Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clébert - 1953- translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith - 2016 with a Preface by Luc Sante

Paris in July 2019 -Hosted by Thyme for Tea

Works Read so for Paris in July 2019

1. At the Existentialist Cafe:Freedom, Being and Apricot  Cocktails by Sarah Blackwell.  2016 - An exploration of the Parisian origins of French post World War Two Existentialism 
2. Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris by Anne Nelson. 2017- an important addition to French Holocaust Literature
3. Journey to the Edge of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine -1932
4. Death on The Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine - 1936
5. "Luc and his Father" - a set in Paris short story by Mavis Gallant - 1982
6. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer - 2010
7. Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clebert - 1952, translated 2016

Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clebert, was published in 1953 from notes

he took while walking through the poorest parts of the city for several years right after World War Two.  Living what he wrote about, he chronicles the poorest side of Paris.  Not the working families but near penniless people struggling on a day to day basis to figure out how to eat in the City of Light with no reliable income.  

“It was not a reportage but a personal investigation; it was me in the streets of Paris, rediscovering a city that was still as it had been during the Occupation, which is to say that in some ways it was still the pre-war city, that of the Surrealists and of [Pierre Mac Orlan’s concept] le fantastique social, which lived on. . . . It was a clandestine Paris that I came to know as a clandestine myself” Clebert in a 2009 interview talking about Vagabond Paris.

Many have as their vision of Paris  a city of beautiful architecture, fine dining, and intellectual hauteur.  This is the city of Colette’s Gigi, of Great fashion houses, the city  depicted in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and the greatest English language set in Paris novel, The Ambassadors by Henry James.  A city of infinite delights.,the home of the Ritz.  The home of famous philosophers and artists. Over the years I have posted numerous times on books reflecting this vision.  Sometimes I read in Proust just to be taken there.

The Celine novels I read this month focus largely on the working poor, small shopkeepers struggling to survive.  To those depicted in Paris Vagabond these people are rich.  They have no hopes or plans. Both Celine and Clebert show a preoccupation with prostitutes, and not the kind depicted by Colette in Cheri living in mansions, but the most debased sort.  Prostitution was depicted in the short stories of Guy de Maupassant  and in Zola’s masterpiece Nana, among many others.  Flaubert is said to have had an encyclopedic knowledge of Parisian Brothels.  

Paris  Vagabond is not a novel.  It is a rambling account of the worst neighborhoods of Paris   In the late 1940s.  People in this side of Paris are sometimes there because they want to live where no one will judge them. Some come into this area as predators and voyeurs.  Looking for food is a big concern.  Most seem to live on bread and soup.  Clebert spent time among rag pickers and in a large Romany compound.  He visits cheap restaurants, pubs, and brothels.  The preoccupation with prostitutes got tiresome after a while.

I am glad I read Vagabond Paris.  It was probably much more shocking in 1952.  I found it to became  repetitious.  I was given a review copy of this book.  I cannot issue a general recommendation as it is sort of over and over the same thing.  His descriptions are very interesting.i wish he would have talked a bit about the role of the war in producing such poverty and about Holocaust survivors.

Here is a typical sample of his prose:

“Truth is stranger than fiction, we say. And this holds good in Paris as much as anywhere. The city is obviously a realm of the offbeat. What can you say about a clochard with a monocle pushing a wheelbarrow? Or a whore walking the street with a dog on a leash? Another soliciting in cock-of-the-rock-orange shorts? A bistro in Grenelle patronized by Russians and Arabs, an impossible combination which the owner handles by drawing a chalk line on the floor to keep the two groups apart? A café frequented exclusively by the deaf and dumb? A barge named Gérard de Nerval? A beautiful Negress who lives in the crate-return depository in Les Halles and fixes her face every hundred meters using her reflection in the gutter?”

JEAN-PAUL CLÉBERT (1926–2011) ran away from his Jesuit boarding school at the age of seventeen to join the French Resistance, serving undercover in a Montmartre brothel to gather intelligence on the patrons who were German soldiers. After the liberation of Paris he wandered through a catalog of odd jobs including boat painter, cook, newspaper seller, funeral director’s mute, and café proprietor. For many months he lived with the city’s down-and-outs, though without losing touch with some of Paris’s literary figures, notably Blaise Cendrars, and gathered the raw material for this book, first published in 1952 as Paris insolite. In 1956 he moved to Provence, where he remained for the rest of his life, writing many books, including published in 1961 and translated by Charles Duff as The Gypsies; and the encyclopedic Dictionnaire du Surréalisme (1996).

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