Les Américains à Paris

0:03Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, my friends. Hello. So good to see you.

0:24So I'm up next in our summer interview series. We have each selected a colleague to bring on the show as a guest critic. My pick was the brilliant Lauren Collins. And we are here to talk about a city near and dear to both of our hearts, Paris. More specifically, we are talking about Americans in Paris. I feel like there's so much to say about this. A whole canon emerges the moment you say it. Frankly, we could make our own podcast just about Americans in Paris. I think this became evident, but we kept it here to one single episode. But we range pretty widely. We're going to be talking about Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Janet Flanner.

1:00We will even dip a manicured toe into Emily. A pedicured toe. A pedicured toe. Thank you so much. That is quite right. All to figure out what has drawn Americans to the city of light for centuries. Because I think Paris is a fantasy for Americans. It always has been. But how much of that is still a reality? And how much of it was ever the truth? So that's today on Critics at Large. Les Américains à Paris.

1:34Lauren Collins, bonjour. Bonjour. I'm so happy to be on this esteemed podcast that I like listening to all the time. So what a treat. Oh, what a treat. What a delight. Right. What a thrill. Well, I've asked you here today to talk to me for our Critics at Large summer series because you have one of the most plum, delicious gigs that is available. You know, it's like a miracle to me that you get to write for The New Yorker magazine and live in Paris, a place that Americans, many Americans have dreamed of being for time immemorial. I think this might be a good place as any to drop in Oscar Wilde's observation that when good Americans die, they go to Paris.

2:19And yet you're very much living. So what I wanted to start by asking you was how did you come to live abroad? How did you make it to the city of Paris, France? I became an American in Paris by way of a Frenchman in London, my husband whom I met when I moved there in 2010. And the funny part was I was not a Francophile, not even Francotropic, really didn't speak a word of the language, had never really had France as a part of my life. And in fact, had moved to London for the very reason that I spoke English. And I thought that would be a good place to apply my trade. But we met, we spent a few years there.

3:03We moved to Switzerland for a little bit and then basically, you know, had kids and started thinking about school and real estate and all the boring stuff that people start thinking about. And we decided eventually that we should go where one of us at least knew how to navigate. And so perhaps counterintuitively, rather than being all kind of like macaroons and mimes and can-can dancers and whatnot, Paris for us was kind of like a practical choice. You know, where can we go live that it's going to make sense for this family that we're trying to put together out of an American and a French person and the little Franco-American franklets that came along?

3:48I think that's the technical term, franklets. I was trying to fit an American in there somewhere, but Frank Lentz, I don't know. Okay, you got to Paris in both, I guess, as you say, the most romantic and unromantic way possible. Romantic because it involved actual love between two people and unromantic because you did not project onto Paris what so many Americans do, which is the city of sophistication and leisure and little markets and wicker baskets with which to shop at them. So what was your experience when you did get to the city? How did you start to make your way there? Well, I was immediately kind of elated because, you know, I felt like there was this just embarrassment of riches in terms of the cultural life, the intellectual life, the political life.

4:41I mean, there's been so much going on in France in the 10 years that I've been here. There are not enough hours in the day for me to cover all the things that I would like to write about in Paris and in the rest of the country, too. And I'm also curious to know, did you feel that there was any kind of set of assumptions about about America projected onto you by Parisians when you were there? Because we are also a pretty, as distinctive as the French are, we are also a pretty recognizable band of people, I would say, particularly in a European context. Did you find yourself treated like an American particularly?

5:21Yes, for sure. And I'm still treated like an American all the time. I mean, it was funny. I don't know if you saw the, there was an article that was like making the rounds. Like is so many people sent it to me about American tourists in Montmartre getting like these hugely inflated bills and the waiters using kind of all the tricks of the trade to, you know, entrap them into accidentally ordering a really large, expensive Coke. You know, it was actually Le Parisien. It was French kind of reporters who decided to don their fanny packs and their, you know, NFL ball caps or whatever and go see what happened.

6:00But I think there's a mutual fascination. I mean, I also sometimes think of it as a love triangle, because there's, you know, there's the UK, that's kind of the third spoke of this relationship that, that fluctuates and changes, but is always like a, it's a passionate one. And there's always a lot of, a lot of back and forth, a lot of projection, a lot of fantasizing about what another culture and another kind of life means that I think is a pretty timeless feature of the France-America interplay. Yeah, 100%. All right, I'm going to lay my cards on the table for one second, just for the sake of honesty.

