DRAGON: Ellery Washingon / James Balwin´s Paris

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Ellery Washingon / James Balwin´s Paris

James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s Paris

By ELLERY WASHINGTONJAN. 17, 2014

Café de Flore, where Baldwin worked on his novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

One bright afternoon in Paris, on the terrace of the cafe Deux Magots, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, I found myself engaged in an increasingly animated conversation about the writer James Baldwin and the notorious feud that broke out between him and his fellow African-American expatriate Richard Wright.

It was late July, and the cafe’s terrace hummed with the casual banter of lounging tourists and residents. All the while a small battalion of crisp-collared waiters shuffled elegantly between the tightly ordered tables and stiff wicker chairs, their every gesture backed by the steady cadence of white porcelain cups tapping against saucers and the gentle clank of Art Deco silverware.

Having spent nearly a decade living in Paris, I’d eaten at Les Deux Magots many times. That afternoon, however, I had a specific purpose in mind. I was retracing James Baldwin’s steps through Paris, while asking myself where Baldwin might be living if he were in the city now. To further my search, I had invited the expatriate African-American novelist — and Baldwin enthusiast — Jake Lamar to join me at Les Deux Magots, hoping he would catch any gaps in my itinerary.

“It started right here,” Jake said of the dispute between Baldwin and Wright, as our waiter swept away our plates to make space for his forthcoming espresso and my cafe allongé. Jake was reminding me that Baldwin and Wright’s quarrel had begun upstairs from where we sat, facing the cobblestone Place St.-Germain-des-Prés and l’Église St.-Germain-des-Prés itself, the oldest church in Paris.

Had we been actually sitting inside the cafe that day, in the winter of 1948, he explained, we would have surely caught a glimpse of an earnest young Jimmy Baldwin, slightly disheveled from having arrived from New York only hours before, climbing the narrow steps up to the cafe’s second floor, where he was greeted by Wright and the editors of Zero magazine, a rather small but important literary journal that would shortly publish Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”

Baldwin was only 24 when he arrived in Paris, with just $40 in his pocket. Virtually unpublished, he had left New York to escape American racism — an escape that he believed literally saved his life and made it possible for him to write. His first essay in Zero argued forcefully against the idea of the protest novel, claiming, among other things, that it was inherently sentimental, and therefore dishonest. Wright, who had already established himself as an international literary force based on the critical success of several novels, was deeply offended by Baldwin’s essay, reading it as a direct attack on the validity of his work. Shortly after the essay was published, the two men ran into each other at Brasserie Lipp, less than a block from Les Deux Magots, and Wright immediately lit into Jimmy, who by all accounts held his own.

Baldwin has maintained a grip on my imagination ever since my freshman year of college, when I read his novel “Giovanni’s Room.” Set in 1950s Paris, the novel tells the story of an ill-fated love affair between the narrator, David, a young American ex-soldier, and a darkly handsome Italian barman named Giovanni. As a young, gay black man growing up in the 1980s, I found this to be the first novel I’d encountered with the subject of homosexuality placed front and center and written by anyone who remotely resembled me. I was inspired in equal parts by the depth and style of Baldwin’s prose, and the fact that he, a gay black man had written so boldly and lived so openly at a time when there was such deep social hatred and opposition aimed at those of us who shared either Baldwin’s race or sexual identity, let alone both. What’s more, the fact that he had found a way to live and write freely in Paris made the city feel like an essential destination for me.

In the fall of 1998, a few months shy of the 50th anniversary of Baldwin’s arrival, I, too, finally moved to Paris, settling in a quaint — if not cramped — one-bedroom apartment on the Left Bank, in the Fifth Arrondissement. Seduced by the idea of chasing Baldwin’s literary coattails, I dedicated myself to rereading “Giovanni’s Room,” allowing the texture and mood of Baldwin’s (and Giovanni’s) Paris to overlap with the version of the city I was newly discovering. Now, some 15 years later, having left Paris, ultimately for New York, I was excited to see the city through Baldwin’s eyes again, which meant returning to the Left Bank.

