Jason Wilson
Introduction
THE BEST DOOR in Paris can be found halfway between the Seine and the Champs de Mars at 29 Avenue Rapp. You don’t necessarily see it coming. The block goes Luxembourg Embassy, épicerie selling plums in liqueur and candied violets, real estate agency, and then you’re standing in front of it: a grand slab of polished oak featuring a six-foot-high phallus. The testes are wrought in glass and iron. Below them, a central panel, in the same materials, forms the shaft. The door handle, in brass, takes the shape of a lizard, which, according to historians, was once a common euphemism for the male sex.
What do you do when, in the midst of an elegant Parisian neighborhood, you stumble across such a thing? Obviously, you stop right in front of it, whip out your phone, and type “penis door” into Google. I did, and became intrigued by the door’s creator, the architect Jules Lavirotte, whom a Musée d’Orsay catalog once memorialized as only the “second grand master” of the Parisian Art Nouveau, but the “uncontested master of the erotic and decadent 1900 baroque.”
It was a Saturday morning. I was a mile and a half from my apartment, with a list of errands to complete. After about fifteen minutes of browsing, I continued on my way. The next door down housed a rare bookseller, specializing in hunting and gastronomy. The shop was closed, with no sign of when it might reopen. But in the window, halfway obscured by treatises on falconry, I noticed a shiny volume on Lavirotte, cowritten by someone of the same last name. This boded poorly, perhaps, for its objectivity, but well for the inclusion of lots of juicy detail from primary documents and family lore that might help to explain, far better than the Internet, how Lavirotte—sometime during the last years of the reign of Queen Victoria—had managed to erect a bachelorette party of an apartment building in the middle of the seventh arrondissement.
I kept on down the block, but before I made it to the Alfa Romeo dealership on the corner, I’d been pulled by force of curiosity back to number 29. This time, I let my gaze rise, taking in the intricate ceramic sculptures that framed the doorway; the second floor’s undulating lintels; the third-floor balustrade; the fourth-floor bow window, supported by a team of sandstone oxen; the fifth-floor loggia, its columns of green malachite tinged with gold; the torch-shaped posts that alternated, on the sixth-floor facade, with feminine statue heads. The more I looked, the more there was. The building appeared to be efflorescing in real time, bursting forth with acanthus leaves, lilies, pineapples. Its walls comprised a bestiary so vivid that it seemed a songbird might vanish, devoured by a pair of tomcats that lurked nearby, if I turned away for a second. I was pretty sure I spotted some other anatomical references too. I needed to get my hands on that book.
If this were a Woody Allen movie, I would have returned again and again to the always-shuttered secondhand bookshop, becoming a habituée of the neighborhood café, where I’d fall madly in love over endless packs of Gauloises (nobody vapes in Woody Allen movies) with a waiter who would clear the night’s last tables, take off his apron, cross the street, unlock the librairie, and present me with the Jules Lavirotte monograph under the light of the full moon, by which he would elucidate every last quirkily charming detail of the building (in addition to his hospitality job, he has an architecture degree). It’s not, so I ordered the book on Amazon and had it by the next day. The front cover featured the door at 29 Avenue Rapp as viewed from the building’s foyer. Reprinted on the back cover was Lavirotte’s blueprint for an hotel particulier, commissioned by a Madame la Comtesse de Montessuy. Even his handwriting seemed playfully concupiscent, with m’s that rose and fell like cleavage.
Jules Lavirotte, it turns out, was born in 1864 in Lyon. His father was a notary; his mother, originally from Beaujolais, gave birth to eight sons, of whom he was the second-oldest. Their family picture—stolid maman, whiskery papa, fils after black-suited fils—goes a long way toward suggesting why he might have wanted to get out of town and make a building with some genitals and tropical fruits on it. But perhaps that’s just the solemnity of late-nineteenth-century portraiture. Lavirotte’s boyhood seems to have been full of larks: descending the Rhône in a barrel, attempting to fly behind a kite, touring France by rickshaw.
