Expats in Paris

Paris Soirées on New Year's Eve

2008-12-29T10:18:00.004Z

I forward here an invitation from Patricia Laplante-Collins (Paris Soirées) for all those who haven't decided yet what they are going to do on New Year's Eve:

Visit Patricia's website - www.parissoirees.com

THANK YOU FOR FORWARDING THIS INFORMATION TO FRIENDS!

"CELEBRATING NEW YEARS EVE "

WEDNESDAY 31 DECEMBER

21h30 - 02h00

Happy Hour. Dinner. Dancing. Tommie Lee & Christian's Jazz Concert. More Great Socializing.

Our Guests of Honor:

The McKenzie Thompson Duo

(Tommie Lee McKenzie on the Bass and Christian Thompson on the Guitar)

"CELEBRATING NEW YEARS EVE WITH GREAT FOOD, GREAT PEOPLE AND THE MCKENZIE-THOMPSON DUO"

THE MCKENZIE-THOMPSON DUO:

Tommie Lee McKenzie is an American bassist of over 30 years who has travelled extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Africa as musician, teacher and musical director. Please visit: www.myspace.com/tommieleemckenzie

Christian Thompson studied music in Southern California, where he grew up. He worked as sideman and band-leader both there and later in New York. He has performed with The Temptations, The Drifters, the Steve Allen Big Band, Charles Rutherford and others. Since moving to Paris, Christian has been playing jazz and R&B at various clubs and venues in the city.

PARTICIPATION EUR 40.00 in exact change AND/PLUS a half bottle of champagne per person. Thanks again for having exact change, champagne and a social or business card or brochure, if you have one.

GREAT FOOD! International Cuisine. Southern US, French or other European and vegetable dishes, lovingly prepared, as always, by Patricia. Free flowing champagne.

ADDRESS:

Chez Patricia: 13 rue de Mulhouse, 75002 Paris. Metro: Sentier (line 3). Nouvelles. (Map on website: directions: www.parissoirees.com)

PATRICIA NEEDS TO CONFIRM YOUR RESERVATION.

Call Patricia: 33 (0) 6 43 79 35 18. E-mail: parissoirees@gmail.com . THANK YOU FOR INCLUDING YOUR TELEPHONE NUMBER WITH YOUR RESERVATION.

What are the next steps if you want to be coached by me?

2008-11-24T10:18:00.000Z

I spend a lot of time answering inquiries about my coaching services, usually with more or less the same questions. Therefore I attempt here to summarize the most usual answers that I provide to these questions.

Where have you been trained as a coach?
What is your academic and professional background?

You'll find (almost) everything on my Linkedin profile.

What kinds of clients do you coach, and in which format?

I coach specifically these target groups:

Expatriate executives or diplomats (individual coaching / group coaching / teleclass programs).
The accompanying spouses of expats or diplomats (group coaching / teleclass programs). Please note that I provide individual coaching to a trailing spouse only if he/she is an expat executive or an entrepreneur.
Multicultural teams, who can also be virtual teams at the same time.
International entrepreneurs / solopreneurs / infopreneurs - mostly in the various areas of information and knowledge transfer: coaches, trainers, writers, speakers, therapists, etc. The coaching takes place in the form of individual coaching. Teleclass programs and coaching groups will be launched in 2009.

Please note that I don't coach persons who don't belong to these categories, but I can sometimes provide a referral to another coach.

You can find information about my coaching groups and teleclass programs on every specific blog. The list of all my blogs can be found at the bottom of every blog, like this one.

Can you send names and contact information of clients and explain on which projects or in which areas you are coaching them, or which results they achieved thanks to the coaching?

Absolutely not!

First of all, I take the ethics in my profession extremely seriously. Therefore I never provide the names and contact information of my clients to anybody for whatever reason. This applies to current and past clients alike. I never talk to anybody either about the individual projects or issues that my clients deal with through my coaching, as they are alsmost always very personal or business sensitive ones. I never do any exception with these ethical principles - otherwise it wouldn't deserve to be called ethics.

Coaching is a very individual process and a coach can be a good fit for one person and not for another one, or for a person dealing with an issue in which the coach is not specialized or knowledgeable enough. On the other hand, I also choose my clients. For example, I don't accept clients whom I consider as not coachable, who deal with issues that are of a therapeutic kind, or who have unrealistic expectations. That is why I request that potentiel clients have 3 individual coaching sessions with me before we sign a coaching contract together (see below). These 3 sessions gives also the potential client the opportunity to test if they like my coaching.

In order to be "coachable", you must be able to set up your own mind as a self-sufficient human being, recognize and accept your own feelings fully, and deal accordingly. This is also another reason why I don't provide the names of my clients. I want to work only with people who don't need external advice to act and move forward.

Coaching is about finding your own solutions, not copying what other people do.

Anyway, as I only want to work with satisfied clients, any client who wants to cancel a coaching or teleclass subscription can do this anytime (see below).

In which languages does the coaching take place?

I totally trilingual French / English / German. I coach my clients mostly in English or French, but I am glad about any new client in German!

Do you provide free coaching sessions or free interviews?

Absolutely not, for many reasons:

I don't need to prove that I am a good coach, as my clients and partners confirm this everyday.
My time is very valuable and I am not interested in spending it with people who cannot afford individual coaching (they can participate in my group programs anyway) or who are not motivated enough to pay for 1, 2 or 3 individual sessions first.
I provide a lot of added value already in the first individual coaching sessions.
I am not desperate to find new individual clients. I want only very few individual clients - but only extremely motivated and competent ones. The rest of my business is focussed on the creation of group programs, e-learning and ebooks.
People who want to get acquainted with me as a coach can read all my 18 blogs and websites and subscribe to my newsletters.
If, after that, they want to experience my coaching "live", they can participate in my free teleconferences, my coaching groups or my teleclass programs.

But if I want to test your individual coaching, what can I do?

It is normal for potential clients to want to test my coaching and if they feel that I am a good fit for them.

At the same time, I select my clients and choose to work only with those who are extremely competent and highly motivated, as I want to work only with people who have the potential to achieve outstanding and long-lasting results quickly.

For all these reasons, I ask the interested persons to subscribe to one invidual coaching session, using the "Buy Now" button on the right of each blog. If both parties, the client and I, are interested in continuing to work together after this initial session, I ask the potential client to subscribe to 2 further individual sessions. At the end of the 3rd session, I'll propose a contract to the person or not, and this person will be free to sign up or not. It is a bidirectional testing process.

Another way to get acquainted with me as a coach, and as an expert in expatriation, intercultural communication and the various aspects of entrepreneurship and marketing, you have the possibility to participate in my teleclasses (for free or for a fee) and coaching groups first.

