RETURN TO PARIS
FARRELL, JAMES T.
Return to Paris By James T. Farrell Author 0/ "Studs Lonigan'' and "The Road Between" FOR WEEKS Paris had been in my mind. 1 had begun work on the final volume of my Bernard Carr trilogy; it...
...I wouldn't tell her what...
...But at this particular period, gold was flowing from America to France, and the dollar was dropping in relationship to the franc...
...Belshaw, loaned me two hundred francs a week for eight weeks...
...I would talk to the patron of a cafe on the Rue Houdon...
...She is dead now...
...I wrote much more on this novel, but in the end I went back to my-original draft...
...And having decided to return to Paris, I thought that once again I will sit on the veranda of the Cafe Deux Maggots, and I will gaze again at that magnificent old tower, stare at it as though it has stood for all these centuries waiting for me to see it and to draw a moody sustenance from it...
...I agreed, believing that to dttend the counter-rallv was a duty...
...He would tell me about the Zone Rouge surrounding Paris...
...Just after I had received my advance check on Gashouse McGnitw, a cablegram came, announcing the death of my grandmother...
...I would start by saying: "Peutetre...
...Sometimes, we would walk about the walled streets of the little village...
...After we arrived, I told her that J was going to show her something special and beautiful...
...All the ghosts of memory of my childhood and youth lie buried in Chicago, and in New York, In Paris alone do I have any remaining and unburied ghosts of memory...
...Belshaw and Mr...
...I spluttered my thanks to him...
...That year in Paris was very important in my entire development...
...And I could no longer consider myself a youth...
...The other storekeepers in Sceaux gave us credit...
...I phoned...
...I would walk along Fifty-first Street, and then Fifty-eighth Street, utterly absorbed in the baseball scores...
...I had trivial thoughts...
...I did this in ten days in order to get the manuscript off on the boat so that I might get my advance as quickly as possible...
...It was when I had written this out that I received a telephone call from Sidney Hook...
...I met George Seldes and he took me to lunch at a restaurant near the Left Bank...
...I had confidence in my book, and was certain that I would be given a contract and an advance...
...AND IN THAT PAVILLION in Sceaux, I also wrote the first draft of my second novel, Gashouse McGinty...
...She understood...
...The rent was very little, but I couldn't pay it regularly...
...I wished that I were working in the office with Gashouse McGinty and Heinie Mueller and the other characters of my book, instead of being where I was...
...I WOULD WALK UP the hilly street, peering at the foreign exchange statistics, very much as in my boyhood...
...I was writing about scenes in Chicago continually...
...It was there that my youth really ended...
...I would go to the Rue Houdon (the main street of Sceauia) every afternoon and buy the latest paper to see what had happened to the foreign exchange rates...
...In due time, the money arrived...
...We left our hotel on the Boulevard Raspail and walked...
...What did that year of my life in 1931 and 1932 really mean...
...There was an allnight vigil in the hospital...
...And yet it was so far away...
...And the smile on the face of nn angel in the garden of the Cluny Museum, a smile that is so suggestive of the smile on the painted face of JMona Lisa...
...The Reds alarmed him...
...Kranz, of the American Students Union on the Boulevard Saint Germain, we ^ei e sent back home by Travelers Aid...
...We walked along Jlaspail, turned towards the Jardin de Luxembourg, looked in the windows (,i the art stores, walked on, crossed the Place Saint Sulpice, strolled by the stores selling religious objects on the P.ue Bonaparte, and came out onto the Place Saint Germain...
...We plastered tan shoe polish on them with the hope that they would look like real shoes...
...Then, I went on to describe my main * characters, Bernard and Elizabeth Carr, walking along the Avenue de l'Opera on a mild and sunny afternoon in late April...
...It wasn't the usual kind of a year in Paris, spent by a youn| American writer...
...My feet would ache after walking on the cobblestone streets...
...They are both happy, and feel as though time had been reborn for them alone...
...I thought tint had she lived only a few months she would have been a great-grandmother...
...She was tight-fisted and rich, and in back of her house there was a garden about one block long...
...But never in my life has the performance of what I conceive to be duty been so congenial to me...
...Now I cried...
...I WAS LAST IN PARIS in the summer of 1938...
...Now and then she would give us vegetables...
...I had no shoes, A French friend gave me a pair of tennis shoes...
...I remember how excitedly my wife, Hoi tense, and I looked out of the moving train window at the French countryside, and how we saw the white iind shining dome of Sacre Coeur in the distance...
...Finally, we were down to our last franc, and had the choice of using this for the purchase of either bread or soap...
...He was going there and planned to paint...
...The picturesque and quiet little suburban French vilage became a dim background to my life...
...I remember that time in December, 1931...
