This book was first published in 1937. Its subtitle is Memoirs of Montparnasse, and it contains the recollections of one James Charters (aka Jimmie), a barman who was well known to the glittering set that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, et al.

The ghost writer is Morrill Cody (1901-87), an American diplomat, editor, and author.

The book's main focus is the two years from 1923: "By 1925 thousands upon thousands were pouring into Montparnasse every year, from every country in the world... But then the tide began to turn. The number of tourists and onlookers became disproportionately high. Too much advertising had turned the sponaneity of 'la vie de Boheme' into a huge commercial success... It was the beginning of the end."

Towards the end of the book, Charters/Cody writes: "Montparnasse really ended in 1929 with the beginning of the depression in America, but as an artist colony it had been on the wane for some time before that. When the sightseers, visiting firemen, and tourists descended on the Quarter in ever increasing numbers the artists and writers began to move out."

Sounds so, so familiar...

The title derives, we're told, from a characteristic touristic contretemps. Two lavishly dressed female tourists descend from a Rolls Royce outside the Dingo bar, obviously unsure whether it's the one they know from whatever Instagram-equivalent they've been consulting. Ex-performer Flossie Martin, one of the famous habituees, looks at them with contempt, and insults them briefly but pungently; and then they're convinced: "This must be the place!"

In its heyday, though, Montparnasse must have been quite unique: "Never has there been such an international gathering of more or less brainy excitement-seekers... But it was excitement with a purpose. It was organized rebellion against all in the world that is narrow and confining."



A 1937 review in Time appreciates the barman's unique perspective on the famous locality: "There is a somewhat more workaday point of view throughout the book, and mixed in with the anecdotes, gobbets of such practical information as how to handle drunks, raucous, tearful or belligerent; comparative analyses of drunks, male and female; how to tell when a fight is brewing and how to stop it."

And it's true, the Montparnasse bar environment resonates through this account. For example:

-- "About 10 per cent of the receipts of my Paris bars represented credit, and fully half of that was never paid."

-- "One of the great helps to the bar business in France was prohibition in America... To a certain class of Americans, drinking to excess became an obligation; no party was a success without complete intoxication of the guests, and it takes a lot of liquor at six francs a drink to intoxicate some Americans!"

-- "White wine, for some reason I do not understand, has always played a special role among artists and writers."

-- "The safest way to drink is the French way, and if you stick to this formula you can never go wrong: before dinner not more than two cocktails or aperitifs; with the meal a good wine properly served; after the meal, coffee and one or two liqueurs; then stop."

-- "New arrivals from England or America almost always started on Pernod."

X
The Gare de Lyon, 1988. The Simplon Orient Express started in April 1919, running from Calais and Paris Gare de Lyon to Milan, Venice, Trieste, and on to Istanbul. In the 1920s and 1930s this service linked Calais, Paris and Istanbul every day

-- For the "real dipsomaniacs", who just cannot resist alcohol, "drinking is a relief from the responsibilities of life, an outlet from reality, an escape that may be vitally necessary in order to avoid suicide".

-- "Save me from a bar full of sculptors, for they are almost always very depressed when drinking."

-- "Montparnasse was mostly talk, as I have implied before. We had some excellent talkers, sincere, amusing, fantastic, or simply incredible. Like talkers the world over, their main subject was themselves."

-- "Montparnasse was a mutual admiration society and the members delighted in each other's colorful characteristics. When a new personality came to the Quarter he was the rage for a short time, everyone quoted him, everyone laughed over his stories."

-- Then there are the tricks and rackets and fights, the suicides, the sex workers, the pimps, and the drug addicts...

There's a fair sprinkling of the sexism, racism, and homophobia that marked the era, but Jimmie retains enough charm, goodwill, and compassion for us to merely note-and-move-on.


Paris, 2019

The book opens with a brief introduction by Hemingway. He's clearly smarting from the way he has been portrayed in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, because he spends most of his paragraphs bagging, in his trademark misogynistic style, "literary salon women". He names no-one specifically, but he's clearly gunning for Gertrude Stein. It's only in the final third of his contribution that he actually gets round to recommending the memoir (and he misspells Charters' first name...).

