THE THIRD WAVE: PARIS’ EXPATRIATE LITERARY SCENE

Every Sunday night, poets, writers, painters and journalists stop at an iron gate on a hilly Left Bank street, punch in the private code that lets them in and amble up a cobblestoned alley of artists’ ateliers to Jim Haynes’ ivy-fringed studio.

The weekly gathering is a renowned, eclectic, infamous mix of the paparazzi , poseurs and authentic artists who pass through this city’s English-speaking expatriate community. It is a literary salon in the roughest sense: a raunchy combo of intellectual grist, grub and amorous adventures.

It is an ordinary evening--before terrorism shattered the city’s psyche. There is a Colombian video artist from Amsterdam, an expatriate writer from Boston, a Dutch cartoonist living in Paris. Two women from Texas, on a “grand tour” of Europe, have found their way here and enter reading Haynes’ directions like a guidebook.

At the door, Haynes waves and shouts over his congregation: “Raul meet Pascale. Jason meet Melody. Ted, Pierre.” Wearing a red-checked shirt and a mustache, he looks like a tall woodsman.

At 52, Haynes is the community’s perennial host, veteran hippie and literary concierge--a man renowned for his 40-volume address book and an impressive number of women house guests.

An extemporaneous publisher of sorts, Haynes founded Suck, a publication on adult sexuality, in Amsterdam in the ‘70s. (Germaine Greer was a contributing editor until Suck ran a full-page photograph of the feminist in the buff.) Every few months, Haynes brings out a book under his Handshake imprint, and his autobiography is famed for its 20-page dedication to friends and its title, an intentional double-entendre.

Haynes’ studio is thick with books and boasts an uncanny abundance of beds. High above the mingling throng of guests, a ceiling fan takes languorous swipes at the heat. In an aquarium, a one-eyed goldfish makes graceful Esther Williams turns.

A bowl of sangria and wine kegs sit on kitchen counters, and Haynes’ Dutch help-mate dishes up a greasy stew. Guests pay 60 francs (about $8.50) to fill their bellies; proceeds--in theory--go to help dissident writers in Poland. In reality, we’re told that the funds are passed on to Haynes’ creditors.

As the evening progresses, Haynes, who elevates his disdain for monogamy to a moral concern, embraces a young French woman. Afro-American poet Ted Joans, in Paris on his migratory New York-Africa-Paris circuit, is filming the young woman in an 8-millimeter movie and tells her to meet him at “Suicide Bridge” at the Buttes de Chaumont for the next day’s shoot.

A “Beth from Berlin” has phoned Joans about going to Africa with him, Haynes says. “I wouldn’t mind going to Africa,” one of the Texas women pipes up.

“You got any oil wells, darling?” Joans rejoins.

The writer from Boston tells of the literary mileage his first book manuscript has chalked up in a year of transatlantic submissions. He says he is at work on a “more commercial” book. Back from Beirut, a Paris-based TV network technician from San Diego grumbles that he’ll quit the business “after one more little war.”

As guests leave to catch the last metro , Haynes is having his temples massaged by a brunette, a conversation on pushing icebergs drifts up from the shadows and the one-eyed fish is being pursued by an aquarium mate. “Swim, baby, swim!” somebody calls out.

A few guests stay on, filling Haynes’ beds. Some, and others like them, will show up the following week, their presence attesting to a new vitality in Paris’ expatriate literary scene that has caused it to be dubbed “the third wave.”

In the wake of World War I, the first great tidal wave of young Americans rolled in on Paris. Freed from hardship and buoyed by the high-priced dollar, they caroused along the Left Bank boulevards and let loose a dazzling fireworks of creative talent. Ernest Hemingway wrote his first best-seller, “The Sun Also Rises,” Henry Miller first published “Tropic of Cancer” in Paris, Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” appeared, and, most notably, in 1922, a little-known New Jersey woman, Sylvia Beach, brought out the first edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Beach’s small bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, on the rue de l’Odeon, provided the literary nexus for the struggling writers, while the cafes of Saint-Germain and Montparnasse became their playgrounds. F. Scott Fitzgerald fretted over his potency in a restaurant near the Seine. Idaho poet Ezra Pound worked from his apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens to raise money for British bank clerk T.S. Eliot while he finished his poem, “The Waste Land.” And Hemingway wrote and boozed on fine de champagne at his corner cafe, the now well-known Closerie des Lilas.