When Lavirotte was eighteen, studying at a private lycée, he fell in love with an older woman. Jeanne Barbier (née de Montchenu) was twenty-five, the wife of the school’s director and the mother of three children. When Monsieur Barbier, a former army lieutenant, found out about the affair, he challenged Lavirotte to a duel. (The younger man avoided the challenge, counting only a hunting rifle in his arsenal.) Not long after that, his mother and father sent him to Paris to live with his older brother, who was there doing an internship, in order to become a notary like his father. Still tortured over the affair, Lavirotte enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and, as a means of distracting himself, started studying architecture. In 1895, thirteen years after they’d met, Lavirotte and de Montchenu—having finally obtained a divorce, the terms of which stripped her of custody of her children—were married in a discreet ceremony in Paris.
“I don’t see that there’s anything immoral or so fantastic about it,” Lavirotte wrote to one of his still-disapproving brothers. The situation was clearly painful, but he and Jeanne, a painter, put the scandal behind them and began to pursue a glittering life in the capital. At the age of thirty-one, Lavirotte complained that architecture was an “idiotic profession.” He’d “yet to earn a sou.” But soon he received his first commission, for a wealthy Frenchwoman’s holiday mansion in Chaouat, Tunisia. Built more or less in the Moorish style, it was nothing spectacular. He dared a little more for his next project—an apartment building at 151 Rue de Grenelle—decorating a courtyard fountain with a bullfrog and sneaking a few salamanders onto the front door. But it wasn’t until he met the Comtesse de Montessuy, a rich widow, that his imagination, or his ability to indulge it, truly flourished. In rapid succession, she commissioned the hotel particulier, and then another residence at 3 Square Rapp. It was there that Lavirotte began to experiment with what would become the Art Nouveau look, playing with asymmetry and using a variety of materials, such as varnished tiles and colored bricks. (Around the same time, Hector Guimard, the undisputed master of the style, created his sinuous canopies for the entryways of the Paris metro.) Even the doorbells were exquisite, with settings wrought in glazed sandstone by the ceramicist Alexandre Bigot.
Lavirotte bought the land for 29 Avenue Rapp from the Comtesse de Montessuy in the summer of 1899. He started construction the next year. Upon its completion, in 1901, the building won the “best facade” prize from the city of Paris. Its decoration doesn’t seem to have caused any major outrage, which is amazing when you think about the drama that would likely ensue if someone tried to mount something similar today. The eccentricity of the place, however, seems to have put off tenants. “I think I’ve rented the ground floor,” Lavirotte wrote to a brother. “It’s a young Spaniard. He’s supposed to come sign the lease tomorrow. I’ll believe it when it’s done.” In 1905, Lavirotte sold his shares back to a partner. The vogue for Art Nouveau passed quickly, and in 1919 the building was sold off to a northern industrialist who wished to invest in depressed Parisian real estate.
Lavirotte went on to build a series of rather sober municipal buildings—a post office, an orphanage—which can still be seen all over France. In 1920, he was injured in a car accident; a year later he contracted typhoid fever. He was sick and suffering for the rest of his life. “Succumbing to her great sadness,” according to her son, Jeanne de Montchenu Lavirotte died of a heart attack in 1924. Lavirotte, too frail to work, attempted suicide several times before dying five years later in a nursing home in Lyon.
Above the entryway of 29 Avenue Rapp, the face of a tired-looking woman protrudes from the building’s sandstone facade. She has rosebud lips, a long neck, and a tidy hairdo that divaricates into a tangle of ornamental curlicues. Several architectural historians have speculated tha
t she might be Madame Lavirotte. The first time I saw her, I took her presence as a sort of sly provocation, another dirty joke. Now I think that her presence was Lavirotte’s testament to love. Put penises on your doors! Gather your pineapples while you can! I imagine him wanting to say to the millions of jaded urbanites who’ve passed by the building over the course of its 116-year existence. In the end, passion will be all you have.
