"You’re
an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil.
You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself
to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking,
not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
“It sounds
like a swell life,” I said. “When do I work?” -- Ernest Hemingway in A
Moveable Feast
Paris, the
Grand Damme of expatriate havens, has held a place at the top of my shopping
list for almost three years. I began my search for a country south of the
border, thinking that the ideal expat escape for me would be a remote Spanish-speaking
village.
Two decades
of living in a small mountain town, however, left me with a thirst for
anonymity and a desire to live in an environment that was a mixture of
races, creeds, and beliefs. I wanted to be pressed in on all sides by art
and culture. And I wanted to be surrounded by creative thinkers with whom
I could converse about something deeper than the latest skis on the market
or the most challenging hikes in the area.
There are certainly
worse places to raise one’s children than a small mountain community. I
loved looking over the faces in my daughter’s highschool graduating class,
and realizing that I’d known most of them since kindergarten. But times
and circumstances change, so I recently planted myself anew in San Francisco.
Own
Your Own Vineyard In Argentina - Now
You Can Have Your Vineyard and Drink it Too - Does it sound like crazy
advice to say, “BUY A VINEYARD”? If so, I hope you’ll think again
after I tell you what happened to me and my husband when we landed in Argentina
for the first time. Mendoza Province, the heart of Argentina’s wine country,
has over a 1,000 vineyards and wineries that produce 70% of all Argentinean
wines and 40% of all South American wines, so we knew we had our homework
cut out for us. We would love to share our experience with you and we look
forward to having you as a
future guest at our estancia.
It
will be from this polyglot soup, where diversity of thought and expression
are encouraged (unless you smoke, are anti-gay, or a Republican), where
I will continue my search for a country.
As the thought
of city life grew more attractive to me, Paris began to loom larger as
a possibility.
language I’d
forsaken for Spanish many years earlier.
I read Henry
Miller and Hemingway’s accounts of the bohemian lifes of expats who lived
in Paris during the 1920’s and 30’s. I read Diane Johnson’s recently released
book Le Divorce. My Paris file grew fat.
As fate would
have it, I fell in love with a Frenchman last year -- in San Francisco.
In the whirlwind love affair that ensued, I traveled to Paris three times
in three months. I fell in love not only WITH the city that inspires love
but IN love with one of its natives.
I set out to
“know” Paris in my favorite way -- by blending in and pretending
to be one of its residents. I negotiated Paris via the Metro. I sipped
kirs at Les Deux Maggots (OK, so I did hit one or two tourist spots).
At
en plein aire cafés I stared unabashedly with the rest of the audience
at the street theatre as it strolled past. I learned
quickly to pick out the Frenchmen from other European males by the similarity
of their narrow noses and lips, wire rimmed glasses, receding hairlines,
and thousand dollar suits. I shopped daily at the patisseries and the boucheries
and the tabacs and the outdoor markets. I paraded down the Champs-Elysées
adapting the I-Love-Being-A-Woman attitude that French women wear
so well.
I sipped espressos
and munched croissants every morning. I joined philosophy discussions at
the Café de Flore. I watched Bruce Lee movies in French. I ate foie
gras and tried not to think about how it was made. I marched to the head
of the line at one of Paris’ most renowned nightclubs and through its doors
in my new Gianfranco Ferrer outfit. I sped along the Normandy Coast
in Bernard’s Porsche at 120 mph. I slept in a chåteau -- the
Domaine des Hauts de Loire. My limited French vocabulary increased daily
as I tried out words like “Je t’aime”. Bernard’s English
improved with words like, “Me too.” I feasted on turkey with a group
of Americans on Thanksgiving. And I ventured to dream, that maybe I
too would someday live in Paris.
To
learn more about Living & Investing in France request our FREE report:
- France is the #1 investment destination in Europe
and has doubled its investments in the last ten years with twice as many
foreign companies relocating their base of operations to France totaling
23,463 foreign companies and employing 2.3 million people. Not only is
France the world's most favored tourist destination, UNCTAD ranks France
as the third-leading recipient of foreign direct investment in the world
in 2009, receiving US $65 billion in foreign investment flows, second only
to the United States (US $136 billion) and China. - Free
Report For Immediate Download
But
wait -- what exactly is it about Paris anyway?