6:44Because what I love about our different perspectives as I'm not an American in Paris, I'm an American in New York City, but I've been an American in Paris. But what can I say? I have to be honest that when I was first really an American in Paris, I went with some classic dreams. I really need to want to break out into song right now. Like, you dream to dream. No, I won't. I dream to dream. If anyone wants to option this for a musical, I'm available. Just write to themail at newyorker.com, subject line critics, with your offer because it's a great story. Here's the story. I went to Paris right after I graduated from college in the summer of 2000, well, actually the early fall of 2009, when, as you may or may not know, everything in the American economy was in free fall.

7:37And it felt like, OK, might as well just try it somewhere else. It's not like I'm throwing any great opportunities here. Let's go. And what I did was I wanted to go live at Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore, the famous English language bookstore founded by Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce, who has made for that reason and others enormous contributions to English language literature. and then for years was run by a huge character, this kind of magical, cantankerous, frightening, almost fairy book-like man, George Whitman. And when I got to Paris, George Whitman was quite old. He had bequeathed Shakespeare and Company to his daughter, also named Sylvia, but he was still around.

8:25He was kind of like the troll living. He would live in the back of the— He would just be eating soup in the back of this magical bookstore across the street from Notre Dame. And I went there because I knew that they allowed self-proclaimed writers to stay at the shop for really any length of time. They had bedrolls that you would just roll out in the evenings and lay down on. And in the mornings, you'd roll them back up and you'd open the shop, volunteer for a couple of hours a day, go out and live your life, and come in and close the shop again. Didn't these people have some kind of name? Like the fireflies or something like that?

9:05What's the name? Tumbleweeds. Okay, that's right. Which is, of course, a very American name, like, you know, blowing across the great Midwest. There are no tumbleweeds in Paris, France. Yeah, tumbling through the saloon. Yeah. Exactly. And tumbleweeds we were. So I did that for a week. And guess what? like many fantasies of the good Parisian life, I didn't like it. I didn't like it. It wasn't for me. I like certain things such as sleeping in a bed, I discovered at that point. It just wasn't quite my scene. And once I left Shakespeare and Co., for which I retain enormous fondness, my life really opened up.

9:46But let's come back to you, Lauren. You are the New Yorker's woman on the ground in Paris. And there have been others in this esteemed lineage, some amazing writers, I think immediately of Janet Flanner, who covered Paris for decades for The New Yorker, who started under Harold Ross and kept on going through William Sean. There, of course, was Adam Gopnik, our colleague who was there in the early 2000s. So when you realized that this was going to be your role, did you go back and look at any of their writing? Have they served as models for you or not so much? I mean, Flanner and Gopnik and Jane Kramer and the occasional Judith Thurman, I'm thrilled and honored and, you know, to follow in these footsteps.

10:34And then those of others like, you know, outside the New Yorker, Alice Kaplan is one of my idols. At the same time, I mean, I've tried to forge my own path, both as a function of my own priorities and of the time that I'm living in and covering. You know, Harold Ross, who was the first editor of The New Yorker, had a specific assignment for Flanner. And he said he wanted to know what the French thought was going on in France, not what Flanner thought was going on. And I love that. I mean, I've come back to that kind of commission in a way in the course of my career in France. My goal has been, it's been to widen the aperture, both socially and geographically, and to render France in a way that's entertaining and informative to an American reader, but recognizable to a French one.

11:21It's sort of the task that I've set for myself. And one way of doing that, I mean, I really make an effort to get out of Paris, just like see some more of the country and within Paris to get out of the traditional kind of Americans in Paris precincts. And also not to treat Paris too preciously. Like, yes, it's romantic and yes, it's picturesque, but it's also a big, loud, dirty, profane, complicated city that evolves and changes like everywhere else. And I'm also like a, I have a little rule for myself. It's like about generalizations and especially those about kind of national character and tendency.

12:02If I'm going to say something about the so-called French, got to back it up with statistics. And I am going to deploy my favorite one on you, Alex. It is that a third of children born in France in 2023 had at least one parent born abroad. And I think that is a cornerstone statistic to any understanding of France today. I just really want to be sure to embrace that and bring it into my coverage of France. I love that you say that because as much as, you know, that Shakespeare and Company, Notre Dame vision might have brought me to Paris, that is not the vision that kept me there or keeps me coming back.

12:47And that's something that I love about your writing, that you capture the real diversity of the country. I want to ask you in particular about one piece you've written. You know, you're writing, sometimes you write the big classic piece, like I'm thinking of your profile of Emmanuel Macron. And sometimes you show American readers a totally different side of this country. Let me ask you about one of my favorite pieces you've written in the last few years, which is your piece about French tacos. Can you just tell us what French tacos are, how you came to that topic, and how you went about writing about them?