In the future, as the number of my teleclasses, coaching groups and e-learning programs will grow, I intend not to accept individual clients any more who haven't taken at least one of my group programs first.

How does the coaching take place?

The individual coaching takes place through the telephone, the Internet and an exchange of emails and electronic documents (assessments, questionnaires, ebooks, articles, and various other resources).

The client can choose between the coaching with a webcam, which is particularly useful for people who are very visual or kinesthesic (feelings oriented), and the coaching through a teleconference bridge, which allows to record all the sessions. The clients receives the recordings in MP3 quality a few hours after the session, without any additional cost. This is particularly useful for auditory people, or for clients with very challenging issues (for ex. entrepreneurs), who want to hear the sessions again in order to get all the "juice" out of the sessions.

Coaching is not about quick fixes, but a way to achieve deep and long-lasting results, even if the first positive results usually appear within the first weeks. Therefore I can accept only clients who, from the beginning, are willing to invest in at least 6 to 12 months of coaching. The coaching contract is on a subscription basis and not limited in time. The client and the coach can cancel any time though (see below).

What does the coaching cost?

I provide a few 1-hour teleclasses or "Ask the Expat Coach" teleconferences for free. They are announced on my blogs.

Group coaching and teleclass programs are usually paid on a monthly subscription basis. The fees are always announced together with the program.

The fees for the initial individual sessions can be checked by clicking on the "Buy Now" button on the right side of the relevant blog. They are higher for entrepreneur (see my Expat Entrepreneurs blog).

Individual coaching above the 3 initial sessions is paid on a subcription basis. The monthly fees can be seen by clicking once on the "Payment Plan" button on the right side of each blog.

The fees for the coaching of entrepreneurs are higher than my fees for expatriates and diplomats. It can be found on my Expat Entrepreneurs blog.

Please don't subscribe to a payment plan for individual long-term coaching before the end of the 3rd initial session and before we have agreed upon a contract together!!!

All the coaching fees are paid exclusively per credit card on Paypal, which is a totally secured, international payment system. Paypal also manages the monthly payments on a subscription basis.

Please note that different conditions apply to the coaching for corporations (coaching of expatriates and multicultural virtual teams).

Can I cancel before the end once I signed up a coaching contract, or subscribed to a group coaching or teleclass program?

Absolutely, because I want to work exclusively with extremely motivated and highly satisfied clients anyway. You can cancel your coaching subscription on PayPal anytime. Please note that if you recently paid for a month in advance, I'll provide the remaining paid sessions if you want them. Otherwise, they cannot be reimbursed.

This cancelling policy applies not only to invididual coaching subscriptions, but also to teleclass or group coaching programs.

I am eager to start individual coaching with you as soon as possible. I have read everything above. Now, what are the next steps?

If you belong to the target categories of clients that I mentioned, the next step is to subscribe to your first initial test session using the 'Buy Now" button on the relevant blog.

I also ask test clients to send, prior to the initial session, an email to me answering these questions:

What are the 3 main goals that you want to reach within the next 1 or 2 years, or the 3 key areas of your life that you are currently trying to develop or improve? If you have more than 3, please choose the 3 that would make the most difference in your life or in your business once you have reached a positive outcome.
Which steps or actions are you already undertaking in order to achieve these results?
In which areas or for which specific steps (among the above) are you stuck or do you think you need my coaching most urgently?
Once you have reached these 3 main goals or objectives, or improved these 3 areas, which difference will it make in your life or business? What will you see, how will you feel, what will you do?

Please send your résumé, links to your websites or blogs, and an electronic picture, together with your answers to these questions.

Please note that this article applies to invididual clients, not to organizations or corporations who want to hire me as a coach.

Shakespeare & Company

2008-08-17T08:35:00.005+01:00

Le Figaro Magazine published recently an article about the Shakespeare & Company bookshop. It reminded me of my student times, when I studied English and German at the nearby Sorbonne and strolled down from time to time towards the Seine.

The bookshop has in fact nothing to do with the former "Shakespeare & Company" bookshop and library which was created right after 1st World War by Sylvia Beach in the Rue de l'Odéon, and which became famous as a meeting point for all literary expatriates in Paris in the 20s and 30s - and eventually as the publisher of Ulysses by James Joyce. The present one was created by an American traveller, George Whitman, who decided in the 50s to stay in Paris. But it has one thing in common with the former one: it is still the meeting point for English-speaking tourists, expatriates and writers (including Paul Auster), and it also has an extraordinary atmosphere of its own.

There is also an article about the bookstore on Wikipedia. You can even take a virtual tour! The official website presents the forthcoming events.

What kinds of results do my coaching clients achieve through my coaching?

2008-07-24T14:27:00.010+01:00

I have different types of clients:

expatriates, diplomats and their trailing spouse
international or mobile entrepreneurs (who are often expats wanting to become self-employed in their new country, or expat spouses).

I have helped my expatriate or diplomat clients achieve consistently the following results over the years:

prepare for and manage the physical and psychological aspects of the relocation, the transition into a new culture (culture shock) and the integration process - together with their family
become immediately efficient at work in the crucial but stressful first 100 days
master the challenges of intercultural communication and leadership
lead multicultural and remote (virtual) teams successfully
learn the new language quickly and efficiently by using their own learning styles and NLP techniques
master the hurdles of intercultural communication at work (colleagues and team) and in private
create and develop new professional and social networks, make friends quickly with local people & maintain long-distance relationships (private and professional ones)
maintain a solid personal foundation despite the stress of coping with new environments, a new lifestyle, new relationships and a foreign culture
develop a good work/life balance an, in particular, find the time to discover the new country and culture
master the different phases of culture shock and integration
plan the next steps of their international career
find a new job abroad or at home
manage the often ignored difficulties of impatriation.

My entrepreneurial clients are mostly self-employed service professionals who are creating, or have already created, their own business based on their specific expertise, in the area of information management and knowledge transfer. They are trainers, consultants, coaches, writers, speakers, etc. Although working usually from their home-office, they develop their business internationally, based on the Internet, e-marketing and the NTIC (New Technologies of Information and Communication).

I help them

make the shift from being self-employed and trading their time for money, to being successful business owners
develop their business around their own values, their vision and their mission
identify their unique expertise and specialities
define 1 or 2 specific niches in which they become the absolute experts and which bring high revenues
create and develop programs and info-products, for ex. ebooks, teleclasses or teleconferences, audio and video recordings, seminars and events, etc.
identify and apply systematically the marketing methods that are the most appropriate to sell their products and services, and fit their personality
leverage everything they do in order to develop multiple streams of income
multiply their revenues through residual (recurring) income and even through passive income
develop their business as a "portable business" that can be run from anywhere in the world
automate, delegate or delete, in order to bring their business to the next level - so that it can ultimately be run and provide revenues even without them
use strategic partnerships to develop their business
develop an international strategy in order to leverage what they do in different languages.