It had never occurred to me to write anything about my interest in Lavirotte. Then I sat down to think about this book, and I realized that his life and career and the way that he inscribed them into the very fabric of one of the world’s great cities was, in fact, a travel story. That is, if you changed one variable: where I lived. But why did you have to come to a place from afar in order to notice something about it, to be changed by it, to undertake a pilgrimage? And how far away did that afar have to be? Was a mile and a half far enough? Or what if the trajectory that counted was Lavirotte’s—from province to Paris, an irreverent come-hither city of his own invention—rather than my own? The distinction between what we by habit think of as travel stories and the stories that materialize every time we travel, even to the dry cleaners, struck me as arbitrary. It also seemed somewhat outdated, in an age when so many people are constantly in motion, our to’s and from’s as scrambled as our identities. Travel writing, in 2017, might be thought of simply as writing about space and time.
It was with this more capacious definition in mind that I selected the pieces that appear in the book. In Robert Macfarlane’s profile of Merlin Sheldrake, a scientist who studies mycorrhizal fungi, writer and subject go to a place (Epping Forest, Henry VIII’s royal hunting ground, now pocked with blast holes from World War II “doodlebug” rockets) and do something cool there (eavesdropping on trees!). Simple as that: travel writing. Randall Kenan proves that home—in his case, the American South—can be as moving as any exotic destination, the shovels and secateurs of the Richmond citizens reclaiming an African American graveyard more memorable than entries on a bucket list. One of the volunteers, a Tony Award–winning actress, shows up at a Saturday morning cleanup in search of a headstone whose inscription, once read, is impossible to forget. “Of all the bustling cities of the American South during the Jim Crow era, Richmond laid claim to one of the nation’s largest black middle classes,” Kenan writes. “As a result they had the means to memorialize their dead grandly.” His story, told with quiet assurance, adds to that work.
Society can be a place too—a flamboyant landscape of sodalities and subcultures. Gwendolyn Knapp’s destination is technically Naples, Florida, but she’s really taking you straight to the variegated-red-hot center of the world of plumeria enthusiasts. Plumeria, Knapp explains, is a “tropical flowering tree most people associate with Hawaiian leis.” Later, she calls them “trees for people like me.” The story, I think, is about loneliness and even about class—the failure to grow up and acquire much more than a dozen gaudy, temperamental plants. Stephanie Elizondo Griest, meanwhile, interrogates the fraught history of the practice of “chiefing,” by which Cherokee Indians in the mountains of North Carolina pose for pictures in regalia that often doesn’t have much to do with their own cultural traditions. “There are three kinds of tourists who visit Cherokee: those who know nothing about Indians; those who think they know everything about Indians; and those who are aware of how little they know about Indians and want to be enlightened,” Griest writes, keenly aware of where she’s coming from. She uses the road trip to build a bridge between Cherokee and Chicana cultures, writing, “From that day forward, whenever I began another essay about Chicanidad, or wore a rebozo to a reading, I thought of those buskers dancing for tourists on the side of the street. Was I also commoditizing my culture when I performed my identity, or was I offering reverence to my ancestors? Could anything profitable be authentic?” Her insecure narrator invigorates a genre traditionally dominated by heroic accounts of mastery and domination. Saki Knafo’s dispatch from the whaling village of Kivalina, Alaska, is less about marine mammals than about human nature.
Sometimes travel is an excuse for a sort of spiritual journey, a way to crystallize thoughts and clarify complicated things. Tagging along on a group tour of the Holy Land, Tom Bissell reflects on fear and tribalism. Elif Batuman contemplates Turkish history, Muslim nationalism, her parents, taxi drivers, Neolithic archaeology, and Michel Houellebecq in a singularly illuminating examination of why a woman might or might not choose to wear a head scarf. Kim Wyatt takes off in a camper van on a “save-your-marriage vacation”; Jackie Hedeman reflects on tragedy and inheritance; Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, on her own in Taigu, China, grapples with a secret. Leslie Jamison, vacationing at a Belizean resort, is concerned with “a tower that looked like outsize macramé, with hidden passageways and grottoes and cubbies, a concealed stairway and—its pièce de résistance—an interior waterslide,” insofar as it involves her transformation into a stepmother. When Wells Tower recounts the sublime hellaciousness of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, he’s writing about being a parent. Part of fulfillment, in travel and in life, is feeling like you have a purpose, even if that’s to “pass eight moist, black hours conceiving the proper torment for the Coleman employee” who forgot to warn that a pump wasn’t included with your inflatable mattress. The campsite is a physic respite for Tower, who realizes he hasn’t checked his phone so little since the day of the birth of his son. “More than one friend told me that their main vacation in August was a vacation from Instagram,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus recalls, considering travel photography, “because they’d endured more than enough ostentatious displays of wealth and leisure for one season.”