For my first day on Baldwin’s trail, I caught the Métro from my apartment in Batignolles — a recently trendy neighborhood in the once working-class northeast corner of the 17th Arrondissement — south, across the Seine, to the Sixth Arrondissement and St.-Germain-des-Prés. I was headed to Café de Flore, the place where Baldwin had spent endless hours on the second floor, drinking coffee and Cognac to keep warm while working on his first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

It was a mild, sunny day, and exiting the Métro station I was struck by how little had changed in St.-Germain since I’d caught my first glimpse of the neighborhood back in the late ’90s. At once I felt I’d returned to the model-version Paris, the district that, as the author Diane Johnson noted in her book, “Into a Paris Quartier,” the American imagination has tended to “fasten” itself onto for over a century. Surely, this fastening is largely due to St.-Germain’s fabled expatriate history, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s stay on what is now the Rue Bonaparte. But for me that afternoon, I was experiencing a renewed vision of the Paris that seems to effortlessly weave the rich vitality of city life together with the ease of vacationing in a small French village. To my left a continuous stream of cars, motorcycles, taxicabs and bikes flowed steadily down the broad, tree-lined Boulevard St.-Germain, while on my right, the ponderous row of classic stone facades was pleasantly broken up by stylishly quaint bookstores, shops, sidewalk cafes and side streets meandering toward the Seine.

During the late ’40s and early ’50s, St.-Germain-des-Prés was the center of a thriving artistic and literary community and a place where nightclubs and bars of varying reputations flourished, allowing Baldwin to openly explore both his literary craft and his sexuality.

At Café de Flore I took a seat on one of the crimson and green wicker chairs on the terrace and began planning my next steps on Baldwin’s trail. Café de Flore sits on the corner of the Boulevard St.-Germain and the Rue St.-Benoît. Its location places it directly across St.-Benoît from its chief rival, Les Deux Magots. Similarly founded in the late 1890s, both cafes are adorned with Art Deco details, red moleskin banquettes, mahogany tables and mirrored walls. Both have rich intellectual and literary histories, boasting a list of luminaries — writers, artists, actors and philosophers that include Ernest Hemingway, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso and Albert Camus. Both have similar menus, and prices. Even the difference in ambience is barely perceptible, though residents and frequent visitors to the quarter are quick to say that the Flore attracts a slightly more fashionable clientele. When my waiter finally made his way to my table, I ordered a croque monsieur and a citron pressé, my favorite pairing at the cafe. Handing the menu back to him, I wondered how a starving young writer, as Baldwin had been when he first visited the Flore, might afford the same, somewhat pricey croque today.

I rounded out the afternoon in St.-Germain by wandering down the Rue de Verneuil, a short, rather tight street of low 17th-century facades where Baldwin lived in various third-rate hotels during his early years in Paris, before continuing on to the Café Tournon, on the Rue de Tournon, near the formal Luxembourg Gardens, and the Brasserie Lipp, back on the Boulevard St.-Germain. Baldwin was known to visit the Café Tournon and the Brasserie Lipp, albeit infrequently, often stopping in before heading off to eat and drink in one of the cheaper neighborhood brasseries or bars. Both restaurants, their Art Deco mosaics still brilliantly maintained, were hot intellectual and creative night spots during the 1950s and ’60s, the Tournon largely considered the place where the St.-Germain neighborhood jazz scene got its start, providing the stage where Duke Ellington made his Parisian debut. Meanwhile, the Lipp had a perpetual waiting list of A-list celebrities and politicians jockeying for a corner table.

Baldwin’s main night-life posse included the painter Beauford Delaney, the composer Howard Swanson, the dancer Bernard Hassell and the writer Ernest Charles Nimmo, known as Dixie. Their favorite spots were Le Montana on the Rue St.-Benoît, Gordon Heath’s L’Abbaye on Rue Jacob and Inez Cavanaugh’s Chez Inez, a soul food restaurant on Rue Champollion. As is the case with nearly all of the restaurants, bars and cafes in St.-Germain, the rambunctious, often decadent spirit that inhabited these places during Baldwin’s time has been replaced by a somewhat staid upper-middle-class mood of luxury and tourism, one that seems to radiate out from Le Bon Marché, the oldest and most palatial department store in Paris, penetrating even the smallest of shops, bistros and watering holes in the neighborhood. Of Baldwin’s main hangouts there, the Montana is one of the few that still exist and is currently one of the most exclusive clubs in Paris. I didn’t even attempt to get in.

