We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  As I made my way towards a train the man shouted “merci” at me. My impression was that neither he nor the woman was fully aware of what had happened, but he at least knew I’d caught them both as they were falling. Once I was on the train and speeding toward the centre of Paris, I realised I should have asked the man if he was, or knew, François Raymond. Obviously it is unlikely that he was Raymond, although I guess he was about the same age as the man I was looking for, and if he’d lived in Puteaux most of his life he may have known him… This chance encounter on an escalator seems as close as I’m going to get to the elusive Monsieur Raymond for the time being…

  This blog was read by one of François Raymond’s friends and he put me in touch with the photographer’s family because, like my mother, the shutterbug had died young. Raymond’s brother found some pictures he thought might be of my mother, but I could instantly see it was someone else. So while posting the blog solved the mystery of what had happened to François Raymond, it didn’t lead me to the photos I’m still hoping may turn up one day.

  After this adventure I was back in Paris a few months later for the opening of the Le Week-end de sept jours (2010) exhibition at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. I wasn’t actually in the show, but I had come up with its title. The curator had asked me if I could think of a good name for her exhibition and I’d said re-using the title of the old Gary U.S. Bonds tune “Seven Day Weekend” might work since it wasn’t a million miles away from the Situationist slogan “Never Work”. Partly on the back of my suggestion being taken up, I had free accommodation for the opening and a few more days in Paris.

  Le Week-end de sept jours was a show of postgraduate art students from Paris, London and Singapore, so I expected the private view to be a tranquil affair — but it certainly wasn’t. Siu Lan Ko created banners that were affixed to the exterior of the building based on then President Sarkozy’s slogan “Work more to earn more”. Rather than using the word “more” twice, the term “less” was substituted in one instance. There were two banners with one of four words on each side. How they read changed according to how the wind blew. Two hours after the banners went up, they were taken down since the art school hosting the exhibition deemed them too explosive and controversial to remain in place. This act of censorship caused a media storm in France and was also covered by the Guardian in the UK and the international art press. Embarrassed by the furore, the government’s education department ordered the college to put the banners back up in time for the opening.

  Unusually for a student show, the private view was heavily policed and absolutely stuffed with people claiming to be journalists. These “reporters” wanted to talk to anyone and everyone who was there, including me. It was obvious from their line of questioning that at least some of those who claimed to be working for the press were actually undercover cops. It wasn’t a pleasant night, but it had the strangeness I associated with the “City of Love” from my teenage reading of Surrealist novels like Nadja, Paris Peasant and Last Nights of Paris. After my initial visits to the French capital these Surrealist works seemed to me to describe a landscape that existed in the mind much more than on the streets of any specific city. As someone born in London I felt better able to attain such states of consciousness in my hometown rather than in Paris. The two incidents I’ve just recounted are the closest I’ve ever got to the literary representations of Paris I’d been exposed to as a teenager via Surrealist and psychogeographical writings. I want to stress that I see my “experiences” and the texts that helped generate them as hyperreal; “literary” “Paris” is a simulation, a series of signs that have no relationship at all with a so-called “reality”.

  Moving on, there are those who primarily associate the 1968 uprisings with France, although for me events in Mexico were more tragic, while in Spain the protests may have been small-scale but they really did signal the beginning of the end for the dictatorship there. Words and phrases often set tunes loose in my mind and The Ethiopians’ song “Everything Crash” is the earworm 1968 summons up: “Firemen strike! Watermen strike! Telephone company too! Down to the policemen too!” The series of strikes in Jamaica in 1968, alongside the Rodney Riots, really were extraordinary and thanks to the Ethiopians they’re the first thing that come into my head whenever anyone mentions that year, not Paris.

  As far as Anglo-Saxon literary obsessions with Paris go, I simply don’t dig the phantasmagorias that dominate its myriad scenes and which are most typically conjured up around the spectres and spectacle of Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, James Joyce, etc. I read all of Joyce’s Ulysses as a teenager but I preferred the 1967 film to the book, even if as cinema it looks pathetic when compared to true anti-classics of the same era like Jean Rollin’s Le Viol du vampire (1968). I found Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy tedious, although Jens Jorgan Thorsen’s 1970 film of the novel is hilarious. For me the cut-up experiments of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel on Rue Gît-le-Cœur are a more enthralling way to hallucinate Paris than the words of the old bores championed by those who mistake the ever proliferating margins they inhabit for a “literary” “mainstream”.

  The issue here is in many ways a matter of class, English Francophilia is so often a silly snobbery cultivated by rich idiots and would-be social climbers who want to project an image of being refined. The working-class population of the British Isles tends to prefer what they understand to be “Spain” to “France” as a tourist and/or retirement destination. Magaluf anyone? Benidorm? Personally I love Valencia and all the crazy stories about that city’s post-dictatorship club scene of the Eighties and Nineties, which was dubbed Ruta Destroy by the media. Likewise, those who went through the Seventies London punk scene were well aware that France was for a time home to mock rock corporate tax exiles like the Rolling Stones. The dead-on-arrival “music” such greed produced was something the Blank Generation rebelled against. Such guilt by association is unfair, but France as a favoured destination for tax-avoiding rock dinosaurs could make Paris appear uncool to London punks. And in terms of criminal anti-heroes, it was the bungling Ronnie Biggs who attracted the attention of English (and indeed German) punk kids much more than the likes of Jacques Mesrine.

