Geniuses & Mules with Bells

PARIS WAS OUR MISTRESS (254 pp.)--Samuel Putnam--Viking ($3).

"The people of Paris," wrote Franc,ois Rabelais in the 16th Century, "are so foolish by nature that a juggler, a pardon-peddler, a mule with bells . . . will gather a bigger crowd than a good evangelic preacher ever could." Four centuries later, between 1920 and 1935, Parisian jugglers and pardon-peddlers were gathering one of the biggest, strangest crowds in French history--a throng of U.S. expatriates, fleeing the New World of Harding, Coolidge, and their own disconsolate selves. Says Samuel Putnam, who went to Paris in 1926 to translate the works of Rabelais, and stayed seven years, writing sometimes as art correspondent for New York newspapers: ". . . It was perhaps the first and only time . . . that the intellectual cream of a young generation had deliberately . . . gone into exile."

Whether they were cream or evaporated milk, Author Putnam is the first ex-expatriate to bottle them all together. Putnam is no more successful than most other Parisophiles in explaining just what it was that made his wife burst into tears on her first glimpse of the Tuileries, or that mists the eyes of those who merely recall the image of a Parisian pissoir. But he does show the variety of attractions that Paris offered to youthful intellectuals in the years following World War I.

Corpses & Clippings. The wave of dis illusioned Americans broke on a foreign shore that was wholly receptive to their discontent. In 1924, at the death of France's premier novelist, Anatole France, members of the new Surrealist movement had shown their antipathy to the old literary regime by issuing a raucous manifesto entitled Did You Ever Slap A Corpse? At the same time, followers of the deliberately infantile Dada movement were exhibiting "paintings" that showed a decisive break with the old tradition--being composed chiefly of newspaper clippings and shoelaces.

Author Putnam admits that the Paris of the expatriates was no more typical of the city as a whole than Greenwich Village is of the city of New York. For the most part, the U.S. expatriates collected in the few blocks around the Left Bank cafes Dome and Doupole in Montparnasse--"a weird little land crowded with artists, alcoholics, prostitutes, pimps, poseurs, college boys, tourists, society slummers . . . homosexuals, drug addicts, nymphomaniacs . . . 'dukes' and 'countesses.' "

Nothing Can Equal Me. The idols of the expatriates--James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Valery, Andre Gide--were for the most part hardworking, serious writers who lived at a safe distance from their rambunctious disciples. When Sinclair Lewis -- arch-progenitor, to the average expatriate, of "the stenographic, Pullman-smoker school of writing"--visited Montparnasse and sat himself down at a conspicuous table in one of the cafes, every expatriate eye turned icily away. "Little" magazines such as transition, Broom, Secession, and Gargoyle occupied a position of huge magnitude in the expatriate eye. Putnam tells the dismal tale of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie's wife, whom Putnam found one day close to tears. "Line and I," she explained sadly, "are separating. . . . He's made transition [and he] says I'm not his intellectual equal any more."

Any day of the week the expatriate might listen to Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller expounding in four-letter words his philosophy of life--the essence of which, Author Putnam says, "was to the effect that prostitutes are about the only pure beings to be found in a world of reeking garbage." There was also frustrated Author Leo Stein, whose loathing of his prolific sister, Gertrude, was a feature of the boulevards. "My God, Sam!" Leo would groan to Author Putnam, "You have no idea how dumb she is! Why, when we were in school, I used to have to do all her homework for her."

Hark, Hark, the Lark. For the more dignified, there were such things as the sonnet-writing contests held regularly in the home of Ford Madox Ford--a lively old Briton who loved to reminisce about his experiences in World War I. "It was in No Man's Land," Ford would say reflectively: "We were making a night attack. I had gone ahead to reconnoiter. I was crawling along on my--er--stomach when suddenly, above the roar of battle, I heard a sound--it was larks singing. Then I looked up and saw that it was light as day. From the bursting shells, y'know. The larks had seen the light and thought it was morning."

Impressed listeners were always sorry to discover later that plump Novelist Ford had actually never been closer to No Man's Land than Paris.

Passed By. Not until the depression was under way did most expatriates realize that their principal support in the elysium of Montparnasse was the moneyed America from which they had fled. The homeward trek began.

"Was the experience of 'exile' worthwhile?" asks Author Putnam. "To us? To America?" Being an ex-expatriate himself, the question is simply rhetorical; the answer is yes. "Who today can doubt," he concludes, "which it was . . . the 'exiles' or the stay-at-homes who contributed most in the way of positive direction to American letters. . . ?" Stay-at-home readers may find his answer, like his question, rhetorical--or plain silly.

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