Cody/Charters has perspectives on many now-familiar notables of the age:

-- There's "the inspiring Sylvia Beach, who, as far as I know, never entered a bar in her life, though, as she told me once, 'we have always served the same clients, you, Jimmie, with drinks, I with books'... She is a serious little woman with a quick, engaging smile and a sharp tongue on occasion. She has had a big influence on the English and American writers especially, and in the old days you would find many with now famous names sitting in the back room listening to her comments and suggestions."

-- "Miss Beach is known, of course, as the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce himself... I do not know, for he leads a very retired life and never visits bars, but I have known many of his friends, and I have many times seen him around the Quarter. Montparnasse was very much impressed with Mr Joyce, partly because he kept himself so aloof, I suppose... He was very well liked by his friends, I believe, and it was a pleasure to see his fine sensitive face and erect figure."


Joyce territory in Trieste, 2023

-- "One of the leaders of the Beach group, with a reputation for having discovered much of the talent of Montparnasse, was Ezra Pound, the poet. He was an erratic character with strong likes and dislikes and a very keen wit. He was known, too, for his rudeness, which was colossal at times and of which he was always proud, I think."

-- In 1926, Hemingway took the trip to Pamplona that he describes in The Sun Also Rises: "The characters in that story are real enough -- in fact so real most of them found it hard to forgive him. 'Brett,' who was furious at first, later relented. At one time all Montparnasse was talking of the 'six characters in search of an author -- with a gun!'" As everybody knows, Brett is Lady Duff Twysden, while Mike is Patrick Guthrie. Charters/Cody doesn't use their actual names, but he writes very sympathetically of the strange, drama-filled relationship between these two: "Of all my friends in Montparnasse, Mike is the one I liked best... After he broke with Brett, Mike was never the same..." He eventually died of an overdose.

-- Ford Madox Ford, about whom Hemingway is so rude, is "a great organizer of good times, first in his bal musette near the Place de la Contrescarpe and later in his own studio... Ford was making considerable money at that time and he spent much of it entertaining his Montparnasse friends with very large quantities of the finest wines and liqueurs."

-- Then we have Sinclair Lewis: "He was not friendly to Montparnasse, saying that most of us were a crowd of useless drunks... the Quarter didn't like Mr Lewis."

-- Gertrude Stein is mentioned, a tad dismissively, but not rudely.

-- Then we have "F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who pretended to look down on Montparnasse but came there frequently nevertheless".

-- "Djuna Barnes, the writer, was one of my good friends who brought me many clients. She is very much of a lady and well liked."

_*_*_

The copy I read was borrowed from Internet Archive. But it's a later edition, published in 1965, and the changes serve marketing interests so blatantly as to be funny.

Here's the cover image:



Note the change of title (completely unjustified, as Hemingway is not even in it all that much...), and the dreadful design, with the ghastly disembodied head... Poor Jimmie doesn't even feature on the cover any more.

And the front-cover blurb is unspeakably awful: "Captures all the flavor of a golden era -- the scandals, brawls and love affairs of the famed celebrities and literary giants who populated -- Hemingway's Paris".


This is the inside cover page

The introductory text -- after evoking "the wildest days of Paris after World War I", and Jimmie's knowledge of all the celebrities, "the least not being Ernest Hemingway" -- goes on to list "his famous customers", many of whom the text never claims as customers, and at least one of whom (Rodin) died before Jimmie ever reached Paris.

For goodness' sake... We often think these shenanigans are purely a product of our own times. But clearly not...

Anyway, regardless of the edition, this was an enjoyable quick read.

As Charters/Cody concludes: "It is interesting to reconstruct the old days in Montparnasse because it was a period that will certainly go down in the history of art and literature. But it is perhaps even more interesting because so many thousands of people from all over the world found self-expression of one kind or another and a general release from inhibitions... For most of these their months or years on the Left Bank mark the highlights of their lives. Such a combination of circumstances as produced Montparnasse is never repeated in the same manner."

I think that is why this era retains its fascination a full century later.