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Writers In Paris
David Burke
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Travel
Writers In Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light
David Burke
How many streets in the city you live are named after writers?
In Paris: more than 400.
David Burke seems to have walked them all.
And that’s just for starters. He also seems to have read all the books by those writers, cross-referenced their friendships, and then figured out a clever way to summarize his knowledge in a modest 240 pages, with 125 photos along the way.
But then, David Burke — a “60 Minutes” producer who moved to Paris for a year and simply forgot to leave — is a lifelong reader and Francophile. As a kid in the ’50s, he went to Pamplona not just for the running of the bulls, but “because that was where the climax of ‘The Sun Also Rises’ takes place.” Later, he tried to find Jean-Paul Sartre in Saint Germain-des-Prés.
Now he’s divided the city he loves into three sensible zones — the Left Bank, the Islands, and the Right Bank — and slotted in the writers who lived and work there, working mostly chronologically, delivering the most salient stories about each. Like…
The Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre
It’s the oldest church in town. When we’re in Paris, we like to go to concerts there. I had forgotten that Ford Madox Ford took his mistress Jean Rhys there — or, in one of her novels, his alter-ego did.
39 rue Descartes
Verlaine died there. Hemingway rented the garret he’d occupied.
Rue Mouffetard
What’s in a name? Mouffle means “stink”, and ”skinners, tanners and tripe butchers” set up shop along the river here. No surprise that young, unknown George Orwell lived here.
Deux Magots
James Baldwin was taken here directly on his arrival in Paris to meet Richard Wright.
Colette
I don’t know that she got her break with her “Claudine” book three years after it was universally rejected. Then another book about schoolgirls was a hit, her husband showed her manuscript around again, et voila — Colette had a best seller.
Hotel du Vieux Paris
They called it “the Beat hotel”. Allen Ginsberg lived here. He produced 56 lines of “Kaddish”, “weeping as the wrote them in Café Sélect.
Gertrude Stein’s Picassos
I never knew that the Gestapo searched her apartment and decided the Picassos were “Jewish trash, good for burning.” But they left them hanging.
Hours Press
And I didn’t know about Nancy Cunard’s poetry contest. A young writer heard about it on the last day, wrote 98 lines and stuffed them in an envelope. He won ten pounds. Samuel Beckett, aged 24. Of course.
Luxembourg Gardens
“Balzac circled the garden at night in his monk’s cowl, candelabra in hand” — another tidbit I didn’t know.
Le Dome
The first big café. One night when Sinclair Lewis was boasting about one of his books on the terrase, someone shouted, “Sit down, you’re just a best seller.”
Rue de la Gaité
Henry Miller was “drawn to the erotic as a bear to honey.” He loved the sex shops and vaudeville theatres here.
Georges Simenon
Colette advised him, “No literature. Suppress all the literature and it will go fine.”
Jim Morrison
And I didn’t know this: No one recognized his corpse, including “the man who came every day to keep the body packed in dry ice because of the city’s heat wave.”
Emile Zola
I had no idea he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The police said it was an accident. Some evidence suggests he was murdered. A tantalizing incident, briefly told, that leaves you wanting more.
Proust
And I certainly didn’t know he inherited the equivalent of $6 million, giving him $180,000 or so in today’s money to live on each year.
And there’s so much more, much of it exhilarating. But watch out — you’ll read with a pencil, you’ll mark titles and writers, and before you know it, you’ll have a stack so tall you might as well have bought a plane ticket.
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