There are plenty of cities more geographically blessed, San Francisco for
example. (In the eyes of this Northern Californian, Paris is disappointingly
flat.) Rome is more historic. Hong Kong is as cosmopolitan. Marrakesh
is more exotic. Many cities have rivers running through them. And
unlike the world’s most popular cities, Paris is landlocked.
It’s calling
card is certainly not its weather -- my last fall visit to Paris left me
with such a case of seasonal affective disorder that I kept my face glued
to the airplane window the last hour of the flight as we chased the setting
sun over the western horizon.
No, the magic
of Paris isn’t about logistics. It’s something more esoteric -- it’s that
certain sin quo non that writers have attempted to put into words
for years.
Paris between
the World Wars was a hotbed of artistic and intellectual exile for Americans
and English writers and artists the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude
Stein, Anaïs Nin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Sylvia Beach,
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, Man Ray, and Ezra Pound. They walked
the cobbled streets and twisting alleys of the Left Bank, they philosophized
in its cafes, and they painted and wrote about a mythical Paris that called
out to the artist, the individualist, the sensualist, and the lover of
life.
Gertrude
Stein wrote in Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “And so life in
Paris began and as all roads lead to Paris, all of us are now there, and
I can begin to tell what happened when I was of it.”
Composer Virgil
Thompson (who claimed that if he had to starve to death, he preferred to
do it where the food was so good) portrayed Paris as a place where
Americans could lead the kind of life represented in Stretrher’s “impressions”
of Gloriani’s garden party -- a place where the open windows of the receptive
spirit could absorb the sun and thus where the gray moral and spiritual
climate of Woollett could be exchanged for an atmosphere of radiant richness
and freedom.
Writer, Edith
Wharton, pointed out that because the puritan races viewed
“Art” as separate from life, unapproachable and remote, they locked it
up in museums. She defined “taste” as the atmosphere in which art lives,
and outside of which it cannot live. Taste, Wharton said, is the art of
dress, manners, and of living in general, as well as of sculpture or music.
And because the French had always been innately sure of this, it was her
opinion that they instinctively applied to living the same rules that they
applied to art.
John Dos Passos
portrayed Paris as a matrix of sensual delight: “Today is Paris...
pink sunlight hazy on the clouds against patches of robins egg... the tow
boat shiny green and red chugs against the current... Paris comes into
the room in the servant girl’s eyes the warm bulge of her breast under
the gray smock... the smell of chicory in coffee scalded milk and the shine
that crunches on the crescent rolls stuck with little dabs of very sweet
unsalted butter...”
In Tropic of
Cancer, Henry Miller feels himself “drawn back again to the proper
precincts of the human world” (Paris) from the death-in-life
of the mechanized city of New York. He wrote, “Even as the world
falls apart the Paris that belonged to Matisse shudders with a bright,
gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees
tangled like hair.”
Robin
Sparks is looking for a country to call home.
She is traveling around the world looking for the perfect spot. Join
Robin Sparks in each issue of the Escape From America Magazine as she travels
around the world in search of a country to call home. If you are
an expat living somewhere that you'd like to tell Robin about, or if you
would like to contact Robin on other issues please click on the link below.
To read more articles by Robin Sparks, see our:List
of Articles Written by Robin Sparks
Hoo
Boy, I mean Oh-La-La. All of you Lovers out there, how ‘bout we just charter
a flight to Paris right now?
Even Mark Twain,
never one to mince words, wrote in Innocents Abroad, “What a bewitching
land France is! .....They say there is no word for ‘home’ in the French
language. Well, considering that they have the article itself in such an
attractive aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word.
Let us not waste too much pity on ‘homeless’ France. I have observed that
Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France
some time or other.”