The end of World War II brought the next surge of American expatriates and, with them, the founding of the prestigious Paris Review. Similarly, in the ‘80s, the tide of American youth in the city has swelled. In an era of yuppie-ism and nationalist fervor, they have come seeking cultural contacts and release from the generation’s materialism. Like their literary predecessors, they sailed in on a strong dollar, and they survive cheaply on piecemeal work. They have little or no prior publishing or writing experience, yet sustained by irrepressible egos they have founded a half-dozen literary reviews, a city tabloid and even a Sylvia Beach-style bookstore.

“The third wave” has yet to make itself felt as a literary force, and whether or not there is serious talent is questionable, but its existence is irrefutable. Also undeniable is an appearance that seems more shallow than past generations of American expatriate writers.

Joseph Simas, 28, hails from Hanford, Calif., and he describes his family as a ‘60s-style milieu of hippie aunts and uncles, Marxists and homosexuals--at odds with the quiet San Joaquin Valley farming community’s usual lifestyle. After a stint in San Francisco’s Mission District, Simas came to Paris six years ago and following a “wild life,” settled down with Connie Bradburn, an opera singer from Chicago. In 1983, he began publishing Moving Letters, a poetry journal typed on a word processor and stapled together.

Simas is pegged by his colleagues as a language poet in the tradition of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and French philosopher Roland Barthe, though he denies the “easy tag.” Still, he is concerned with defining the world through language and, a child of television and the computer, he examines media words and worries about his identity. Using disjunctive narrative, he posits poetic identities such as boxer, waiter or woman. “I tend to fragment my identities in my real life,” he says, and is anxious about simultaneously being a young poet, “a husband of sorts,” an avid movie fan and a foreigner in Paris. Oblivious to the rare brilliance of a blue Paris sky, Simas claws deeper. “How do I process information? What is thinking? What is existence?”

A seemingly taciturn man of solemn demeanor, Simas is heavily bearded and browed, giving him the look of a dark Fauvist portrait. As he talks, he rolls his cigarettes on the coffee table with meticulous gestures. He denies any part in the room’s sunny domesticity, with Bradburn’s matching print sofas and the books standing straight on their shelves.

The couple lives in an immigrant neighborhood of Turks, Indians and North Africans just off the city’s famous prostitution strand, rue St.-Denis. The sidewalks are jumbled with butcher shops, grocers’ crates and kebab stands, and Simas’ apartment is down a narrow alley of fissured facades. Yet, his life is comfortable by expatriate literary standards. Simas is co-director of a progressive primary school, and Bradburn sings in the chorus of the Paris Opera.

Of the literary bunch, Simas also seems the most French--”I’ve even had mal du foie (liver trouble),” he says--and the most serious intellectual. His poetry has appeared Stateside in such little magazines as California Institute of Technology’s Sulphur, Temblor of North Hollywood and New York’s Conjunctions, and he has had two books of poetry published. “I’m in the beginning stages of what is literature,” he says. In nine issues of Moving Letters, he has published such language poets as Ron Silliman and Michael Palmer and Carla Harryman from San Francisco, and he has read at L.A.’s Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice.

Leaving for a trip to the United States, he says, “I’m going to sound out America--to find out what’s going on.” When he left San Francisco, he says, “things were hot and active.” But, he adds, “visitors here in the last year have changed. They’re really caught up in earning a living. I know a lot of poets (in the U.S.) who’re editing computer journals and are very isolated. They’re moving out of the cities because it’s too expensive and dangerous. The scene’s dispersed. They come to Paris and see here’s a big city where there’s a community. I’ve felt more envy this past year than in the whole last five years. Before I felt almost criticism for living here.”

And what might history have to say about their community? “Some of us are going to go on writing,” Simas says. “And maybe somebody’ll say, ‘Oh, his first books were published in Paris and he edited Moving Letters.’ ”

Carol Pratle, 26, publisher of Sphinx, a women’s literary review, has lived for eight years in the 11th arrondissement , a working-class quarter east of the Bastille. Construction of a people’s opera house at the Bastille is beginning to bring in bistros and art galleries. “It’s becoming like a new Greenwich Village. This is the area you come to if you want to do something after midnight,” says Pratle, who goes with her pals to the cheap restaurants and famous dance hall, the Balajo, on the historic rue de Lappe.

The renowned literary watering holes of Montparnasse--the Dome, the Select, the Closerie des Lilas--are just expensive monuments to Pratle. “It’s cold and foreign to me,” she says of the quarter. “It’s touristy and overplayed.”

