Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [121]
She had chosen her café after some deliberation. It was a clean, well-lighted place on the Avenue du Général-Leclerc, near where Hemingway had penned his short stories at the Closerie des Lilas, where F. Scott Fitzgerald had written at the Dôme, and where stacks of other authors had written at the Deux Magots.
All the writers had horrid cheap flats—that’s why they went to cafés. The American and her friend had a cheap flat too, owned by a depressed Frenchwoman named Marie-Claude, who nailed all the shutters closed, turned off the gas, took the TV, and told a friend to rent it if he could.
So conditions were perfect to nudge the American with the very overdue novel and the tiny, dark flat into the cafés, where, she thought, if she sat where Hemingway sat and drank what he drank (though it seemed a tad early for a rum Saint James), she might write a novel too.
She would sip the good Parisian coffee and watch the French hurry to the Métro to work, and write about the way the ladybugs had swarmed on the bush in the sea-damped hollows of Lagunitas when she was eight and afraid of her father.
“Write one true sentence,” Hemingway said, and the American thought, then wrote, “I hate that kind of advice.”
She liked better what Steinbeck said: “Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate.”
Next to her an elegant young couple were chatting and smoking. The French know that smoking is bad for you, but they don’t care. The American, temporarily at a standstill with the ladybugs, wrote down everything they were wearing, her shiny black flats and his pink tie, and everything they ate and drank. Then she nibbled the end of her pen.
After a while the American put away her yellow pad. She was tired and sad and happy, as she always was after trying to write, and though she felt she had done some very bad writing indeed, she would not know how bad until she read it over the next day.
She sipped her cold coffee and looked around. Mozart and jazz played softly in the background, and a good cup of coffee cost four francs, and they left you alone, not even coming to wipe the table, but maybe it was not the right place for inspiration to come. She frowned. What was wrong?
It was pleasant. It was clean. It was in the heart of Montparnasse. It was McDonald’s.
The Art of Eating
One of my favorite food magazines is the Art of Eating, an excellent, critical, superbly written quarterly newsletter by Edward Behr. It’s been referred to as “the must-have foodie quarterly” by National Public Radio, and by me as one of the best publications of any kind, ever. I can’t resist sharing some other accolades it has received: “A publication of great class and pedigree. It is worth every dollar” (World Class Wines); “He could care less about cover notes, entertaining his readers, or providing vicarious thrills to make them renew. If you want an in-depth look, it’s one-of-a-kind stuff. He’s not pandering to anybody but [only to] his own curiosity” (Chris Kimball, quoted in the Boston Globe); and “I’m a devoted reader” (Corby Kummer, Atlantic Monthly).
Behr founded the quarterly in 1986, and although it’s not exclusively about France, over the years Behr has devoted several issues to various aspects of French food and restaurants, each of them worth the effort to special order. All of these below are still available for purchase, and don’t let the fact that some of them are more than a decade old deter you: this is top-notch food writing and is still very