Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [62]
A Writer’s Paris: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul, Eric Maisel (Writer’s Digest, 2005). “You feel at home in Paris,” writes Maisel, “because the things that you care about—strolling, thinking, loving, creating—are built into the fabric of the city. Despite its negatives—eighteen million tourists annually, eleven percent unemployment, large numbers of homeless people—Paris remains the place where you can feel comfortable decked out as a dreamy artist.” This little book is not for everyone—Maisel really has written it for writers, notably those who plot to go to Paris to write—but there are nonetheless wonderful passages in it that would appeal to anyone with a smidgen of creativity and a deep devotion to the City of Light.
Janet Flanner
Readers of my first Paris edition may recall that I included an obituary of Janet Flanner that appeared in the New Yorker. Flanner—who wrote under the nom de correspondance Genêt—wrote a regular “Letter from Paris” for the New Yorker from 1925 to 1975. Readers of the magazine before the 1990s know that it was a long-standing policy not to print bylines. Not until I requested permission to reprint the obituary did I learn it had been written by William Shawn, distinguished editor of the magazine for nearly forty years. Of Flanner, he wrote, “She loved the people of France among whom she lived so much of her life, and she loved no less the American people for whom she wrote,” and “her estimates of people and events, her perceptions and illuminations, were rarely embarrassed by time.”
I love all of Flanner’s books, which include Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings, 1932–1975 (1979), Paris Journal, 1944–1965 (1977), and Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (1972), all published by Harcourt. These collections are for both those of us old enough to remember her missives and young Francophiles about to discover her. We are most fortunate, not only as readers but as human beings, to have such a vast and perceptive record of Parisian life and times. She was there for much of the twentieth century’s momentous events.
Equally interesting is Flanner’s personal life. In Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray (Simon & Schuster, 2000), William Murray explains how his mother, Natalia, met Flanner—at a cocktail party given by Natalia in 1940 at her apartment on East Forty-ninth Street in Manhattan. The encounter, Murray relates, was a coup de foudre. His account illustrates what life was like for him growing up with these women in New York and Rome. Murray’s book is fascinating on several levels—we learn about his own career at the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for thirty-three years—but it is perhaps most valuable in its portrayal of what it was like for gay professional women during a time when it was not accepted. In the introduction to Darlinghissima, a book of letters between the two, Natalia writes, “I hope that my grandchildren, and other young women like them, born in a freer, more liberated society, more knowledgeable about relationships between the sexes and without the inhibitions or taboos of an earlier era, will understand and value our experiences and efforts to be, above all, decent human beings.”
PARIS MEMOIRS
It’s a toss-up if there are more memoirs written of Paris, Provence, or Tuscany, which is to say there are an awful lot about each of these hugely appealing destinations. It’s hard for me to pass up reading a Paris memoir, so, yes, I’ve read all of these, and can report that each is unique and worthwhile. I think you’ll agree that any one (or five) is an enjoyable read.
Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, Sarah Turnbull (Gotham, 2003). “Like an Aussie backpacker in need of a bath, probably,” is how Turnbull describes her appearance when she meets Frédéric, her French boyfriend, at Charles de Gaulle airport. “I’m