Two thousand sixteen was a year that privileged time over space, history over geography. “This is 2016,” we heard, as the shocking events came and came, as though they were an affront more to their era than to the places in which they were happening. Timelessness can be a literary virtue, but I wanted The Best American Travel Writing 2017 to address the rising isolationism and xenophobia of its moment, as well as the set of political, economic, and environmental crises that have set more than 65 million people, one-third of them refugees, in transit across the globe. I thought it would be stupid to try to talk about travel without acknowledging tightening controls, immigration raids, the refugee ban.
Jodi Kantor and Catrin Einhorn’s reporting on the efforts of hockey moms and poker buddies to welcome Syrian refugees to Canada takes measure of the various distances that they must traverse in order to become the “New Canadians” that their hosts would make of them. Even figuring out the correct dosage of Tylenol is a stretch across language and habit. Travel writing has often been the domain of people we think of as “expats” and “globetrotters.” But it shouldn’t be confined to tales of Americans and Europeans going to places. We need immigrants, the people coming from somewhere, to help us make sense of both the rest of the world and of our own surroundings. Take the Eritrean defectors whom Alexis Okeowo writes about, or Reggie Ugwu’s American family, on whom Nigeria exerts an eternal pull. There’s Zarif Khan, aka Hot Tamale Louie, who moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, from the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1909. Kathryn Schulz traces his life to devastating effect, her reckoning of the ways in which each generation of Americans walls off access to certain newcomers resonating with the resurgence of “nativist nostalgia.”
Which is not to say that we didn’t need escapism. In fact, we positively craved it. One of the most effective ways to counteract the impulse to turn inward—the feeling that you didn’t have any curiosity to spare; the temptation, after another terrorist attack, to never leave home—was to tag along with Peter Frick-Wright on a mission to solve a famous Bolivian plane crash, or to lose yourself, along with Tim Parks, in the archive of the Corsinis, a family of Florentine aristocrats who have installed 4,000 feet of steel shelving in their Tuscan villa to house the papers of their ancestors, who “[wrote] down everything about themselves and preserv[ed] everything they wrote.�
� Parks gets to touch paper from the 1400s. Some documents have been “eaten away by silverfish”; others reveal “tiny cuts made in the sixteenth century to show that the surface had been disinfected against the plague.” Joining Ann Mah for harvesting season in Champagne, where her cheeks turned pink and her hands turned black, was a deliverance from sitting in front of my computer, refreshing the news. “One evening, the Polish guys and I sat after dinner and drank the house Champagne, glass after glass poured from the wine refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen,” Mah writes. “In halting English, they told me about their children and, as they warmed to the language, waxed enthusiastic about the foods they missed from home.” I wish they’d raised a glass to Jules Lavirotte, who probably would have appreciated it.
Lauren Collins
ELIF BATUMAN
Cover Story
FROM The New Yorker
In 1924, a year after founding the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country’s new leader, abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, which had been the last remaining Sunni Islamic Caliphate since 1517. Having introduced a secular constitution and a Western-style civil and criminal legal code, Atatürk shut down the dervish lodges and religious schools, abolished polygamy, and introduced civil marriage and a national beauty contest. He granted women the right to vote, to hold property, to become supreme-court justices, and to run for office. The head scarf was discouraged. A notorious 1925 “Hat Law” outlawed the fez and turban; the only acceptable male headgear was a Western-style hat with a brim. The Ottoman Arabic script was replaced by a Latin alphabet, and the language itself was “cleansed” of Arabic and Persian elements.
The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 2
