Pedro Pizano

Roaring Paris

Paris, “La Ville Lumiere” has been a cultural hub since the late nineteenth century until our days. Writers, painter, and artists of all sorts have moved there and have created a rich imaginary world where Paris lives figuratively. This was especially true in the 1920’s where a series of socio-economic, political, moral, and cultural factors allowed and motivated American writers, as Hemingway and Stein, to live there.

This paper will start with a general description of the aforementioned factors to be able to understand what Post-war Paris was like and why it was so appealing. The argument will center and stem from the factors themselves and not from the point of view of the writers. Immediately after, it will flip the coin and examine why the authors themselves wanted to move there: their fundamental assumptions about an artist’s life, their views on America and their place in it, the consequences of The Great War on their psyche, and how it is or not a youth-culture movement. It will end by demonstrating the aforesaid experience of Paris by using examples from A Moveable Feast and Paris France, by Hemingway and Stein respectively. Henceforth follows the description of economic, social, technological, political, moral, and cultural factors of Paris, France in the 1920’s in that order.

The 1920’s were called the roaring 20’s primarily because for the first time the United States became an economic and military super-power in the aftermath of the Great War. The cultural and technical production that began in the US quickly spread like infectious fire through all of Europe. In France, the years from 1920 until the onset of the Great Depression were called the “années folles”(Crazy years). These economic factors made Europe very appealing for Americans.

In Paris the exchange rate for the dollar was so favorable that one could rent a comfortable apartment in La Rive Gauche for less than fifty dollars a month.[1] The economical situation was so bad in France because of two reasons, the material devastation of the Great War and the casualties the French men endured:

“It was France which paid the biggest price of the war when comparing the demographic scale. 1,325,000 people died and 280 million people were injured. … An economist, Sorby, evaluated the total material damage of France caused by the World War I as 55 billion francs. This is equivalent to 15 times the national income of France before the World War I°.”[2]

Paris, being the capital of France, suffered the most: the active population decreased by 10.5 percent and repeated bombings caused damage and casualties, especially in 1918 with the development of German long-range siege artillery. The United States, on the other hand, since it was indirectly paying for the rebuilding of all Europe with loans at elevated interests rates and it was transitioning from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy was able to become the richest nation in the world.

The other grand reason as to why Paris was so appealing were the amazing technological advances that occurred in the early years of the 20th century, to name a few: electricity, automobiles, airplanes, telephone, radio and cinema. Also, basic appliances such as washing machines, clothes dryers, exercise machines, refrigerators, freezers, electric stoves, and vacuum cleaners all became popular from the 1920s. France was a mayor player in the technological advancement. For example, the Paris Exposition of 1889 was the first electrical installation that was successful on such a big scale.[3] The cinema was also invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in Paris and by the start of the twentieth century when the automobile industry was beginning to take off, France produced 30,204 cars in 1903, representing 48.8% of world automobile production that year.[4] France had basically a monopoly on the technological advances in the early years of the 20^th century. A monopoly that was slowly being taken away by those two countries that believe that war solves all their problems, the United States and Germany. Because of this Paris was a charming city during and after the second industrial revolution as it was called, and Berlin and NY were not.

In the United States the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding “symbolized the national mood. Inarticulate, unassuming, and inoffensive, Harding stuck many as less a visionary leader than a bumbling uncle.”[5] The national mood was one which was described by many expatriates as too business minded, too conservative and pragmatic and too rooted in its inflexible presumption of moral superiority to comprehend the disruptions brought about by cultural and technological change.[6] Harold Stearns (whom Hemingway parodied as Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises) criticized existing conditions in America and the Young Intellectual published in 1921: “The institutional life of America is a combination for the blackjacking of our youth into the acceptance of the status quo not of 1920, but of the late eighteenth century in government, of the early nineteenth century in morals and culture, and of the stone age in business.”[7] Add to that the Eighteenth Amendment of 1919 which made prohibition law for the next 30 years and it can be understood why Stearns ended his book with advice that became the battle cry of the expatriate artist” “Get Out!”

In the world at large, advances in philosophy, psychology, natural sciences, and physics eroded the belief humanity had in positivist progress, humility, servitude and Christian virtues. In philosophy the most representative is Nietzche (1844-1900) with his superhuman and his will to power. Darwin advances the theory of evolution and chance is thrown into human nature, Freud brings forth the deep dark unconscious and Einstein makes everything relative. These were all essential cultural factors in the 1920’s and were the precursors and some of the consequences of The Great War. As such, writers would adopt them: sometimes as a general feeling of disenchantment in the world at large, sometimes as a means to explore regions formerly unknown in their psyche, or they would use them to create new literary techniques like James Joyce and his subconscious run on sentences or Stein and her distinctive style.

