Paris, Interzone

Terrifically enjoyable book on the black American expatriates and the pornographers of Paris.

Wright had widened and was more or less unbridgeable.
Hoetis’s congenial notion of having ‘the old black writer and
the young black writer’ at the same table, thrashing out ideas
over café au lait and funnelling the results into Zero, was mis-
judged. The novel which Wright had looked through in 1944,
was nearing completion, and Baldwin was launching it with
high hopes indeed, He knew he was, as he said, ‘smart’. He
even knew he was smarter than Wright.
"All literature is protest" Wright had snapped at him at teh Brasserie Lipp,
a copy of Zero lying between them like disputed territory.
 All literature may be protest, replied the
pupil who has learned so much he can outsmart the teacher,
‘but not all protest is literature’.
###
The gloom which had depressed Paris year upon year lifted on
Easter Sunday, 1949. Not just the gloom of guilt and austerity,
though that was ending too, but the actual gloom of having no
lighting. The lights of Paris, for almost ten years ‘dimmed
with humiliation’, as one journalist put it, were turned back
on. The City of Light was relit.
Great monuments, reduced to vague, ghostly shapes in the
blackout, had their pre-war floodlighting restored. The trans-
formation of the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame Cathedral
was not only dramatic but revitalizing. Elliot Paul, an editor of
the original transition, described how Parisians bathed in the
free-shining light, now that regulations curtailing the supply
of electricity had been suspended. There was ‘light in their
houses, homes, hotels and little shops every day . . . permis-
sion was given for all and sundry to turn on electric advertis-
ing signs and illuminate window displays’. The relighting of
Paris was celebrated in a night of festivity. ‘
A The Marshall Plan to help in the reconstruction of Europe
was under way, and France was its main beneficiary. The
Minister of Economic Affairs spoke on the wireless of
France’s gratitude (he meant the French government’s‘ grati-
tude) to the United States: ‘All this merchandise has been
given to us by the American government,‘ he said. ‘A great
lifting of the heart goes up from the French towards the gen-
erous American people.’ For the moment, the painted graffiti
on the walls of Paris saying ‘US Go Home’, the workers’
demands for ‘trade not aid’, the complaints in the fashionable
cafés about ‘loud Americans’ with too much money, the offi-
cial crackdown on the sale of Coca-Cola — for the moment,
those feelings were forgotten, as austerity ended in the flick of
a switch.
The city, which had been running smoothly, if slowly, on
bicycles,-was now fuming with automobiles, hurtling through
the narrow streets of St-Germain, causing an ear-splitting
racket and giving rise to the neologism embouteillage: ‘traffic
jam’. The food markets were also full and tempting again, and
the invidious ‘black traffic’, no longer needed, ran into the
ground. e
‘The hucksters shout their prices and the shop apprentices
have become barkers,’ wrote Janet Flanner in the New Yorker:
standing at the shop doors and bawling about the luscious wares
inside. In the charcuteries there is a mosaic of every known dainty ~
— turkey paté, truffledpigs’ trotters, chicken in half mourning,
whole roast goose livers, boar’s snout jelly, and fresh truffles in
their fragile bronze husks. In the poultry shops, there are
Strasbourg geese and Muscovy ducks. In the entrail shops, there
are indescribable inner items and_ blood sausages. At the fish
stalls, there are costly deep-sea oysters and enormous hairy sea
spiders, to be buried in mayonnaise. The street barrows are filled
with bearded leeks and potential salads. Food is still what
Parisians buy if they can.
An American journalist working for one of the international
news services calculated that during the first half of 1949, he
and his colleagues filed only 60 per cent as many stories as
they had during the previous six months. The news was that
France was __only three-fifths as newsworthy as it had been,
which was good news.