  I sometimes wish that when people mention Paris to me the 1966 tune “Paris Blues” by Tony Middleton would come to mind — since he’s a considerably more sophisticated singer than Charlie Harper of the UK Subs. That said, there’s both more and less to life than sophistication, and it’s a huge challenge to consciously control which rengaine runs around my head. When “Party in Paris” gets stuck in my brain I am at least able to amuse myself by transforming the lyrics to “ooh-la-la-la-ooh-la-lay there’s a piss-up in Plaistow today…” And given the ongoing gentrification and corporatisation of daily life, there is now good reason to wonder whether there’s any difference between a part of East London and Paris — regardless of whether we’re talking about Paris, Texas, or Paris, France. So let’s end with a question: to what extent have Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation caught on among English-speaking literary Francophiles? That was a false ending btw, since the matter might more reasonably be summed up this way: “Paris does not exist”. And nor indeed does literature!

  1 My Rumney interview is online here: https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/interviews/rumney.htm

  2 In the 1870s, Richard Wallace designed and funded the Wallace Fountains, which became an integral part of Parisian urban furniture (ed.).

  City Not Paris

  Anna Aslanyan

  “The distinction between journalism and fiction is the difference between without and within,” Mavis Gallant says in a preface to one of her books. “Journalism recounts as exactly and economically as possible the weather in the street; fiction takes no notice of that particular weather but brings to life a distillation of all weathers, a climate of the mind.” After starting as a reporter in her native Montréal, Gallant moved to Europe in 1950, settled in Paris and continued to write: mainly
in English, and mainly short stories. The diary she kept throughout May ‘68 appeared in the New Yorker the same year, and later came out as a book (inexplicably out of print now). Grounded in fact rather than fiction, Paris Notebooks is proof that it takes a master of both genres to tread the blurred line between without and within.

  “One of the reasons I came to Europe was to understand what happened here during and after the Second World War,” Gallant told me when I interviewed her in 2010. Her Paris — all the Parises distilled in her writing — reflects an entire spectrum of perceptions. The expat heroine of the story “The Other Paris” (1953) feels short-changed: “Where was the Paris she had read about?” The 1959 novel Green Water, Green Sky has an American youth indulging in his romantic notion of the city: “That was the way he wanted something to happen; that was the thing he was ready for now.” Another story, “Across the Bridge” (1993), also set in the Fifties, is narrated by a young Parisienne, and for all its vividness, the narrator’s experience comes across as a notion acquired rather than spontaneous. To write Paris convincingly, Gallant had to know it better than all her characters put together, and so she constantly moved between circles, talking to shopkeepers and poets, teachers and cleaners, immigrants and born-and-breds, youngsters and their parents. Despite her intimate knowledge of French life, she had no illusions about her own place in it; nor did she believe that being an outsider gave her some special observation powers. Nevertheless, curious and open-minded, she had to see everything with her own eyes while constantly adjusting her focus.

  Was May ‘68 a turning point in her relationship with Paris? During les événements, some of her views changed, sometimes more than once in the course of that month. “Everyone has discovered something,” she says in Notebooks. Most of her own discoveries are clearly described and substantiated (once a reporter, always a reporter). Years later, she told me: “I can’t say I was totally objective, because at the time I was very much in favour of changes in France”. In any case, she was a sharp observer. In Notebooks she wages a war on fake news, annoyed by exaggerations, suspicious of biases, enraged at rumours. Where is the evidence of the organisers’ links to the CIA? When did the shortages start, making people stockpile food? “Why always rape in these stories, and why always four times?” “Until I know the names, I shan’t believe it.” However, this is a diary, so the occasional deviation is permitted: “Dream: City besieged, strikebound… Faces all strange to me, but distinct. Everyone very polite. City not Paris”.

  Remembering les événements in 2010, Gallant said: “My sympathies were with the young”. Childless herself, she often used childhood and youth — including her own — as a vantage point in her fiction; as a reporter, she relied on her ability to see across the generation gap. At one end of it are parents, worried about their children on the barricades. Wouldn’t they worry less if they joined the kids? “Perhaps it’s none of their business, as a great deal of it is none of mine? But I’m not French and these aren’t my children.” Walking around the city that May, Gallant learns things that have so far escaped her attention. It turns out that juvenile delinquents, “what used to be called les blousons noirs”, haven’t disappeared; also, that there is an entire “population of rootless, drifting teen-agers, who seem to have no homes, or else homes they don’t care about”. And then, of course, there are students.