Regarding the Cultural Revolution that occurred in those years, The Roaring Twenties were where jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, and Art Deco peaked. The general spirit of the era was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity, a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality, in architecture as well as in daily life. At the same time, amusement, fun and lightness were cultivated in jazz and dancing, in defiance of the horrors of World War I, which remained present in people’s minds. The period is also often called “The Jazz Age” because it was were the American big bands found their golden era and traveled throughout the world.[8]

For these reasons Virgina Woolf could write in 1924, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed…All human relations shifted — those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”[9]

The roaring 20’s or the Crazy years in Paris were precisely the expression of that change, and it was only natural that writers such as Stein were there to live it and Hemingway moved there to experience it.

Stein writes in her book Paris France: “So it begins to be reasonable that the twentieth century whose mechanics, whose crimes, whose standardization began in America, needed the background of Paris, the place where tradition was so firm that they could look modern without being different, and where their acceptance of reality is so great that they could let anyone have the emotion of unreality.”[10] This quote beautifully summarizes what has been said in the former paragraphs, and illustrates in a few points the whole concept of the American expatriate. She then adds one of the most lucid sentences about American writers in Paris and she does it in a peculiar American “modernist” style: “…what is it to-day a French woman said to me about an American writer, it is false without being artificial…It did not take the twentieth century to make them [the French] say that as it has taken the twentieth century to make other people say that.”[11]

For Hemingway it was “the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is.”[12] As he himself tells on in A Moveable Feast, he was free to roam the scenic avenues and rues of Paris, with a notebook and pencils in his coat, until he found a café where he would order a café au lait and perhaps some St. James Rum. The atmosphere of these small cafés, with their peculiar customers, their marbled topped tables and pretty girls, would allow him to write endlessly and tirelessly:

“The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I though. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil…then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone…”[13]

In the former quote we can see how Hemingway uses his surroundings to catapult himself into the writing. The girl becomes his inspiration to start writing: “I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere…”[14] and then as we see in the former quote, she holds his attention fixed because it is his one constant fascination until the story takes over him, his surroundings, and everything else. At that point he belongs to Paris, Paris belongs to him but all of that belongs precisely to the act of writing. The only way Hemingway could seize his surroundings was through art (and I wonder if there’s any other way of doing it) and he could only do it in Paris.

Yet, Hemingway was not writing about Paris itself or its “belles femmes”, he was writing about Michigan. Why would he go all the way to Paris to write stories based on his experiences with his father on Walloon Lake in Petoskey, Michigan? “I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood,” he tells us, “and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.” Of course, by other growing things he refers to stories and books. But what is exactly this notion of transplanting yourself and what are the motivations behind it apart from all the socio-political, economical and cultural factors already mentioned?

Curnutt examines the reasons why expatriate modernists, such as Hemingway, Stein, and many others would move to Paris in the 1920’s. He mentions 5 main characteristics which are: displacement as a fundamental condition of life, the denunciation of America’s repressive morality, the apparent renunciation of their nationality, the consequences of World War I, and the youth-culture movement it wanted to become.

Expatriate modernists depict displacement as a fundamental condition of life in the early 20^th century because they came of age at a time of personal tragedy, and “the only thing left to believe in was art…As Fitzgerald explained in his first novel, this Side of Paradise (1920), this generation had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”[15] As such, Curnutt explains: “Foreign travel became a pastime in the 1920’s in part because it provides a perfect metaphor for expressing this orphan-like sense of not belonging.”[16] Travel in a foreign land breeds anxiety when one confronts languages one does not understand or food one is not accustomed to, therefore travelers usually compensate by imagining their comfort upon returning home. “But expatriate modernists did not believe a homecoming was possible. Because their childhood world was now so old fashioned and irrelevant to the contemporary scene, they saw themselves cut loose from their moorings, doomed to drift from port to port in search of a stability they were not sure they would ever find.”[17] This self-imposed exile by many American writers had this essential condition as its base; one that has been as old as mankind but that was especially poignant in those first decades of the twentieth century. Many people who were already of age by the 1900, which lived through the Bolshevik revolution in Russia or saw the coming of the century in Paris, have trouble explaining what these years were. They say that you would have had to live it to understand it. The years from 1900-1920 were the end of an era of humanity, of perhaps the highest artistic current: Romanticism, of faith in progress, and of the start of the century of death. How could anyone feel they belonged anywhere when all of these miraculous and scary changes were happening in the world at large? Specifically how could someone with artistic aims stay in a land that was still in the 18^th century and was ruled by Puritan morals such as the United States was?

