Book Review: Paris in the Fifties (1997)

For many Francophiles, Paris in the 1950′s represents the apex of the city’s cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic achievements. The immediate postwar period,with the city flush with American dollars and tourists and a magnet for European and American expatriates who would later go on to prominence in their chosen milieus, still saw plenty of rationing and an uneasy uncertainty about the country’s place in an increasingly globalized and capitalist world, but it also saw the flourishing of new ideas and innovations in just about every facet of French life.

Stanley Karnow, fresh from his stint in the U.S. Army and emboldened by the relative generosity of the G.I. Bill, began his career in journalism in Paris, where he served as a stringer, and eventually correspondent, for Time magazine. In Paris in the Fifties, written in 1997, he reminisces about the heady days of his early career, at a time when foreign newspaper and magazine bureaus wielded generous budgets and freelancers could scratch out a decent living, even in Paris.( Le sigh.)

Karnow, who counts a Pulitzer Prize and several Emmys among his many accolades in his long and illustrious career as a newsman, had the distinct privilege of capturing the city at a time of profound change. Sure, there was the rise of the House of Dior, the continued obsession with the finest wines and foods, not to mention the influx of countless celebrities from Hollywood who descended upon the City of Light in droves at a time when the exchange rate made filming in France more favorable than in humdrum Los Angeles.

On the other hand, lest we forget, there was also the collapse of the French colonies, from the disaster in Algeria to the humiliating defeat in Indochina; the violence and destabilization wrought by endless strikes, protests and threats of revolution instigated by disparate movements, from the Socialists to the Communists to Algerian Moslems to disaffected and unemployed youths; the appalling poverty in pockets of the city that contrasted with the sybaritic lives of the privileged few.

In the midst of all of this, Karnow and his fellow correspondents roamed every corner of the city and beyond, scoping out the stories behind the Stories, interviewing not just the famous but the obscure. He writes an entire chapter entitled “Massacre at Le Mans,” but rather than bore his reader with the minute details of the auto race — thank God — instead he wanders behind the scenes and makes note of the idiosyncracies of the sports journalists sent to cover the event by their respective publications; the charm of families picnicking on the lawn near the course as only the French do, complete with tables, napkins, tablecloths, silverware, and wine; and the subsequent horror of what would later be known as the worst accident in auto racing history, with over eighty people killed in the disaster.

Elsewhere he remembers the forgotten and the fascinating, from the peculiar position of the so-called Monsieur de Paris (i.e., the state executioner) to the art of the strip tease, to the horrifying conditions of the penal colony in French Guiana, to the little known life that the ascetic Ho Chi Minh led during his years in Paris, prior to becoming his country’s greatest nationalist leader. In between he offers little slices of his own life in the city, from his romance, marriage and subsequent divorce to a French woman to his adventures scoring interviews with French and North African politicians and rebels. His own life clearly could fill a book three times the length of this one, but he chooses instead to shine the spotlight on Paris itself and its wonderful, infuriating, devastating allure. He sees himself as merely an observer, one with a sharp eye and facile pen, as well as one lucky bastard who happened to have been in the right place at the right time.

As a writer myself I deeply appreciated his many, many recollections of the Parisian intelligentsia and their profound influence on every aspect of French culture and society. Who wouldn’t want to have been a reporter in Paris at a time when you could run into the likes of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Malraux, Camus, Francoise Sagan, Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Andre Breton at any of a number of cafes and bistros around town? Karnow counted among his colleagues and friends Art Buchwald, Anthony Lewis, I.F. Stone, Otto Friedrich, and Norman Mailer. And when he married Claude Sarraute, he got to know her mother, the writer Nathalie Sarraute, whose novels Sartre had labeled admiringly as “anti-novels.” (Nathalie is the writer who Karnow had described in the quote I included in yesterday’s post.) One of the things I love most about France is the country’s reverence for intellectuals — in contrast to our native and utterly incomprehensible disdain for them here in America — and Karnow was in the thick of that country’s postwar community of the best and brightest, and here he writes often of them with a mix of bewildered admiration, humor, skepticism (especially with regard to their Stalinist leanings).

That’s certainly not to say that this book doesn’t have its share of flaws, although Karnow’s easy, graceful writing and knack for culling the most amazing stories and anecdotes from what surely is a lifetime-and-a-half’s worth of them, more than make up for the few shortcomings. Probably the strongest critique I have of Karnow’s memoir of his days as an intrepid reporter of all things French in the heyday of the 1950′s is the glaring lack of insight regarding the experiences of women. Indeed, at times I wondered if perhaps Karnow wilfully ignored the story of their lives, despite the fact that, obviously, they make up half the entire population. After all, women only gained the right to vote in 1944, and Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work, The Second Sex, was published in 1949. Merely writing about “the French” doesn’t necessarily include the singular experiences of women, as many now understand. History has predominantly been about the accomplishments and even massive failures of men, while women have usually been shunted to the shadows, their own often remarkable achievements deliberately ignored.

The women’s movement had been simmering for centuries in France but wasn’t especially vocal in the 1950′s, but surely its enormous contributions to the development of modern French life and politics merited at least a half-chapter, if not an entire one. Probably the only chapter in which women figure prominently is “The Glass of Fashion,” but even here Karnow dismisses their most visible representatives as “mannequins.”

This glaring oversight, however, takes nothing away from the highly readable and enjoyable nature of this memoir. Karnow had a coveted ring-side seat as a witness to the birth of postwar Paris, and he generously shares much of his experiences and insights here. Imagine Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, only set in a more distant but no less critical time. I harbor a special affection for Karnow the journalist, ever since I devoured his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, which educated me more than any other volume about the history of my own native country under the late president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Now I’ve discovered his gift as an insightful memoirist as well, and Francophiles with a special interest in the Paris of the 1950′s, a time of significant events and even more significant people whose influence haunts the city to this day, would do well to pick up a copy of this memorable book.

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