13:21So I had seen French tacos sort of all over town, signs for them. So I was like, what is this? A French taco is, it's not a taco. It's a sandwich. It's like a flour tortilla slathered with condiments, bunch of meat, and then like other things, all kinds of add-ons, French fries, whatever you want. Dallas and cheese sauce, and then it's like folded and toasted like a panini. And this is a homegrown gastronomic phenomenon that was essentially invented and popularized by, you know, owners of like what are called snacks. So kind of just like little small business fast food outlets, many of them of North African descent in Lyon and Grenoble over the past decade.

14:12And I just thought this was amazing. I was like, it's not that often that a new fast food crops up. Like, where did it come from? Grenoble and Lyon are in this duel to kind of stake a claim as the birthplace of this extremely popular fast food. And yeah, so there's a bit of a time gap sometimes in Americans' perception of what goes on in France. Like, I think you think French food and it's very much kind of Julia Child's interpretation. And of course, these dishes are still standbys, but you've got pizza and couscous and all these other things, and you've got French tacos. So that was the genesis of that piece.

14:53Have you had one? I have never had one, but I'm getting some French tacos the next time I'm there. Are they still everywhere? Have I missed the moment? No, I'm going to keep a French taco warm for you. And for dessert, we'll have El Morgon. That is the Algerian upstart hazelnut spread that is challenging Nutella and therefore potentially by nefarious means was recently banned by the European Union. Absolutely.

15:23I know this will shock you listeners, but we are not the first American writers to live and love the French capital. After a quick break, we dig into the long cultural history of Americans in Paris. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

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16:32We've been talking about our own experiences as Americans in Paris. So I want to get into what it is about Paris that appeals to something in the American sensibility. Let's go back. I love to go back. I love to dip a little toe into the stream of the 19th century, the early 20th century, Henry James, Edith Wharton. What's their American vision of Paris? Well, so I know we'll get to Janet Flanner in a little bit, but... Bring us to Janet now. We're going to kind of Janet and Edith at the same time because Janet Flannery's like unsurpassable line on Edith Wharton was her withdrawal from America was her most American act.

17:19And you just you can't get any Flannery or any better than that. Wharton, I mean, I so last summer I was reading The Custom of the Country. You read it, and it's not that you identify with Undine Sprague. But I was thinking, I have a very nice mother-in-law, and I'm not dealing with HVAC problems in a chateau. But I so identified and tapped into her occasional feeling of, this is not what I signed up for. What are your Wharton feelings? Well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do something that I simply love to do, as listeners to the show will know. I'm going to go to the text. Let me just zoom over and get my tote bag.

18:03Inside this little tote bag, I have my very own copy of A Custom of the Country. So I love that you bring up this book and the figure of Undine Sprague and Wharton in general. I think what I would say is the following, to set up the custom of the country and the passage that I would like to read. In the 19th century, Paris became, for the American, the ultimate symbol of sophistication. America was new. Paris was old. America was aspirational. Paris was the aspiration. Fashions came from Paris. Art came from Paris. Food came from Paris. There was a whole sense that that was where things were done correctly in that a certain class of American person, and especially American woman, really needed to tune into what was going on in Paris if she was going to have any kind of cultural sophistication, which of course, you know, was being used to harden America's own class system.

19:05So here we get Undine Sprague, the heroine of The Custom of the Country, which was published in 1913. She is a young married American woman. Her husband is conveniently still in New York, and she's in Paris, she's living her life, and she's looking out the window in her hotel room. And this is what she says. The scene before her typified to Undine her first real taste of life. How meager and starved the past appeared in comparison with this abundant present. The noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes symbolized the glare and movement of her life. Every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration.

19:45Everything amused her. The long hours of bargaining and debate with dressmakers and jewelers, the crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through a picture show, or the lingering visit to the last new milliner, the afternoon motor rush to some leafy suburb where tea and music and sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine, the whirl home through the bois to dress for dinner and start again on the round of evening diversions, and dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, or the Café de Paris, and the little play at the Cappuccine, or the Varieté, followed, because the night was too lovely, and it was a shame to waste it, by a breathless flight back to the bois, with supper in one of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous progress through the midnight haunts, where ladies were not supposed to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being occasionally taken for their opposites.

20:41That is one long sentence, and you get it all. That is the most deliciously overstuffed sentence. No, I mean, there's something that is so modern about that. I mean, you can kind of equate it to the Instagram reel of, you know, 24 things you absolutely have to do before you leave Paris. It's this sense, you know, which can be both exhilarating and kind of grating that Paris is a playground. Paris is, you know, an all-you-can-eat buffet that was laid out expressly and solely for the delectation of the American visitor. Yeah, it's when I hear that, Alex, what I think of is this kind of, you know, European girl summer.