  At first glance, these flag-waving, tract-distributing, slogan-shouting revolutionaries look rather pathetic. Here they are in the occupied Sorbonne, with their portraits of Stalin and Mao, “everything tatty, a folklore now — China, Cuba, Godard’s films”. Here they march with “that presumptuous banner about the handing over of the torch of resistance”, preaching solidarity “to a working class in battle for thirty years”. Here they are setting things on fire (“A lovely tree. They tried to burn it — the leaves are singed… We waited all winter for the leaves”) and then standing there in narcissistic silence, listening to the radio talk about them. But the moment Gallant hears them chanting “Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands” — in protest against threats to banish Daniel Cohn-Bendit from France — all is forgiven: “This is France, they are French, I am not dreaming”. To her, that’s the most important event of les événements “because it means a mutation in the French character: a generosity”.

  Their naivety, ineptness and self-obsession aside, the young are fighting for a worthy cause. At a meeting at the School of Photography and Cinematography, Gallant wishes students at American colleges could see the place. There is not a single photograph here, but the teachers don’t care: “their only terror seems to be that these kids will grow up and become photographers”. When they claim to stand with the students, she is embarrassed for them: “If they thought these reforms were essential, why the hell didn’t they do something about it before the kids were driven to use paving stones?” Another of her stories, “A Painful Affair” (1981), has a flashback to May ‘68, when the learned protagonist, “pale trench coat over dark turtleneck”, watches with “stoic gloom” as students burn copies of his “long-awaited autobiographical novel, Sleeping on the Beach”. Mistaking him for Herbert Marcuse, they try to carry him to the office of Le Figaro so he can set it on fire. When I asked Gallant about the role the nation’s great thinkers played in ‘68, she burst out laughing, sounding incredibly young: “To be honest, I’ve never had much patience with French intellectuals”. She hadn’t come to Paris to hang out with the Left Bank crowd.

  As the protests pick up pace, Gallant keeps kicking herself: “I used to think that the young in France were all little aged men. Oh!” For her, supporting the young is a natural extension of always being on the side of the underdog. At the height of the clashes, deploring the brutal treatment of the demonstrators, she stops to point out that the “police have been beating people up for years, without the romanticism of the barricades, and… if the Night of the Barricades had taken place in a working-class suburb like Saint-Denis we would have known no more about it”. She then turns her attention to the police:

  They stood from noon until two o’clock in the morning without one scrap of food… and they watched the barricades going up, knowing they were going to have to demolish them and the kids behind them. At around two in the morning they were given the order to charge. They had been given clubs to hit with and tear bombs to throw. What were they supposed to do?

  Total objectivity is impossible, even if you stick to bare facts, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive for it.

  Who else needed standing up for? Immigrants had a rough time in Paris during (or indeed before and after) the unrest. If “juifs allemands” were in the news, other groups remained invisible — at least until people began looking for a scapegoat. “I have a queer feeling this is going to be blamed on foreigners — I mean the new proles, the Spanish and Portuguese,” Gallant writes. “And, of course, the North Africans are good for everything.” Soon she is told it’s all the fault of some “commandos d’étrangers et d’apatrides”, and a friend confirms her suspicion about growing xenophobia, adding that even the young, “except for supporting Cohn-Bendit… are worse than ever”. Another demonstration gathers, this time chanting “La France aux Français”. So much for the “turning upside down and inside out of the French character”.

  Did her own status make Gallant more sensitive to the plight of outsiders? In one of the diary entries, she remembers an academic woman she met at a manif, who kept “speaking to me as if I were a plucky child recovering from brain fever in a Russian novel. Turned out she thought I was an Algerian, and that was her way of showing she wasn’t racist”. Gallant doesn’t take the woman’s condescension personally; even if she did, she wouldn’t be putting herself on the same misery scale as the real underdog — the one without. She is angry on their behalf: “Brief flash of what it must be like on the receiving end of liberal kindness. The awful sugar. Lesson and warning.” Still, that wouldn’t stop her from speaking up for migrants, just as knowing how impossible
it was to be objective wouldn’t stop her from trying.

  “No one seems to understand what I want. Furious. Hate all French.” Such snaps are rare in Notebooks; if Gallant does want anything to come out of May ‘68, she doesn’t dwell on it. When she asks people about their expectations, most say, “Quelque chose de propre”. “Une merveilleuse abstraction?” she ventures, but gets no reply. “I thought something was definitely going to happen,” she told me in 2010. “I wanted to witness it, to be on the streets when it came. I wanted to see changes, whatever they might be; I had high hopes.” Were they about Paris per se or about her idea of Paris? Was it ever possible for the two to merge?

  By 1968, Gallant had been living in Paris for nearly two decades. She stayed there for another four and a half — the rest of her life — exploring varieties of exile, to borrow the title of her 1976 short story. Once an outsider, always an outsider; yet for all her attempts to keep a distance from the place, the better to understand it, she was perhaps too close to it to be fully on the outside. She didn’t just want to witness changes: she wanted to be part of them. Some things (if not quite what she’d envisaged) did change in ‘68. The workers, criticised for drawing the line at economic demands, won a forty-three-hour week and a 7% salary rise. The immigrants kept their role as the troublesome Other. The intellectuals, too, remained where they’d always been. The students eventually grew into boring soixante-huitards. Gallant continued to write.