A wonderfully evocative memoir filled with anecdotes and a rich cast of expats of the postwar Paris literary scene
"Paris was a mistress or a lover to nearly everyone in this book," writes John Calder in this fine memoir of the city's literary and publishing scene. According to Calder, writers from the US and Britain flocked to the city of light after the second world war to escape censorship. For him Paris and Tangiers ("the other Paris") were "gardens of Eros", a phrase borrowed from his great friend, Maurice Girodias, who founded the Olympia Press, which published not only avant-garde works by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, but also more explicit (and more lucrative) works popular with GIs with titles such as Sin for Breakfast. Written by authors with names like "Ruth Less", they were really penned by hard-up literary writers such as Alexander Trocchi from Glasgow. Calder's account of Paris in the 1950s – the city of Jean-Paul Sartre and the nouveau roman – is wonderfully evocative, filled with memorable anecdotes and a rich cast of expat characters such as English poet Christopher Logue ("thin and cadaverous"), Colin Wilson (who was writing The Outsider) and William Burroughs, known to the Tangiers street boys as "El hombre invisible".
0 comments:
Post a Comment