21:36And to me, it seems like not a day has passed since Wharton wrote that. And you also get the pleasure. This is one of my favorite kind of Parisian subjects. But not only is Andine Sprague, the American come to Paris, she's also the provincial come to the big city. And so there are just like double layers of ecstasy and amazement and the feeling that she has to eat it all up at once. A hundred percent. That's so beautifully said. And of course, you know, as we've previewed, Undine goes on to try to live a more old French life and feels really stultified by it. You know, the other thing that strikes me in that passage I just read, which it ends with a hint of sex.

22:20And I think that also so gets to the heart of the French-American cultural relationship and things that each culture projects onto the other. I mean, to just start with the cliches so that we can explore and perhaps bust them. I think the idea, as I see it, especially from that era, is of the buttoned up American arriving in this city of – it's this libertine city. Right, of sensual – the city of sensual delight. Exactly. Like, my God, they're showing their shoulders. Can you even imagine? There's this sense of, okay, Americans are still doing the square thing, but in France, you can let those inhibitions go.

23:02I mean, one place this immediately takes me is to the amazing figure of Josephine Baker, the performer, the dancer who came to Paris in 1925. She was 19, very young, and she begins to perform in La Revue Negre at the Theater of the Champs-Elysees. And she's a total sensation. She's dancing essentially in the nude, covered scantily. It's a huge spectacle of sex. It's a race spectacle. Josephine Baker is black. She's applauded. She's celebrated. And to me, it's such an interesting combination of French and American gazes, each one looking at the other. the American in this case, personifying a kind of liberation and sexual freedom, and the French supporting her for it.

23:47Is Josephine Baker a touchstone for you at all, Lauren, in the Chronicle of American Life in Paris? Yes. I'm so glad you brought up Josephine Baker. I was lucky enough to be able to go to her induction ceremony into the Pantheon, which is, you know, the national tomb of France's heroes. And she was only the sixth woman. She was the first black woman to be pantheonized. There's a verb. I can't say it. Is it pantheonisée? Pantheonisée. Thank you. I'm just guessing. Sounds great. I went with one of her children. She adopted 14 children from all over the world, called them her rainbow tribe. She was active in the resistance.

24:26You know, she was a voice against racism, against anti-Semitism. A hero, born American, naturalized French. At the same time, what was so interesting about this occasion is that bifurcated gaze endures. It was a political occasion, of course, too. It was in an election season. It was at a moment when French people were questioning the disjuncture between this national creed of universalism, saying race doesn't exist, we're all the same, and their own experiences of racial discrimination. Rukhaya Diallo, who's done a lot of work on this, I remember she wrote, while France is inducting Josephine Baker, cherishing Black Americans while subjecting its own citizens to 20 times more police checks when they're perceived as Arab or Black.

25:14And she pointed out that, you know, while France was swooning over Baker, it was exhibiting her own ancestors, colonized ancestors in human zoos. No, it's fascinating what you say, because I think that so much of the French-American relationship, and I'm speaking really about like the relationship that takes place in the mind and therefore expresses itself in culture, but it is political, very much political too, is about freedom and different ideas of freedom and what freedom might mean or might be able to bring you. I mean, when I think of the classic crew of Americans in Paris, there are a few, but one, of course, is from the lost generation going in those years after the First World War, being able to live cheaply, being able to make art, new ideas, freedom, a kind of intellectual artistic freedom.

26:02Hemingway Fitzgerald, of course, Gertrude Stein, a new way of thinking and seeing coming up through art and literature that's being created in France and coming back to the United States that way. And then if you jump ahead, you know, a very significant American creative experience in Paris was that of James Baldwin, who went to Paris to live when he was 25 years old, and he was finishing Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, which is a New York City novel. He goes to Paris to finish that. He needs to leave the place where the book takes place and where he feels entrapped and set his imagination free.

26:41And like, boy, did he. As soon as he gets to Paris, he just, he writes a storm. I mean, it's amazing to me, honestly, that he was 25, although I guess you do have that courage at 25. He just he goes on a tear and he gives us one of the most, for me, complex texts on American life in Paris, which is Giovanni's Room. Giovanni's Room is a really sad novel. Have you read it recently, Lauren? I have read it, but I haven't read it recently. But going back and thinking about it, what struck me so much was the protagonist of Giovanni's Room is a white American. He's a tall, white, blonde American man.

27:23And what I think is so interesting is, you know, when Baldwin published it, people said to him, how come your main character here is a white guy when you just wrote this incredible novel about race in America? And he said, I couldn't make him black and gay. There wasn't enough room in the novel to tackle both of these subjects. It's so interesting. He writes about Europe. There's a great line from his essay, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American. I prove to my astonishment to be as an American as any Texas GI. And he writes about his life in Europe as a form of preparing for America.