On my second day following Baldwin’s trail I made my way to Montparnasse and settled into a comfortable leather bench at Le Select, yet another well-preserved Art Deco cafe, the place where Baldwin wrote much of “Giovanni’s Room.” If ever there was an American expatriate hub in Paris, Montparnasse was certainly it during the postwar years, largely owing to the sheer number of American students who moved to the Left Bank in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Baldwin associated with many of these students, mostly ex-G.I.’s, writing about his experiences with them in the essay “A Question of Identity.”

A sudden rainstorm that morning had delayed my trip to Montparnasse, but by 3 o’clock, the time I arrived at Le Select, the torrential streaks had subsided to a misty drizzle, and the cafe’s green-trimmed awning, the words “American Bar” printed on the corner bend, was fully extended, affording cover to a small cluster of smoking patrons huddled leisurely on the terrace. (The French government banned smoking indoors years ago, making it difficult to conjure up an image of Baldwin at Le Select chain-smoking while scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad in one of the tight rear booths.) In spite of an extensive urban renewal project in the 1960s and ’70s that led the city to raze many prewar buildings in Montparnasse, Le Select remained intact, its Art Deco décor virtually unchanged since the 1920s. Le Select sits in the shadow of La Tour Montparnasse, which for many years held the title for the tallest building in France. Decried by Parisians as “grotesque” upon its completion, the tower became the symbol for the indiscriminate destruction of locally cherished buildings, empowering a movement to ban all skyscrapers within the city limits and to preserve historic places like Le Select.

The clientele that afternoon consisted largely of French students earnestly discussing politics and philosophy, a handful of American tourists and local businessmen having a late lunch and people I took to be neighborhood regulars reading newspapers and books, or simply staring out at the boulevard. As I nibbled off a plate of bread and charcuterie, I couldn’t help overhearing the nearby students as they discussed the lagging French economy, the weaknesses of their president, François Hollande, and the highly publicized conservative protests against gay marriage. I was captivated by the youthful sense of French entitlement in their speech, and my thoughts returned to the question of which neighborhood in Paris a young, foreign, black — and struggling — James Baldwin might currently be, especially considering that Le Select and his other haunts on the Left Bank have all become so chic.

Clearly, Baldwin had explored Parisian neighborhoods beyond those on the Left Bank. In a May 1961 article in Esquire magazine, “New Lost Generation,” he attested to the joy he felt discovering Paris. “The days when we walked through Les Halles singing, loving every inch of France and loving each other ... the jam sessions in Pigalle, and our stories about the whores there ... the nights spent smoking hashish in the Arab cafes ... the morning which found us telling dirty stories, true stories, sad and earnest stories, in grey workingmen’s cafes.”

As for Pigalle, still the largest red-light district in Paris, I had walked through the quarter earlier that week on my way to a dinner party at a friend’s apartment in Montmartre. The sun had already begun to set, its final rays fading into the variegated shimmer cast by a long procession of dim Art Nouveau lamps and bright storefront neon. Along the Boulevard de Clichy, I strolled past the Moulin Rouge and a vivid array of sex shops, strip clubs, adult movie theaters and hotels for prostitution (which is still legal in Paris). It seemed with every step there was yet another barker calling out to me from in front of a neon-lit doorway, attempting to sell a lap dance, an XXX-rated film, a girl — or possibly a boy — for hire. That night the spectacle of Pigalle made it easy to imagine the scenes of decadence and freedom Baldwin described when reminiscing about his trips to the area. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case with Les Halles.

In “Giovanni’s Room” Baldwin describes Les Halles as a place with “choked boulevards and impassible streets, a place where leeks, cabbages, oranges, apples, potatoes, cauliflowers stood gleaming in mounds all over, in the sidewalks and streets in front of metal sheds.” The restaurants, bars and cheap workmen’s cafes that Baldwin spoke of with such joy were demolished and replaced in 1977 by an underground transportation hub and shopping district — a modern monstrosity of metal and mirrored glass whose underground tunnels connect an intricate series of Métro and suburban train lines, while housing a subterranean shopping center. The extensive transportation and shopping options have allowed Les Halles to remain one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Paris, much like Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Street Mall — in terms of daily traffic, at least, in spite of the planners’ intentions to draw more exclusive retail and dining to the area. Still, the cost of living in the center limits the neighborhood’s actual diversity.