I strongly believe that a service business can be successful only if it is based on excellence in the following areas:

skills and expertise of the business owner
management (even a home-business requires strong management skills)
technique (Internet, organization of virtual trainings and events, use of software, etc.)
marketing (including all the new methods of marketing that are constantly being created, like social networks).

Too many service professionals make the mistake to believe that their personal skills and expertise are sufficient to become successful in areas where they don't event need to make investments, as they already own a computer, a telephone, a printer and a broadband Internet access. My coaching aims at developing fully the potential of the 3 other crucial elements: management, technique and marketing.

Last but not least, having an excellent work/life balance and sound personal foundations is also crucial for success as an entrepreneur. I also help my entrepreneur clients achieve this through my coaching.

Generally speaking, my clients also report a number of untangible and not measurable benefits as the result of the coaching: balance and fitness, concentration and focus on their goals, self-esteem, physical and mental dynamics, replacement of limiting beliefs by supporting ones, improvement of personal and business relationships and communication, just to name a few.

My other blogs & newsletters for expats

2008-07-02T13:06:00.000+01:00

I don't write only on this blog. I also created several other blogs either for / about expatriates, or about intercultural leaderhip, in English and in French.

In English:

In French:

You just have to click on the title of each bIog.

There is also a free newsletter for each blog, with the new articles and resources. In order to subscribe to them, please click on the title of this article.

Interactive dialogue with the readers

2008-05-15T13:52:00.002+01:00

For the last few months, I have been spending quite a lot of time creating this blog and writing articles. But a blog is also an interactive too. Therefore, all my readers are kindly invited to use the "comment" function on this blog, below this article, in order to express their impressions, wishes, etc. Are there in particular any specific subjects that you would like to be covered or developed?

Thanks a lot and "see" you soon on this blog!

What is a "portable business"?

2008-04-28T16:31:00.000+01:00

I published recently an article about "What is a "portable business"?" on my blog Expat & Mobile Entrepreneurs. You can read the article here...

Other blog and newsletter for expats in France

2008-04-16T11:44:00.004+01:00

If you read this blog or its newsletter, you are probably (or want to become!) an expat in Paris. Then you might be interested in the other blog that I run and that is called Expats in France. You can also subscribe to its free newsletter.

For Austrians in Paris - or expats or French people wanting to discover Austria in Paris!

2008-03-26T15:41:00.001Z

The Bibliomonde website provides a huge list of resources about Austria, and of course of Austrian cafés and shops in Paris. It is here.

New and original expat survey

2008-03-01T14:26:00.001Z

I invite all my expatriate readers to participate in the survey that is mentioned below. The article is written by Kate Goggin, writer and editor, whose website is here.

Participate in our survey: At Home Abroad: How Design and Architecture Influence Overseas Living in association with the Interchange Institute.

Do you live overseas currently? Does your international home measure up to your expectations? Whether you live in a castle, a cottage, a hut or a hovel, I am interested in your story - how you made a home in a faraway land and how it affects your work, your family and your life.

Take part in this exciting new survey by The Interchange Institute.

The results will help us:

Document the importance of home environments to overseas living.

Examine the relationship between housing choices and expat assignment success.

Desired participants:

Anyone who is currently living outside his/her passport country for either his/her work or education, or for a spouse's/partner's work/education is eligible.

We encourage both spouses/partners to complete the survey if possible. They will need different computers to do so, however.

Help us understand:

How you chose and settled into your home.

Whether and how your home affects your overall expatriate experience.

How the layout, design, and/or furnishings of your home affect your family’s interaction.

The survey takes about 20 minutes. To show our appreciation, we will award a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate to one participant for every 50 people who complete the entire survey.

Questions? Contact: Dr. Anne Copeland, The Interchange Institute, copeland@interchangeinstitute.org (617) 566-2227 (USA) or Kate Goggin, kate@kategoggin.com.

Photo submissions are encouraged. Please contact me for more details.

View home-related clips on international housing and antiquing in Europe.

Survey about the relocation issues of expatriate families

2008-02-20T11:52:00.003Z

Robin Pascoe, "the Expat Expert" who published several books about expatriates, created a survey about the relocation issues of expat families and the support that they received.

I can only encourage you to take the survey, as it will provide valuable insights from the perspective of the families.

I quote 2 paragraphs from the web page about the survey:

"There are numerous relocation surveys that examine the challenges of relocation in order to help companies and sponsoring organizations to better develop relocation policies. But, with very few exceptions, they neglect to go straight to the source—the family—for input.

Family Matters! will fill this gap by sampling only the accompanying spouse, the working partner in his/her capacity as spouse or parent, and any high school children in the family. The entire family can do this survey with lots of room provided to give us your opinions. As we are only offering one survey (instead of multiple surveys depending on where you fit in the family) do keep in mind that some questions may not apply to you. Just skip them.

In recognition of your contribution to this important exercise, after we have collected all the responses, we will be making a donation of $2.00 CDN for each survey to a very well-respected Canadian organization which helps families in Africa called The Stephen Lewis Foundation which can be found at www.stephenlewisfoundation.org."

at any time to do the survey

Jazz clubs in Paris

2008-02-14T15:15:00.001Z

The official "Paris tourisme" website lists the jazz clubs in Paris. Click here.

Galignani - The first English bookshop on the Continent

2008-01-18T20:42:00.000Z

Galignani is the first bookshop in English that was established on the continent in 1801. Fortunately, it has remained a particular place with a warm and special atmosphere and doesn't look at all like the huge culture supermarkets that you can find nowadays under the name "bookshop". On top of the latests books in English or French, you can find a huge choice about arts, politics, literature, etc. and also of magazines in English. For pictures and more information, the article in Les Echos is worth reading.

Literary Expatriates in Paris (part 3)

2008-01-02T11:32:00.000Z

Here is the 3rd and last part of the article "Literary Expatriates in Paris".

"During the period of the second wave following World War II, new English-language periodicals appeared, two of which deserve special mention: The Paris Review and Merlin. The former, founded in 1952 under the editorship of George Plimpton, drew heavily on the expatriate community for its writers and its editorial staff. It emphasized the writings of European as well as American writers. Its ties to Paris diminished rapidly, however, after Plimpton returned to the United States in 1956 (where the magazine continues to flourish). Merlin, decidedly more experimental and avant-garde in content, proved more short-lived. Published in seven issues between 1952 and 1954, it was edited by Scottish expatriate Alexander Trocchi with the collaboration of a motley international group that included American Richard Seaver (a few years later to become editor of The Evergreen Review in New York), Englishman Christopher Logue, and South African Patrick Bowles. Merlin (and especially Seaver) did much to bring the recent work of Samuel Beckett to the attention of English-language readers. In 1953, they joined with Maurice Girodias and the new Olympia Press to publish a new series called the "Collection Merlin." The series would eventually include a distinguished list of titles, notably Beckett's novels Watt (1953) and Molloy (1955) and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955).