Today there
are approximately 200,000 Americans living in Paris
according to expat David Applefield who publishes the literary journal
FRANK. He says that many of the factors that pulled writers and artists
from former lives during the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties --
freedom from moral judgment and censorship, overt racism, Puritanical values
on sexuality, crass consumerism, an attractive exchange rate, are barely
valid in Paris today. But he admits that some of the cultural elements
that once made the city so appealing for the creative soul -- love and
appreciation for aesthetics, passion for dialogue, unabashed sensuality,
rootedness to history, respect for writers and artists (even poor ones),
cheap and excellent wine, anonymity -- are still present.
John Calder,
another writer currently living in Paris, says: “Few politicians
give culture more than lip-service and in the U.S. it is usually too dangerous
even to mention. George Bush, when he was president, could not admit to
a liking for classical music, while in France any politician who did not
have at least a veneer of culture could never be elected. The French want
to be led by those with good minds and good educations, Americans
too often by the lowest common denominator, those who affect to be most
like themselves.”
Expat writer,
Josh Parker writes, “There is something, as Henry Miller said, of the giant
idea incubator about Paris. Art presses in at you from every side, fills
your vacant moments even when you think you are most oblivious to it...
frankly, I am enjoying the luxury of at last being in Paris.”
The
recently-released novel Le Mariage by Diane Johnson, fills the bookstore
windows of my San Francisco neighborhood and inhabits the number 6 spot
on the San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller List.
It follows on the heels of Le Divorce, another of Johnson’s novels
about Americans living in Paris. Last week I attended her reading at Berkeley’s
Black Oak Bookstore. Johnson told how she followed her husband to Paris
eight years ago for what was supposed to be a sabbatical. Today the writer
and her husband live eight months a year in Paris and four in San Franscisco.
In Harriet
Welty Rochefort’s hilarious book French Toast, she relates the hard-earned
wisdom of one who has lived among the French for over twenty years. From
a small town in Iowa to the City of Light, Hariett has done what many dream
of doing, and she shares the cultural bumps she hit along the way.
In Paris Noir
, Tyler Stovall writes about the African-American expatriates who
made new lives for themselves in Paris after World War I. Nearly half a
million African-American soldiers discovered a racial egalitarianism in
France they'd never experienced in America. Many never went home.
A generation of black musicians and performers, Josephine Baker for example,
created a Harlem Renaissance in Paris. While most white expatriates returned
to America when the Depression hit, most African Americans stayed put.
After World War II black writers began to make names for themselves
in the City of Light -- among them Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester
Himes, and more recently Jake Lamar.
Americans living
in Paris aren’t limited to writers and artists of course. I met dozens
of American-born bon vivants who call Paris home and there’s not a droll,
complacent one among them. Adrian Leeds, coordinator of a French/English
conversation group and author of a restaurant guide; Jonathon Roberts,
a retired Los Angeles film commissioner; Robert Price, a Texas attorney
who recently completed a cooking course at the Cordon Bleu; and Brett Vallaint
, who moved to Paris alone at the tender age of 22, married and later
divorced a Frenchman -- these are just a few of the American expats whose
stories I’ll tell in future articles. You’ll learn from them what it takes
to move to, live, work, and play in the City of Light.
My rocketship
love affair with Bernard eventually crashed and burned. (Love doesn’t fizzle
out with Latins.) My love for Paris, however, burns white hot in spite
of a few cracks I’ve begun to notice in her patina. I’ll touch on
these French “discrepancies” in future articles.
Anaïs
Nin, my all-time favorite expat writer wrote in her final passage of her
Diary, “I cannot install myself anywhere yet. I must climb dizzier heights.”
"You’re
an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil.
You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself
to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking,
not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
Hoo
Boy, I mean Oh-La-La. All of you Lovers out there, how ‘bout we just charter
a flight to Paris right now?
The
recently-released novel Le Mariage by Diane Johnson, fills the bookstore
windows of my San Francisco neighborhood and inhabits the number 6 spot
on the San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller List.
It follows on the heels of Le Divorce, another of Johnson’s novels
about Americans living in Paris. Last week I attended her reading at Berkeley’s
Black Oak Bookstore. Johnson told how she followed her husband to Paris
eight years ago for what was supposed to be a sabbatical. Today the writer
and her husband live eight months a year in Paris and four in San Franscisco.