For her part, Pratle lives in an apartment composed of two maid’s rooms--a kitchen and a cozy bedroom--for which she pays 1,000 francs ($143) a month. She shares the floor--and the bathroom--with a young German dancer and a Los Angeles artist, David Cee, 24. Her identity is stated in the entrance hall with an American and a Soviet flag, under which is “Betty Crocker’s Cookbook.” Raised in a modest Chicago family, Pratle came to Paris when she was 18 and studied Russian literature at the Oriental Languages Institute of the Sorbonne. She directs a semi-professional theater group, specializing in contemporary Russian drama, and leads a theater tour to the Soviet Union for New York University in Paris.

Her contact with people of the Eastern Bloc countries exploded “the preconceptions Americans are indoctrinated with since they are babes in arms,” she says. She finds life in the United States “a little too comfortable. Shopping carts and supermarkets have doubled in size in the last five years.”

Still, publishing in Paris hasn’t been an easy venture. Only about 1 in 100 submitted manuscripts are publishable, she says. Transient writers have moved on as the dollar’s value has dropped, well-known writers don’t always respond to her initiatives and supporting her review on teaching and translation fees has left her in debt. Nevertheless, she has published an interview with Marguerite Duras and has come out with two annual issues.

Her neighbor, Cee, is also a publisher of sorts. In Paris for two years, he has brought out a publication called Eleven, which lists neighborhood attractions and is inspired by L.A. Weekly. Cee, who introduces himself while emptying his trash, wears leather shoes and heavy socks, stained shorts and a Paramount Pictures cap. In a maid’s room just large enough for a painter and a canvas, he has tacked his California license plate on the wall. Cee is having his “first decent” show at a new Bastille gallery, and he swears he won’t go back to Los Angeles. “It’s the desert! It’s Okie town!” he shrieks.

Like Pratle, John Strand, 34, publisher of Paris Exiles, holes up in an old-fashioned neighborhood in the east of Paris. For three years, the two editors shared an apartment, but Pratle had a fling with Strand’s art director and Strand has taken up with a freckled-faced graduate of Tufts. The new twosome met at the city tabloid, Passion, where she was line editing for 500 francs ($71) an issue and where he writes theater reviews for 500 francs a page.

Strand, who lives in a sparsely furnished modern apartment, came to Paris five years ago, “attracted to the idea of a socialist government.” Despite the fact that he had never seen the French capital, he quit his job as a hospital purchasing agent and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. Today he does what he has wanted to do since he was 5--he writes. “Here, there is a strong literary tradition and a respect for artists that doesn’t exist in the States,” he says. “Artists can escape the negative pressures of the marketplace. Nobody is going to come up and ask me why I don’t have a job and go to an office.”

Since 1985, Strand has published two issues of Exiles, using proceeds of teaching fees for a theater course at New York University’s Paris branch and reviews for Passion. He doesn’t pay writers and takes six months to a year to respond to manuscript submissions, chunks of which are stuffed in shopping bags in his closet.

Still, Strand says, “there are a lot of serious writers and artists here.” Like his colleagues, Strand mixes known and unknown writers; he has published noted nouveau philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, experimentalist poet Pierre Guyotat and a favorite of the Paris publishing clique, London-based Kathy Acker, whose post-punk, post-feminist works include a reworking of “Don Quixote” with the errant knight cast as a female dog.

In an expatriate scene where Eastern Bloc rather than American writers are now dominant, with Czech Milan Kundera at the summit, the American-run journals make a point of publishing foreign writers in English. Pratle has devoted space to Japanese women writers, Passion has run a story on Third World writers and David Applefield’s Frank has treated Turkish writers. Says Strand, who regularly publishes experimental French authors, “It’s the opposite of cultural isolation.”

A contemporary American version of the garret artist, David Applefield lives in a small Left Bank apartment and pushes his magazine, Frank, with the hard-sell avidity of an adman. He displays a collection of covers, posters, ads, even a press release for Frank.

Not surprisingly, Applefield, who has published works by such name writers as Italo Calvino, Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon and William Burroughs, is criticized as commercial by his colleagues. “It’s a bunch of interesting names, but it’s not an exciting magazine for what will become literature,” says Simas. “I feel there’s some model out there for David; maybe the model is the Paris Review.”

Applefield returns the compliment, calling Simas’ Moving Letters “a stapled leaflet,” although he has published his poems.

Like Sphinx and Paris Exiles, Frank is typeset and has a black-and-white semi-gloss cover. It also boasts a respectable circulation of 2,500 and, begun in the summer of 1984, is going towards its sixth issue.