In 1999, my second year in Paris, I lived beside Les Halles, in the First Arrondissement, on the pedestrian Rue du Cygne, and, more recently, I’d heard that the entire complex was being redeveloped. Curious to see the changes before leaving Paris, I invited my friend Walid Nouioua to dinner at Le Père Fouettard, my favorite restaurant in Les Halles, beside the hub’s main entry. That night, I was disappointed to find the new facade of Les Halles hidden behind wide construction panels and such extensive scaffolding that it was impossible to see what the new structure might look like. Walid and I took a table on the large bustling terrace. A doctor by profession, Algerian and French by birth and citizenship, Walid happens to be an avid Baldwin reader, and so midway through our meal, I asked his thoughts on the possible whereabouts of a young James Baldwin in contemporary Paris. Other friends and colleagues, I explained, had made suggestions based on one characteristic or another: the Marais, given Baldwin’s night life and homosexuality. Ménilmontant or Place des Fêtes in response to a notion of creative affinity. Belleville or Château Rouge for ethnic diversity. The suburbs of Paris such as Montreuil, St.-Ouen, Aubervilliers and St.-Denis as places where artists and writers were currently moving. After weighing the options carefully, Walid simply shook his head and agreed that the reasons offered for each of these districts made them all viable possibilities.

And so I spent my final days in Paris visiting bars and cafes in Beaubourg and the Marais, notably Café Beaubourg on Rue St.-Merri, L’Open Bar on Rue des Archives and L’Étoile Manquante on Rue Vieille du Temple. I discovered the smartly gentrified, red brick and masonry townhouses hidden in the alleyways near the Place des Fêtes. I wandered through a string of charming studios and galleries in and around Belleville and the picturesque Rue des Cascades. I revisited the African markets at Château Rouge and toured a handful of galleries and artists’ workshops housed in old factories, garages and warehouses in the trendier corners of Montreuil, one of the eastern suburbs of the city. I even visited the northern suburbs of Paris, investigating La Maladrerie, an elegantly conceived public housing project in Aubervilliers, where writers and artists’ studios were located alongside general housing. And yet I couldn’t actually picture a young James Baldwin living in any of these places. As I reflected on the idea behind my search, it dawned on me that the key elements that conspired to bring Baldwin to Paris all those years ago no longer existed in Paris, nor did the same overriding impulses to leave America.

In the spring of 1984, during an interview for The Paris Review, a nearly 60-year-old Baldwin was asked why he had chosen to live in France, to which he replied: “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France — it was a matter of getting out of America.” The problem of racism in America was for Baldwin so consuming and, to his mind, deadly that he feared he wouldn’t have survived it if he’d stayed, let alone been able to isolate himself enough to write. And yet upon arriving in France, he had no illusions that Paris was among the “most civilized of cities,” nor did he consider the French among the “least primitive of peoples.” During those early years he stayed in France because, as a black man, he perceived that the ruling-class whites there simply left him alone, unlike those in America, and that’s what allowed him to develop as a writer.

But I arrived in Paris generations after the time when the French were inclined to leave people of color alone. Baldwin himself pointed out the changes in French feeling toward all minorities after the furious battle of Dien Bien Phu, signaling the loss of colonial Vietnam, and the brutal Algerian war. Over the years this change has grown in step with the influx of blacks and North Africans from France’s former colonies and outer departments, including Guadeloupe and Martinique.

As the French historian Michel Fabre noted in his book “From Harlem to Paris (Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980),” France may have served as “a place of shelter from what Baldwin called, ‘the American madness,’ ” but that time has clearly passed. No longer a haven for American blacks, France is no longer needed.

Of course, during the near decade I lived in Paris, I certainly experienced occasions of French racism firsthand. And yet that didn’t dissuade me during my recent trip. Even if France is no longer a haven for people of color, Paris remains a beacon, a vital connection to a time when, for many of our most important artists, writers and political thinkers, a much-needed shelter was sought and found.