Expatriate modernists denounce America as a land of repressive morality where puritanical attitudes render the nation incapable of acknowledging the uncertainties of the age. Curnutt explains: “Contributing to the modernist’s sense of displacement was their belief that the vast bulk of Americans failed to appreciate the complexities of modern life.”[18] By that they meant, as explained before, that you could not live in a land that was too-businesses minded and too conservative to comprehend anything about sexual freedom or personal freedom. Artists also wanted to dwell in a land where alcohol and other mind-altering substances (which have been associated with artistic production since the beginning of time but especially in the 19^th century) were readily available.

Although expatriate modernists condemned American conservatism, they did not renounce their nationality. Rather, they regarded Paris as a foreign realm in which they could create new identities, craft new values, and explore unconventional and taboo behaviors. Curnutt argues that American expatriates did not go to Paris because they were interested in Paris itself, nor in the culture or even the language. He says “The point of living and writing abroad was no to become a citizen of another country but to free oneself from the restrictions of home.”[19] I would argue otherwise because then they could have gone anywhere but they all chose Paris. From Joyce to Picasso everyone was in Paris at that time and it was because of its cultural history and its literary tradition. Artists have and will always be respected in Paris. Even today an artist will be given a parking spot over a politician or a rich merchant. For Americans in the 1920’s you simply had to go to Paris.

Henry Miller, another expatriate, in one of the seminal books about Paris writes: “Paris of itself initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil.” [20] This quote summarizes the 3 main points mentioned by Curnutt before. It explains displacement as a fundamental condition and its consequence of extirpation from the maternal womb or homeland, and the new experience that was to be found in Paris in those times.

Regarding the questions as to why it had to be Paris, Pizer tells us “And although any act of transplanting might theoretically be beneficial, it is Paris above all, as Miller implies, that has served as the best “obstetrical instrument.”…It is itself [Paris] an image of freedom in that it harbors –in its quartiers, its residents, and its activities-a sufficient range of life to dramatize how freedom of choice, and therefore, as in transplanting, a fuller growth, lie within one’s capacity simply through an act of movement.”[21] That is to say the city itself represents displacement itself and Hemingway is well aware of that when for example in the first sketch of A Moveable Feast he runs away from the Café des Amateurs because it’s filthy, to a nice café on Saint Michel where he can write. He describes with minute detail the streets he took to get there: “I walked down the Lyceee Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St. Etienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Pantheon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St. Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St-Michel” [22] Paris, the city itself became a metaphor because of its geography and innumerous offers of culture, café life and people of the act of displacement itself. This was all configured by the cultural and socio-political history of the 19^th century, which is beyond of the scope of this paper to describe, but which made Paris the only destination possible for American writers in the 1920’s, contrary to what Curnutt believes.

Expatriate modernists also explore the consequences of World War I depicting it as a major cause of their disillusionment and disaffection. Curnutt affirms that “perhaps the greatest casualty [of WWI] was the idea that war was a noble endeavor fought for patriotism, the honor and glory of sacrifice and the valiant defense of one’s principles and convictions..[It] resulted in unprecedented cynicism toward the motives for armed conflict.”[23] Of course the war itself was one of the major displacements in the 20^th century with millions of soldiers leaving their homeland forever, never to return. The war simply ended all possibilities for the world to be the same and “the best expatriate modernists recognized that, although the war made belief in the values their elders bequeathed them impossible, to craft new ideals that would impose order and clarity upon the confusions of modern life remained the responsibility of the younger generation”[24]

Finally, expatriate modernism is a youth-culture movement because no one wanted to come of age in a world that had made the War possible and all its horrors. It was better to remain innocent and child-like to try to forge new ideals and not become and “adult” as dictated by society. Staying in America would have necessitated this and as such everyone who wanted to be anyone had to go to Paris.

For Hemingway and Stein, as we have seen, their sejour in Paris was essential not only for the maturation of their writing styles but also for the creation of their whole personalities. It was there that they first became writers, it was there that Stein could be openly lesbian, it was there that Hemingway lost his innocence and broke the vows of marriage for the first time but it was also one of the happiest of times before that. In short, Paris in the 1920’s represented a sort of Eden and a falling out of it, A Moveable Feast may be precisely the representation of that. “The image of a lost Eden,” Pizer explains, “is one of the most evocative and permanent resources of the western imagination, with writers and artists drawing upon a host of symbolic equivalents of the journey from innocence and bliss to tragic knowledge. Fore Hemingway [and Stein], Paris served this role well.”[25] And in that discovery and loss of Eden, writers such as these have created that figurative image of Paris which we all hold dear.

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