A graduate of Amherst and Northeastern University in Boston, Applefield first came to Paris when he was 21, inspired by the city’s literary tradition. The young American walked the rue St.-Denis with a copy of the “Tropic of Cancer” in his pocket; he asked the prostitutes out to dinner and was told to get lost. “It wasn’t the sex,” Applefield says. “It was the drinking, the dancing and whoring (in Miller’s book), the being free and alive and spontaneous. It was seizing the moment.”

At 30, Applefield now practices a cockier stance and spouts such pronouncements as “Marguerite Duras has gotten enough attention.” Leading the way up the stairs to his sixth-floor walk-up, he plays the poor artist, exasperated at his compatriots’ naive materialism. His modest lodgings are “impressive to the American sensibility,” he laments expansively. “Comfort is so important to them.”

In three cluttered rooms looking out on rooftops, Applefield lives with a German-Cuban mate, who, in the last days of pregnancy, sits in a window-side wicker chair. Their Beagle, Wilson, wanders happily around, swatting low-lying memorabilia with his wagging tail.

An obvious image of Hemingway, Hadley and their baby Bumpo leaps to mind. Not far away in a similar garret, Hemingway strove to write “one true sentence.” In his literarily romantic quarters, Applefield writes such sentences as “His emotional state was overloading.” Inspired by James Joyce’s fragmentation of time, Applefield writes about the nonsensical emptiness of American life. In an excerpt from his second book (it and his first are as yet unpublished), printed in Frank, he uses Arby’s as a metaphor for American society and creates a protagonist who forces himself “to maintain eye contact” during what could be the most prosaic description of love-making in print: “That was the closest he had ever been to a woman even though he had slept with a few girls in his life. They hugged each other like mother and child, husband and wife, father and daughter. It was weird, rare, nice.”

On a quiet, late-summer’s afternoon, a couple of clients are drinking fresh fruit drinks and reading the paper; the cat, Baby Moon, is snoozing on a cafe banquette, and a stream of friends flows in and out of the bookstore, embracing its proprietor, Odille Hellier.

Named for the New York newspaper, the Village Voice opened in 1982 on the rue Princess in the pricey St.-Germain quarter. The blue English-cottage-like shop has since become a rallying point for young writers and Hellier, who spent 10 years in the States, has been their chief supporter.

In a symbiotic relationship, Joey Simas advises her on poetry, Jim Haynes helps out in the shop and Applefield handles her magazine subscriptions. In return, Hellier lets the writers hold readings in the shop, carries their publications and smoothes feathers ruffled by rival aesthetics.

Inevitably, Hellier, 44, is compared to Sylvia Beach. However, she says, “today it is hard to believe that a bookstore could discover a James Joyce. There are so many agents and publishers.”

Of the current crop of would-be Joyces, Hellier says, “They all believe they’re great writers.” However, she adds, “Their work has not come to maturity.”

She also says that the magazines are not selling as well as they did a year ago. “The public’s interest has dropped because they don’t publish regularly enough.”

Robert Sarner, 34, who founded the tabloid Passion in 1981, also claims to be a granddaddy of the group, spawning Sphinx and Paris Exiles from among his writers. With three years of journalism under his belt and a collection of Paris Reviews and early Rolling Stone magazines stored in a basement, Sarner launched Passion in the mode of its predecessor, Paris Metro. The Canadian speaks a franglais , often claiming not to know words in English, and has adopted a studied Gallic pose of condescension. With a beret riding atop unkempt hair, he presents himself as Paris’ Clay Felker.

His magazine offers a combination of opinionated leftist reportage and American-style how-to pieces on life in Paris. Hellier dismisses it as “good for addresses,” while Sarner snips that the literary bunch “is a small, incestuous community.”

Yet, with its rifts and bonds, the community forms a presence that testifies to Paris’ still-powerful intellectual pull. “The third wave” may never write of the city as “a moveable feast,” as Hemingway did, or describe, like Malcolm Cowley, charms that lead to “a half-sensual, half-intellectual swoon.” Simas says that for inspiration “all big cities are the same,” and John Strand only allows that Paris is “visually attractive.” Haynes sums up the city’s practical advantage for young writers: “If you publish in Kansas, nobody pays attention. If you publish in Paris, everybody scrutinizes what you do.”

What will come out of all of the activity? Says Haynes, “There’s a Marshall McLuhan saying, that a fish doesn’t know it’s in the water until it’s out.” His own modest ambition, he adds, is to win a Nobel Prize.