The Godfather: Peter Corris on Paris

Tags: Charles Baudelaire/ Gertrude Stein/ James MacManus/ Jeanne Duval/ John Baxter/ WC Fields/ Woody Allen

Reading habits differ; I know people who read only fiction and some who read only non-fiction. I know of one person who reads one of each in alternate reading sessions. My pattern is to read them in turn and in that way I’ve just finished two recent books about Paris: Black Venus by James MacManus, a novel; and a history of the city around the time of the First World War, Paris at the End of the World by John Baxter.

Paris – it occupies a central place in Western thinking and in popular culture. Who can forget WC Fields’s crack in My Little Chickadee when he’s about to be hanged: ‘I’d like to see Paris before I die. Philadelphia would do.’ Or Bogart’s consoling words to Bergman in Casablanca (picked up by Woody Allen in Manhattan): ‘We’ll always have Paris.’

Black Venus tells the story of the poet Baudelaire, famous for Les Fleurs du Mal, and his Creole mistress Jeanne Duval. Baudelaire liked to roam the streets of Paris at night, and MacManus captures the atmosphere at the time of the Second Empire when the city was not the place of wide boulevards it is today:

That night the fog rolled up the Seine, sliding beneath bridges, pushing cold, wet fingers into slums that tumbled to the very edge of the river’s muddy foreshore.

The destructive relationship is interesting but sometimes reads more like biography than fiction. The life of the bohemian artists and painters is well caught. Intriguing to learn that they were extended open-ended credit by the proprietors of cafés and restaurants because their fame and frolics attracted tourists and hangers-on who paid full whack.

Unhappily, there are weaknesses in the book. The passage of time isn’t rendered convincingly; there are repetitions an editor should have picked up and the author appears to think that to be dressed ‘like a pox doctor’s clerk’ means to be dressed soberly, rather than the reverse.

John Baxter’s book, though quirky, is altogether more satisfying. Baxter has accumulated a wealth of out-of-the-way information and anecdotes to build up a picture of a city under threat surviving almost due to its own sense of style.

Paris escaped being overrun by the Germans at the beginning of the war by a stratagem which Baxter rightly compares to the rescue of the British troops from Dunkirk:

France was saved by the city’s military governor, General Galleni, who rushed reinforcements to the battle in a fleet of [Paris] taxis. Their presence was decisive, stopping the Germans dead, and forcing them into retreat.

Paris remained Europe’s cultural centre. The major contributors are all here – Cocteau, Picasso, Proust, Gertrude Stein and others – not exactly doing their bit, although Cocteau was a stretcher bearer for a time and Stein and Toklas drove ambulances, but keeping the cultural flag flying.

Baxter grafts the story – partly reconstructed from documents, partly imagined ­– of his grandfather Archie, who served in the first AIF, onto the main narrative. It shouldn’t work but it does, uniting the author with his material and giving a different perspective on different nationalities‘ attitudes to the war and its impact.

He comments that, ‘By the end of the war, four times more men had deserted from the AIF than from any other dominion force.’

There are nuggets of information that were new to me, such as that the anarchists who participated in the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo all suffered from tuberculosis and felt they had nothing to lose. I didn’t know that British troops claimed to have seen a vision of Joan of Arc supporting them:

… though for her to have intervened on the side of the British, who had burned her at the stake, would have shown truly saintly forbearance.

His remark here is typical of the wry and engaging style that characterises the whole book.

I’ve been to Paris several times, always with enjoyment. On a visit with Jean in 1995 we visited John Baxter, whom I’d known in Sydney, in his Left Bank apartment. He and his wife gave us a good lunch and Baxter showed us part of his massive book collection, which he wrote beguilingly about in his memoir A Pound of Paper (2003). They gave us directions to Napoleon’s tomb but we became lost, crossed the river unnecessarily, and so saw more of Paris than we’d anticipated.

Like WC Fields, I’d like to see Paris (again) before I die, but I doubt that I will. Sydney will have to do and it does.