In addition to the publishers and periodicals, the English-language bookstores were an invaluable support to the expatriate community. After World War I and throughout the period of the first wave, the most important of them was unquestionably Sylvia Beach's famous Shakespeare and Company. Encouraged by her lifelong companion, Adrienne Monnier, owner of the bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres, Beach opened her own store in 1919 on the Left Bank. After a brief stay on the rue Dupuytren, she moved to a location across from the shop of Monnier on the rue de l'Odéon. Both a bookstore and a lending library, Shakespeare and Company quickly became a center of activity in the growing expatriate community. In addition to selling and lending books, the store served as the sales address and principal Paris distribution point for many of the local English-language publishers and periodicals. Beach befriended, advised, and lent books to countless expatriate writers, among them Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Robert McAlmon, who even used the shop as his mailing address. But Beach's most famous association was with James Joyce and the publication of his novel Ulysses. Employing the printing services of Maurice Darantière in Dijon, Beach published the first edition under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Throughout the 1920s, she published and served as distributor of nine of the first eleven printings or editions of the novel before Random House took over responsibility for new editions in the early 1930s. With the onset of the Depression and the decline in both expatriate and tourist numbers, the shop's business began to drop off. By 1937, the situation was so serious that Adrienne Monnier and some of her French friends established "Les Amis de Shakespeare and Company" to raise funds to allow the shop to survive. Beach attempted to stay on after the German occupation of Paris but finally closed her shop in late 1941 after a Nazi officer threatened to confiscate her books. She declined to reopen the shop after the war but did continue to lend books from her apartment to a new generation of expatriate writers, among them American Richard Wright.

The post-World War II wave of English-speaking expatriates was served by several new bookstores, the most important and longest surviving of which was Le Mistral, located on the Left Bank just across the river from Notre Dame. Founded by American George Whitman in 1951, the shop was later renamed Shakespeare and Company in memory of Sylvia Beach. In the tradition of Beach, Whitman not only sold books; he also lent them. His shop also provided a quiet and comfortable place for visitors to meet, talk, listen to readings, or just find a quiet corner to sit and read. The shop also served as a distribution point (and sometimes mailing address) for many of the locally published periodicals and books. In the late 1940s, Whitman was a close friend of fellow student and aspiring poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When the latter opened City Lights Bookstore, he modeled it very much after that of his Paris friend. Both stores remain open today and the two men continue to be good friends.

The second wave lost its momentum as the 1960s progressed. With the exception of Beckett, the more avant-garde writers began to go elsewhere, notably New York, San Francisco, and London. In 1968, the Olympia Press closed its doors in Paris and disappeared completely after a brief attempt to reopen in New York. The increasingly conventional atmosphere of Gaullist France after the collapse of the student revolt in 1968 (not to mention the rapidly rising cost of living) undermined the attractiveness of Paris to many of the younger avant-garde writers and artists. At the same time, conditions in other countries were becoming more appealing. The United States, for example, emerged from the repressive atmosphere of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s to see censorship go into decline with a number of important court victories (notably in the cases of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch). With the civil rights movement, the Kennedy presidency, and the Vietnam War, the country experienced a period of great political and social upheaval and cultural vitality. Cities such as New York and San Francisco became the places to be. Young American writers and artists could begin to feel the same sort of artistic excitement and the same possibilities for freedom of expression at home that many had once sought abroad."

Literary Expatriates in Paris (part 2)

2007-12-07T00:29:00.001Z

"A second wave of foreign writers, artists, and students descended on Paris in the aftermath of World War II. The new expatriate community was especially active in the 1950s and early 1960s. In addition to the general factors noted above, many of the new expatriates were motivated to come to the French capital by a sense of nostalgia for the experiences and achievements of the Lost Generation of the 1920s. The most celebrated figure among the new group was undoubtedly Samuel Beckett, who wrote with equal facility in both English and French. He had been in Paris since the late 1920s and had worked closely with Joyce. In the late 1940s he was on the verge of becoming an international literary celebrity. Among other expatriates active during this period, three groups may be distinguished. There was a group sometimes called the "Merlin juveniles" (the name given them by Beckett, who worked with them), which included Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue, Patrick Bowles, and Richard Seavers. All were associated with the important expatriate periodical Merlin and were instrumental in the founding and early history of the Olympia Press. There was also a contingent of soon-to-be-famous American Beat writers, among them, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, who established themselves in a small, seedy, no-star hotel just off the Seine, known since that time as the "Beat Hotel." Lawrence Ferlinghetti might also be included in this group. He had gone to Paris in 1948 to study for a doctorate in literature at the Sorbonne, and while there he wrote some of his early poetry. He had, however, already returned to the United States and founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco (1953) by the time Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso arrived in Paris in the late 1950s. Finally, as in the first wave of expatriates in the 1920s, there was a sizable number of African American artists in Paris after World War II. Among the better-known writers in this group were Richard Wright (originally sponsored in France by Gertrude Stein), James Baldwin, and Chester Himes.

During both waves, the expatriates added much to the energy and excitement of the cultural life of Paris, thereby drawing even more expatriates (and, inevitably, tourists). They formed their own communities, living mostly on the Left Bank of the Seine with the center of gravity shifting from Montparnasse in the 1920s to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and other areas closer to the river in the 1950s and 1960s. Within these neighborhoods, the expatriates had their favored meeting places, most importantly cafés. In the 1920s and 1930s, these included the Dôme, the Select, the Rotonde, and others in Montparnasse. In the period after World War II, allegiances shifted more to cafés such as the Flore, Aux Deux Magots, the Mabillon, and the Pergola in the Saint Germain-des-Prés area or the Tournon, a short walk away, across from the Luxembourg Palace.

During both periods, the literary expatriates depended very much on the presence in Paris of a substantial number of English-language presses, periodicals, and bookstores, whose fortunes and very existence were in turn tied to the ebb and flow of the writer community. The presses were generally small but included such famous names as the Contact Press (of American poet Robert McAlmon), the Three Mountains Press (of William Bird), the Hours Press (of Nancy Cunard), the Black Sun Press (of Harry and Caresse Crosby), the Obelisk Press (of Jack Kahane), and the Olympia Press (of Maurice Girodias, son of Kahane). They published most of the Paris expatriate writers, often before they were well known elsewhere (as in the cases of Ernest Hemingway's and Henry Miller's first books). Most of the early presses of the first wave disappeared with the onset and deepening of the Depression (some well before). Only the Obelisk Press survived through the 1930s, ending with the death of Kahane in 1939. In 1945 it was revived by his son, Maurice Girodias, and it evolved into the Olympia Press after 1953. The latter publishing house was highly successful in the late 1950s and early 1960s with its publications of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Genet, and William Burroughs as well as an extensive line of erotica (many authored by members of the Merlin group).

The lives of the expatriate periodicals followed similar patterns. Among the more important ones of the first wave were The Transatlantic Review (edited by Ford Madox Ford and, for one issue, Ernest Hemingway), This Quarter (edited by Ernest Walsh, Ethel Moorhead, and later Edward Titus), and transition (edited by Eugene Jolas). Sometimes called "little magazines," these periodicals carried poetry, short stories, and other brief prose writings of all the significant expatriate writers, from Stein and Hemingway to Pound and Joyce. (For example, the well-known fragments from what Joyce usually called "A Work in Progress," which would later be incorporated into his Finnegans Wake [London, 1939], appeared in all three of these periodicals.) Only transition survived the onset of the Depression, lasting until 1938."

Useful books for expats in Paris

2007-11-27T11:15:00.000Z

I recently added a list of books about Paris, or that are otherwise interesting or useful for expats living in Paris. You can see them on the colum on the right of this blog. There is a direct link to Amazon if you want to order them. Some might even be the perfect present for an expat friend (or yourself?)

Meetup groups

2007-11-27T11:11:00.000Z

One of the biggest challenges of expatriates, especially newly arrived ones, is to make new friends in the new location. There is now a new resource: all the Meetup groups that are now organized in the Paris area through the Meetup website. There are Meetups for expats, and others around specific activitites, like entrepreneur Meetups, or Meetups around hobbies. If you want to see which Meetups already exist, please click on the title of this article. Or you can also click on the Meetup button in the column on the right of this blog.

Bonjour Paris

2007-11-19T20:30:00.000Z

Bonjour Paris is an excellent blog about Paris written by an expat. Just click on the title in order to be redirected!

American Literature in Europe, 1850-1950

2007-11-19T20:17:00.002Z

Introduction

The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs was one of many major works of American literature that were first published in Paris

Although the British Library is principally the national library of the UK, its collections are also home to a vast collection of works by celebrated American authors. Many of these writers travelled, worked, and published extensively in Europe. One of the most striking currents in transatlantic cultural history during the twentieth century was the migration of several generations of American writers and artists to Europe, their creative odysseys mirroring the parallel deployment of multilateral armies during two world wars. While their nineteenth-century predecessors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James, retreated to the “Old World” to search for the European roots of the “New”, a second wave of creative talent left the United States to join the vanguard of international Modernism. It was this dynamic group of Americans who became known as the “Lost Generation”, many of whose careers were launched in the inspiring turmoil of inter-war Paris.

The following pages trace the careers of some of these influential “transatlantic” authors through the Library’s rich and fascinating holdings of unique literary treasures. From handwritten manuscripts of celebrated works in their early stages, through letters sent across the Atlantic between author and publisher, to rare editions of the final printed books, these pages point towards an ongoing process of transatlantic cultural exchange and controversy. The documents discussed represent only the tip of iceberg: further exploration of the Library's printed books, manuscripts, and Sound Archive, will continue to reveal the rich results of this intercultural exchange as it continues through the second half of the twentieth century to the present day.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Our Old Home”

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The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne (British Library MS. Add. 44889). These images are from a copy of the author's manuscript, professionally bound as a gift for Hawthorne by his friends in England, with watercolours added to the frontispiece. This rare item, along with Kerouac's On the Road and other American literary treasures, will feature in a new display in the John Ritblat Gallery from 4 July, 2007.

Europe has long exerted a fascination for American writers and artists. All the way back to Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper (the writers behind the tales of Rip Van Winkle and The Last of the Mohicans), and on through Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Mark Twain, the transatlantic pilgrimage—often described as a voyage back to “our old home” (the title of a work by Hawthorne)—was a long-established feature of American literature. For many major American writers, Europe represented a complex model of aesthetic refinement, beauty, and historical depth, decadence and moral doubt.

The classic American myth of Europe as the site of “Romance” is elaborated in the uncanny writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In early works like The Scarlet Letter (1850), with its evocation of Puritan society, along with The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne masterfully recreated both the hopes and ideals, and the mystery and dread of the new American nation. Hawthorne was one of America’s first great fabulists, a writer who depicted the country’s stark origins and the ambiguous legacy of Puritanism and Transcendentalism. Hawthorne also spent a prolonged period in Europe as a traveller and later as the US Consul General in Liverpool—the main port of American access to Europe, and “gateway between the Old World and the New”.

Hawthorne published his final novel, The Marble Faun, Or The Romance of Monte Beni in 1860. This late masterpiece, set in a picturesque but degenerate Italy of classical art, decadence and disease, contrasts the moral naivety of its American characters with the doomed, amoral aesthetes of Rome. The American title "The Marble Faun" was changed in the British edition to "Transformation: or the Romance of Monte Beni", much to Hawthorne's dissatisfaction. One of the British Library’s most impressive literary treasures by a foreign author is an original manuscript of The Marble Faun in the author’s hand, “rewritten and prepared for the press” during his stay in England in 1859 (BL MS. Add. 44889, 44890).

In his celebrated Preface to the manuscript, Hawthorne notes the importance of its European setting to his creation of the “Romance”—a literary form which he much preferred to the more prosaic novel:

Italy, as the site of this Romance, was chiefly available to the Author as a sort of poetic or faery precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author… can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land…. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.

With these words, Hawthorne drew attention to what would become the abiding preoccupations of American “transatlantic fiction” in the decades to come.

Henry James and Edith Wharton in Europe

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Letter from Henry James to Frederick Macmillan, 5 April 1908 British Library MS. Add. 54931, ff. 268-271 Copyright © The British Library Board		Image from a very rare "yellowback" or pirate edition of Henry James's The American published in London in 1877. British Library 12602.cc.3 Copyright © The British Library Board

The period following the 1860s in America was one of conspicuous wealth and excess that has come to be known as the "Gilded Age". Immediately following the horrors of civil war, this was a time of renewed national confidence and social reconstruction, of world fairs and industrial innovation, of the growth of international travel and the leisure class. In fact, these were also the formative years of the transatlantic tourist industry, when genteel Bostonian families like the Jameses, the Lowells, the Holmeses, and the Adamses, would enjoy grand, leisurely tours of London, Paris, and Rome, Baedeker guides in hand. The complex interaction of American “innocents abroad” (like The Gilded Age, the title of a novel by Mark Twain ) with the longer-established societies and cultures they found in Europe became one of the defining features of American literature in the later nineteenth century.

One writer in particular bequeathed to the next generation a distinctively “transatlantic” form of fiction developed in response to his own anxious expatriate status. In novels like Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1901), and The Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James repeatedly explored the opposition of European and American values. Early on, his characters and plots tended to dramatise the conventional contrast between European experience and American innocence. Towards the end of his life, however, the author began to question this simple opposition, and replaced it with a much more nuanced play of perception and point-of-view. Although James ultimately resented being seen as an “American abroad” (he became a British citizen in 1915), his exile’s perspective helped pare away the commonplaces and illusions of this first truly transatlantic era.

Some of these themes and tensions emerge from a letter—one of many in the Library’s extensive holdings of James’s correspondence and manuscripts—in which the novelist procrastinates to Frederick Macmillan, his future publisher, about the delay on a promised, but never-completed, volume entitled London Town:

Then came the immense distraction of my going to America—which raised an immense barrier, that of a different, an opposite association and interest; and from which I returned saddled, inevitably, with too portentous complications.

Henry James, to Frederick Macmillan, 5 April 1908; BL Ms. Add. 54931

One of these “complications” was to be his “publication of an elaborately revised and retouched and embellished and copiously prefaced and introduced Collected Edition of my productions”. The so-called ‘New York Edition’, was eventually published in 24 volumes on both sides of the Atlantic by Macmillan in 1907-1909. The British Library holds a full set of the New York Edition (012705.d.31), together with more than 130 letters between the author and his publisher in the extensive Macmillan Archive (Add. 54931), discussing arrangements for the publication of his work".

Another expatriate, Ezra Pound, perhaps came closest to the truth of James’s enduring power and influence. In a memorial volume published after “The Master’s” death, Pound paid tribute to James’s “great labour… of translation, of making America intelligible”, and above all the “whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality”. Pound recognised that James’s “analysis” of these “national qualities” had become especially pertinent in his own time of international conflict:

As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscope slide the nature of Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals, too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.

Ezra Pound, “A Shake Down”, in The Little Review, “Henry James Number”, August 1918, vol. 3, ed. by Margaret Anderson and Ezra Pound (Cup.503.ee.1).

Even if they were not aware, or did not care to acknowledge the fact, it was in terms framed by Henry James’s fiction that the next generation of literary expatriates—the “Lost Generation”—understood their own ambiguous position as Americans in Europe.

In fact, one of the most important and influential authors who trod directly in James's European footsteps was his friend and fellow expatriate Edith Wharton. Wharton's work is well represented at the British Library, as might be expected of another novelist published by MacMillan on both sides of the Atlantic (her correspondence with the company alone runs to some 200 letters; Add.54956-54957). Indeed, as Hermione Lee's recent biography makes clear, Wharton was in some ways James's protegé, both in experience and literary concern (Lee, Edith Wharton, 2007; BL: m07/.17334 DSC). Her fiction often depicts American characters travelling in a semi-mythical Europe, characters at once displaced from their American roots but also confounded by the myriad complexities and corruptions of the "old world". In fact, like Gertrude Stein, Wharton made Paris her home in the early years of the twentieth century and became a prominent literary hostess: Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt visited during their world tour in 1909-1910, as did many other American notables of the period, including the Vanderbilts and the Tafts. Wharton was no less hospitable to the French avant-garde, entertaining poets and writers including Bourget, Valéry, Maurois, Gide, Rilke, Rodin, and Cocteau. Between them, James and Wharton presided over this seminal period of transatlantic travel and cultural exchange, and left a sophisticated record of the stimulations and anxieties of a generation of highly privileged, cosmopolitan American expatriates.

Expatriates at the Fin de Siècle

Before the “Lost Generation” of American writers, artists, critics, and fellow-travellers descended on the city in the wake of the First World War, Paris—like much of Western Europe—enjoyed a thriving belle époque of creativity and innovation. For Paris, this was a period of conspicuous consumption and luxury, of shopping arcades and boulevards, of the flâneur and the birth of photography. As with virtually every European cultural movement from 1850 onwards, American travellers and expatriates were closely involved in the artistic developments of this transitional period. As well as Henry James, the era also belonged to aesthetes and symbolists, flamboyant Europeans like Stephane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Husmans, Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Algernon Swinburne, alongside intrepid Americans like Henry Harland, Stephen Crane, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler.

One of the characteristic projects of the so-called “Wilde years” (although Wilde actually distanced himself from the publication) was The Yellow Book. Conceived by the consummate Art Nouveau illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, and American expatriate novelist Henry Harland, The Yellow Book quickly became a lavishly designed handbook for aesthetes on both sides of the English Channel. The artists and writers who contributed were of the highest calibre, from Beardsley himself, Sargent, and Walter Sickert, to Max Beerbohm, Edmund Gosse, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, George Gissing, Henry James, and many other lesser known figures, including a surprising (for the time) number of women writers and illustrators. For its provocative content, the publication—which ran for 13 issues, from April 1894-April 1897—relied on the inspiring partnership of Harland and Beardsley, and owed its continuing existence to the vision of publisher John Lane, future founder of The Bodley Head press in London. While Beardsley was unfortunately removed from his post as regular illustrator and art editor in 1895—apparently tainted by his close association with Wilde—the inclusion of work by so many esteemed modern artists and writers, and the sharp, satirical style, effectively predicted the direction of the early Modernist movement in the first years of the twentieth century.

Henry Harland himself was an archetypal representative of the new cosmopolitan, transatlantic class. An itinerant traveller, role-player, and protegé of some of the key literary taste-makers of his time (James included), Harland’s own contributions to The Yellow Book took the form of short, highly stylised stories and tales, and waspish commentary on the London literary scene (often written under his nôm-de-plume “The Yellow Dwarf”). In common with many of his generation, Harland died young, of tuberculosis, in 1905, not long after his cryptic European romances, The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box (1900; 012641.aaa.21), The Lady Paramount (1901; 02637.aaa.14), and My Friend Prospero (1903; 012628.d.30), had begun to receive the approving attention of fellow writers. It is interesting to note that although Henry James regretted his involvement in so apparently frivolous an enterprise as The Yellow Book, he continued to contribute, largely because he held Harland in such high regard: “I hate too much the horrid aspect & company of the whole. And yet I am to be intimately—conspicuously—associated with the 2nd number. It is for gold & to oblige the worshipful Harland” (Henry James, letter to William James, 28 May 1894, quoted in Henry James: A Life in Letters, [1999; YC.1999.b.4469]).

Another expatriate from America who made a name for himself in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century was Stephen Crane. Although chiefly celebrated nowadays for The Red Badge of Courage (1895; Cup.503.l.56), an innovative, naturalistic retelling of “an episode of the civil war”, the young American was much more popular in his day, blazing a romantic trail through the European salons and drawing-rooms of the fin de siècle. Once again, as with Harland, Crane won the early support Henry James, as well as the coterie of proto-Modernists who convened near the latter’s Kent retreat, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. In effect, Crane—whose fresh, journalistic clarity of prose and rugged “Yankee” style endeared him to the locals—became an honorary member of a predominantly English group of prose innovators. Like Harland, Crane died young (at 29 years), in Europe, and left a large and varied body of fiction and journalism which would came to have a significant influence on the work of later kindred spirits like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.

The "Lost Generation"

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Gertrude Stein, A book concluding with as a wife has a cow: a love story (Editions de la Galerie Simon: Paris, 1926), published first in Transition magazine, and embellished with lithographs by Juan Gris. This famous, and famously rare, collaboration between the two great Modernists will feature in the exhibition, 'Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde, 1900 - 1937'.

Like many other cities in Europe, Paris was devastated by the Great War. As has been widely acknowledged, the war was one of the world’s first highly mechanised conflicts. After decades of excitement and futurist dreams on both sides of the Atlantic—typified by the Great Exhibitions in London, Paris, and Chicago from 1851—the War reflected the dark, disturbing underside of technological invention. Some of the artists and authors who remained in Paris after the cessation of hostilities had served in this unprecedented clash of civilisations; others had reported on the events and the terrible political and humanitarian upheavals afterwards.

If the War highlighted alarming aspects of twentieth-century innovation, Paris also somehow clung to its reputation as the capital of bohemian culture. The city had long been famous for its philosophical intrigues and artistic inspiration, its avant-garde tastes and flamboyant personalities. The inter-war period saw the rise of Montparnasse as the hub of the city’s artistic community, its bars and cafés resounding to the pulse of “hot” jazz music and intellectual debate.

All this colour and creativity was so different from the austere materialism of American cities (mainly New York and Chicago), as depicted by “Naturalist” writers like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair (all of whom would make their way to Europe in due course). As the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses suggested in 1922, the Parisian cultural scene was more permissive of literature which confronted established mores and codes of behaviour. Culturally as well as morally, Paris in the 1920s remained one of the most exciting, sophisticated cities in the world. Capital of the avant-garde in all its forms, the city played host to any number of intersecting artistic cliques including Modernists and Cubists, Dadaists and Futurists, Expressionists and Surrealists. These were the years of Picasso and Modigliani, Braque and Duchamp, Stravinski and Satie, Diaghilev and Cocteau. Radical developments in the visual and performing arts were mirrored in the Continental literature of the time, from the surrealist shock tactics of André Bréton and Guillaume Apollinaire, to the textual experimentation of Joyce and Beckett. It was into this vibrant, inspiring foment of idea and innovation that the self-imposed exiles of America’s “Lost Generation” flung themselves. Young radicals like Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound, and, a little later on, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, published some of their most powerful and controversial works in the city.

On the face of it the sobriquet of “Lost Generation” seems an odd collective description for a group of writers and artists who were among the brightest flowering of American literary talent yet to emerge on the international stage. In fact, it was Gertrude Stein—the scene’s abiding spirit and prominent literary hostess—who coined the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway (“you are all a lost generation”). However, it was undoubtedly the latter’s use of the phrase as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1926; 12711.c.22), his epochal novel of wild years spent in Paris and Spain, that popularised the expression and made clear its apocalyptic overtones. The phrase—and Hemingway’s book—depicted this generation as characterised by doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and wounded—both literally and metaphorically—by the experience of war. To varying degrees, these virtues and vices were to be found in the life-story of nearly every member of the Lost Generation. Aside from their wild lifestyles, though, what is most striking is the astonishing range, depth, and influence of work produced by this community of American expatriates in Paris.

This outburst of creativity was supported by an explosion of small-scale entrepreneurialism in the creative arts. Much of the literature produced by the American Modernists was published by small presses also run by expatriates, including Shakespeare & Company, Contact Editions, Black Sun Press, Three Mountains Press, Plain Editions, and Obelisk Press. A list of the canonical works of inter-war American literature produced in Paris, following the landmark publication of Joyce’s Ulysses by Shakespeare & Co. (owned by Princeton expatriate Sylvia Beach 1 ) in 1922, provides a key to the literary future of the United States:

H.D (Hilda Doolittle), Palimpsest (Paris: Contact Editions, 1922; 12651.i.54)
William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923; Cup.510.fac.4)
Ezra Pound, Indiscretions (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923; Cup.510.fac.1 [mislaid])
Ernest Hemingway, in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924; Cup.510.fac.6)
Robert McAlmon, Village: as it happened through a fifteen year period (Paris: Contact Editions, 1924; Cup.410.f.1246)
Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanac (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926; X.519/20735)
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Paris: Contact Press, 1925; X.520/32188)
Hart Crane, The Bridge, A Poem (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.510.fa.15)
Archibald MacLeish, New Found Land, Fourteen Poems (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.400.c.22)
Ezra Pound, Imaginary Letters (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; Cup.510.fa.16)
________. A Draft of XXX Cantos (Paris: Hours Press, 1930; Cup.510.fac.14)
Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Basso Snell (Paris: Contact Editions, 1931; Cup.410g.725)
William Faulkner, Sanctuary (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
Dorothy Parker, Laments for the Living (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932)
Katherine Anne Porter, Hacienda (Harrison of Paris, 1934)
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935; Cup.804.bb.5)
Henry Miller, Black Spring (Paris: Obelisk, 1936; Cup.804.p.6; Durrell 124)
Anais Nin, House of Incest (Paris: Obelisk, 1936; 12623.k.28)
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (Paris: Obelisk, 1939; Cup.804.bb.8)
Anais Nin, Winter of Artifice (Paris: Obelisk, 1939; 12631.r.6)

Notes

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare & Company, 1922; C.116.g.17). Supporting the manuscript holdings of the many authors who surrounded her, the British Library also holds a substantial collection of correspondence and other manuscript material related to Sylvia Beach and her proprietorship of the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris. According to André Chamson, Beach’s library and bookstore did “more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined”; Chamson, quoted in Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939 (1975; X.981/10131).