...He proposed that I go along with him to attend the counter-rally to the Stalinist "peace" meeting...
...I pointed to the old Romanesque tower of the Church of Saint Germain des Pres...
...I scarcely went outside our door, and from morning to night I wrote with growing confidence and enthusiasm...
...I said: "There...
...It was a mugi,y, fray October afternoon...
...At the end of ten days, my draft o$ three hundred and twentyfive or so pages was completed...
...Perhaps I shall now discover how much Paris really meant to mo...
...I hardly spoke French and I would have to keep trying to tell her, over and over again, that I was hoping to get some money...
...I remember him coming to me in the corridor of the American Hospital to tell me that I had a son...
...I was full of my material, and my mind was crowded with memories of Chicago In fact, I became nostalgic...
...BUT I AM THINKING of Paris because of other and more intimate reasons...
...At twilight, I would stand in front of my door, and look at the changing colors of the sky...
...Chicago seemed both far away and near...
...Then it was April, and we were at the end of our resources...
...Since then, I had^gone to sit and look at it many times...
...There was nothing for me even to tell myself...
...I wasn't satisfied with what I had written, and was etarting my opening chapter all over /aga.n I wrote the first paragraph: Paris in the springtime...
...And my old landlady, Madame...
...At about four o'clock in the morning, five days later, the concierge wakened me to have me phone the American Hospital...
...I was think of it...
...She had rented this pavillion to Pierre Loving and to Sam Putnam...
...I was hurt...
...And Dr...
...t And in a pavillion at 5 bis Rue de Chemin-de-fer in Sceaux-Robinson, I revised and completed Young Lonigan...
...And I will again walk on all those streets I loved...
...We crossed over to the Cafe Deux Maggots and took seats...
...He was a small, and slightly plump man with gray hair, a gray moustache, and twinkling, confident eyes...
...Wp bought bread...
...Hortense didn't understand me...
...With the help of Dr...
...Chicago seemed alternately so far away and so near...
...These ten days were intense ones for me...
...Hortense looked...
...A sad year had ended...
...Once more I shall be able to see Notre Dame in the distance as I walk along the quais, and I shall have the opportunity to gaze at Mono Lisa...
...He talked about Mussolini, and about how he had been expelled from the Soviet Union, and also about Mallorca...
...1 had only recent I v mailed her a bright scarf and it was cn route to her when she passed awav in her sleep...
...My first wife and I trnved there with about sixty-five dollars, faring an unknown future...
...I rewrote a story, "Helen, I Love You," and sent it off to America...
...And now, returning once more to Paris, I shall remember all this, and I shall see all those old landmarks...
...I had first seen that old tower by accident at twilight on a night early in May, 1931...
...But the greater portion of Gashouie 'McGinty was written during those ten days in Sceaux...
...it opens in Pans...
...All during my stay in Paris...
...I took it into Paris to get it off on the boattrain...
...I was all absorbed in my work...
...I had been mysterious and non-communicative, and Hortense became annoyed...
...She agreed to our leaving, and to our taking what we needed of our belongings, and she accepted our promise to pay...
...I wouldn't tell her what I wanted her to see...
...Boeuff-de-Saint-Blaise, the obstetrician at the American Hospital...
...And Chartres...
...Winn I had left Chicago in April, she had cried...
...I used to hear her talking of me', and sarcastically exclaiming: ¦ Peut-etre...
...I used all of it, and added to it...
...If we needed credit, he gave me credit...
...The desperation of our circumstances did not interfere with my writing...
...A young and friendly minister, Dr...
...Sometimes I would be blocked and would repeat: "Peut-etre...
...My first son was born in Parts, and lived only five days...
...BUT MADAME NEVER evicted us...
...There were those few black words on a blue sheet of paper, telling me that she had passed away peacefully in her she p. And these few words snapped a link with the past, with that South Side of Chicago which had remained so much in my mind while I was in Paris...
...I thought of her deatn back there on the South Side...
...THERE WERE HARD DAYS in the winter of 1932, following the death of my son...
...But there was no way of going on...
...A good and a productive year had ended...
...The babv was dead...
...It is essential that we speak out to the whole world about the black reaction of Stalinism...
...After the war, a friend of mine visited her son, Henri, and paid that bill...
...When I read the cablegram announcing my grandmother's death...
...Suddenly, I remembered streets, faces, even stores iind storekeepers...
...Each day that I waited, I became more apprehensive about the dollar...
...Later, she allowed us to take all of our remaining things on the basis of that same promise...
...A trip to a nearby cafe in Neuilly as the dawn came...
...I sat in a cafe, look.ng at the crowds...
...In the Fall, when we had to move back to Paris because of the cold, and also because of our expected baby, I had to go to her and explain that I couldn't pay her for four months rent...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 19
