the newness but the escape from the old, the haunting secrets and oppressive forces, and unsettling questions of identity, that he or she leaves at home. Baby Ernest´s mother had dressed our soon-to-become symbol of male "writerness" in a prissy white dress. She had desperately wanted a girl and treated her son like the one God did not give her. Does an ambitious adolescent with a flare for words need a psychologically better reason to leave home than that? For me, all the rest of the Hemingway story is peripheral. And an examination of the home lives and backgrounds of many expats reveal that although Paris might have been a real attraction, highly-personal reasons to flee were prompting in the wings. Paris, ultimately, became the quintessential excuse, because moving to the City of Light is so easy to justify in cultural, artistic, aesthetic, linguistic, and historic terms. What happens after you get here is another story. I´ve flirted with a book on the subject I´m tentatively calling Why Paris?

Today, the American contingency in Europe is hard to quantify.

We know that there are about 100 000 permanent anglophones residing in Paris and its banlieus alone. In that the community is not really a community with any common ties and that the individuals that make up this statistic come and go, and are replaced with others, doesn´t help us understand who is really here or why? In terms of writers, poets, and painters, we know the venues for reading, publishing, and exhibiting.

One thing is clear. The economics of living a writerly life in Paris are far from what they once were. The exchange rate and the strength of the dollar was the understated heartbeat of expatriate life. William Styron wrote in an essay we published in Frank, that a luncheon he consumed in the early 50s in a plain but nice restaurant near the Gare Montparnasse consisting of salade de museau vinaigrette, entrecâ"�te, pommes frites, haricots verts, glace au chocolate, café filtré cost him .85. For a few dollars a day pauper-writers lived like kings in post-war Paris. Styron, a struggling novelist at the time, paid eight dollars a week for a room at the modest Hotel Liberia on the rue de la Grande-Chaumire. Today´s Paris-based writer does not fit this profile at all. Famed expat, Jim Haynes, whose friendly Paris-based imprint Handshake Editions (Jim doesn´t believe in contracts, and has been known to bring out small editions of books overnight) states: "The better the exchange rate, the better and more hip the crowd." Americans with already established literary careers, university affiliations and secure salaries tend to come and spend parts of the year in Paris simply because life here, although expensive, is more pleasant. less writers come at the beginning of their careers and in fact Paris has kind of grown into a haven for post-fifty literary retirement.

The poet C.K. Williams shuttles between Paris´s 10th arrondissement and the campus of Princeton.

The American gay writer and Francofile, Edmund White, lives on the Ile Saint Louis and in New Haven, Connecticut. Poet Kathleen Spivak spends half the year teaching in Boston and the other in the Saint Germain ds Pres area. Tom Bishop of New York University commutes between the City of Light and Greenwich Village. Harry Mathews spends his winters in Key West, Florida with his French wife Marie Chaix and his summers on the rue Saint Dominique. Ted Joans floats between Paris and Seattle. Ron Sukenick, whose classic cult book, The Death of the Novel, a signed and dedicated first edition of which I curiously found in a book stall along the Seine in 1985 for five francs, courriers between Colorado and the French capital. And British-Canadian publisher/writer John Calder, who published Miller, Beckett, Breytenbach, the Nouveau Roman writers, and scores of Paris expats, practically lives on the Eurostar tearing between his London office and the Parisian "red" suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois.