Paris works its enchantment on American men and women of letters

Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Edited by Adam Gopnik

Library of America: 614 pp., $40

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April in Paris. May in Paris, November in Paris and why not January and February to boot? Every month, indeed it sometimes seems that every day, has been celebrated as best spent in Paris. No other city in the world has this allure, this romance, this reputation that a person’s life is incomplete without having been there at least once. Adam Gopnik has compiled a superb anthology focused on the American experience of Paris.

Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker and author of the bestselling “Paris to the Moon,” organizes “Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology” chronologically, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s observations of his first visit in 1767, long before there was a United States. “The Civilities we every where receive give us the strongest Impressions of the French Politeness.” Franklin writes that six days in Paris have changed him more than six years at home. Of his transformation by a French tailor and wigmaker, he says: “Only think what a Figure I make in a little Bag Wig and Naked Ears!”

Franklin and others included in the anthology have been changed by Paris and, as a result, they seem a little more alive to the full range of human feeling, as evidenced in the wistful memoirs of Dorothy Tanning, whose marriage to Max Ernst put her at the center of the French avant-garde. “Try, try to remember at least some of the thirty-four times three hundred and sixty-five nights. They are the ones to be cherished,” she writes. “Try, try to remember them and the same number of days to match, all shine and midnight blue, before they turn to black.”

The cast of 69 writers is unequaled by any other anthology about Paris. Hemingway, still the unmatched romantic, edges against Frederick Douglass; Art Buchwald is there alongside P.T. Barnum, and Charles Lindberg after landing in Paris at the end of his historic flight. Gertrude Stein presides over the city where James Baldwin, like so many both before and after, discovers that he is really an American after all, writing, “In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris....”

The eclectic nature of Gopnik’s enterprise is evident in “Satori in Paris,” in which Jack Kerouac writes that “Paris is a place where you can really walk around at night and find what you dont want, O Pascal,” or in the letters of a young William Faulkner amazed by grown men sailing model boats in Luxembourg Garden’s pond. “They are really beautiful boats -- well made, of fine wood, and all flagged and pennoned like big ones. Think of a country where an old man, if he wants to, can spend his whole time with toy ships, and no one to call him crazy or make fun of him! In America they laugh at him if he drives a car even, if he does anything except play checkers and sleep in the courthouse yard.” Of course Faulkner would go home to Oxford, Miss., to write, to be laughed at, to be ignored and eventually to be given back to America by the children of those French model ship makers.

There is always one little quibble about such an anthology: Julian Green is mentioned in the introduction, but no selection of his was included, though he is the only native American so established in France he was elected to the French Academy and his novels are part of the essential core of French literature. His little essays, which mention among other things the silences of Paris, are surely missed.

Still, “Americans in Paris” is more necessary than a toothbrush for anyone’s next voyage to the City of Light. When I go there again, I will have to check Dawn Powell’s observation that entering Notre Dame Cathedral is like, “walking into a sapphire.” And consider one final selection, a postcard from Hart Crane on what he found in Paris: “Dinners, soirees, poets, erratic millionaires, painters, translations, lobsters, absinthe, music, promenades, oysters, sherry, aspirin, pictures, Sapphic heiresses, editors, books, sailors, And how!”