From the Great Depression to the Cold War

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Title page to Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller showing the Paris address of the book's publisher. British Library Cup.804.bb.5 Copyright © The British Library Board		Nabokov's Lolita, which first appeared in two volumes in France. British Library Cup.805.a.5 Copyright © The British Library Board

The period of the Lost Generation’s ascendancy and influence lasted barely a decade, and began to wane after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed in the early 1930s. Like their European counterparts, American Modernists such as Stein, Pound, and Williams had initially pursued formal literary innovation at the expense of political or historical context; as William Carlos Williams put it in The Great American Novel, “Clean, clean he had taken each word and made it new for himself so that at last it was new, free from the world for himself” (1923; 17). Now, though, the Depression years and the alarming growth of Fascism and Communism required public intellectuals to address the political tide, to take sides and make allegiances. Many, including George Orwell, André Gide, and Arthur Koestler, Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, turned to the left, and looked to the Soviet experiment in Russia for solutions to the economic and ethical crises of the 1930s.

The “Roaring Twenties” of hedonism and experiment in Paris were replaced by the chastened Depression years, and the arts reflected this change, as a new sprit of realism took hold in American (and European) fiction. This was also an era when American literature turned to face inwards again, when authors returned from their European travels and focused on alarming domestic developments. Characteristic titles from this depressing decade were Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925; YA.1986.b.1522), Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930; X.808/6212), Dos Passos’s USA (1938; 12718.cc.22), Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Cup.410.f.84), and the portraits of rural deprivation in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; 1960; 10153.ff.26).

“American tragedies” of all kinds—wildcat strikes in the cities and poverty and hardship in the Dustbowl—would continue to preoccupy American writers and intellectuals at least until 1941, when the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour forced the United States out of isolation and into international affairs once more. Again, throughout the 1940s-1950s, another wave of North Americans, many in Europe for the altogether less hedonistic purpose of fighting Fascism, found their way to Paris. Again, following in the pioneering footsteps of Stein, Hemingway, et al, the list of authors who either wrote or published first in Europe reads like a who’s who of the post-war era: James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, Leonard Cohen, J.P. Donleavy, Joseph Heller, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Edmund Wilson, Thomas Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut. Like their forebears in the inter-war years, many of these writers, once again scarred by horrific experiences of Europe at war, found dark inspiration in the surreal spectacle of the continent’s descent into chaos.

One of these writers, Henry Miller, had, in fact, been in Europe for longer than most, and his time in Paris spanned the 1930s, that anxious decade after most of the expatriates left, and the forces of Fascism mustered across Western Europe. Sometimes threatening to overshadow his literary achievements, Miller’s influence as a social libertine and radical cannot be underestimated. In often ill-tempered partnership with Jack Kahane, head of the Paris-based Obelisk Press and another pioneer of “free expression”, Miller eventually brought forth his rancorous reflections on exile and debauchery in Tropic of Cancer (1935). Paradoxically, this was an era both of literary experiment and unprecedented censorship, when controversies around their work forced Joyce and Lawrence, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Radclyffe Hall, among others, to seek the support of courageous small presses, often in comparatively liberal Paris as opposed to London or New York.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice...

The opening of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

The enduring product of this torturous process of censorship and publication are a number of novels now regarded by many as among the cornerstones of the Modern movement. In its confessional sensibility and embrace of extreme experience, sexual freedom and violence, Tropic of Cancer was defiantly one of those pivotal works. It would also prove hugely influential, with many of Miller’s post-war successors on both sides of the Atlantic, among them the Beat Writers and Existentialists of the early 1950s, responding to his unrelenting search for creative and sexual freedom, and his nihilistic pleasure-drive. Again, even during the relative “down-time” of the 1930s, it seems that the inspiration of Paris, with all its dark corners and dirty secrets, just as much as its glittering social life, was a vital ingredient in the mix from which Miller, and these later acolytes, would emerge.

Another émigré—from Russia, to Europe, then America, and finally back to Europe—who took full advantage of Paris’s more permissive publishing regime was Vladimir Nabokov. In fact, his best-known, and most controversial English-language novel, Lolita, would be published by the city’s Olympia Press three full years before it was released in New York by Putnam’s. As many critics have pointed out, Lolita represents the epitome of the author’s career-long love-affair with everything polyglot and cosmopolitan, and a late-flowering work of experimental Modernism, in the tradition of Kafka and Borges. Its subject-matter—European émigré Humbert Humbert’s obsessive pursuit of his prepubescent muse across the mental and literal landscapes of 1950s’ America—essentially reverses the direction of one of the age-old features of “transatlantic fiction”.

Click above to read in full the opening of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

From Hawthorne, through Poe and Twain, it is Henry James’s innocent American heroines like Daisy Miller, Isobel Archer, and Milly Theale, who most resemble virginal precursors to Nabokov’s Dolores Haze, the quintessential American teenager of the 1950s. Again, it is ironic, but oddly appropriate given the history sketched above, that Nabokov—a White Russian who became an American citizen in 1945—achieved much of his formidable reputation outside his adopted country. In this, too, he resembled James, Stein, Hemingway, and all those other pioneers of the American avant-garde who sought to test prevailing concepts of American innocence in the cauldron of European experience.

Literary Expatriates in Paris (part 1)

2007-11-19T19:09:00.001Z

You can find the source of this article by clicking on the title above.

"Throughout much of the twentieth century, Paris was widely viewed as the cultural capital of the western world. As such, it exercised a magnetic attraction upon several generations of artists and intellectuals, large numbers of whom migrated to the French capital from all over the world. The number of English-speaking expatriates was especially impressive. Like the thousands of tourists who flocked to Paris, they were stirred by the city's physical beauty, its sense of history, its fine restaurants and sidewalk cafés, and its lively and sometimes even decadent nightlife. Unlike more casual visitors, however, the expatriates came to stay, at least for a time (some for only a few months, others for many years). They were commonly self-exiles, who chose to leave a homeland they considered artistically, intellectually, politically, racially, or sexually limiting or even oppressive. They were drawn to Paris by the reputed vitality of its artistic and intellectual scene, by its apparent tolerance for innovation and experimentation, by the high respect accorded the artist by Parisians of all classes, and by the accompanying level of freedom allowed the individual in his or her search for identity and artistic voice.

There was a pronounced ebb and flow to the migration of expatriates to Paris. Two fairly distinct waves can be discerned. The first wave lasted roughly from the end of World War I to the onset of World War II. Expatriate activity during that period was highest in the 1920s and was associated with what Gertrude Stein called "the Lost Generation," which referred to the alienation of the young men and women who had lived through and sometimes witnessed firsthand the devastations of the recent war in Europe. Activity tapered off dramatically after the stock market crash of 1929, as the ensuing economic depression forced many expatriates to return home. The onset of a new European war in 1939 and the German occupation of Paris in the following year brought their presence to an abrupt and virtually complete end. During the twenty-one years of the first wave (1919 to 1940), however, the number of English-speaking authors who lived as expatriates in Paris was large and included some of the most important literary figures of the time. Among them were Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Durrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein."

New blog

2007-05-01T15:07:00.001+01:00

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