Paris

Review: Bastille Day

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Bastille Day, Greg Garrett. Brewster, MA: Raven/Paraclete Press, 2023.

Summary: A brief love affair with a beautiful Muslim woman who he rescues from a suicide leads Cal Jones to come to terms with losses and traumatic memories and to discover that he is not alone.

Brave. And broken. Like James Bond. That is how Calvin Jones describes himself. Jones had been a war correspondent in Iraq where both his father and driver Khalid died in bomb attacks. He blamed himself for Khalid. He fled to the security of working at a local news station. For ten years. Life was good. He was in a serious relationship with Kelly McNair, an interior designer. They looked good together. Sex was pretty good. Then, before his eyes at a Black Lives Matter rally five police die including the officer he was riding with, who he watches bleed out before his eyes. The man had protected him with his life. And all the dreams, never distant, came back.

Rob, a fellow correspondent, sensing the troubled state of a former colleague invites him to join Rob’s news agency in Paris to cover terror attacks in Europe. He arrives the Monday before Bastille Day (July 14) in 2016. While waiting to meet Rob in Harry’s New York Bar he meets a beautiful Muslim woman, Nadia, highly educated but unhappy. In days she will be married to a Saudi millionaire, an arranged marriage that will greatly benefit her family. Except she doesn’t want this marriage and has contemplated suicide, jumping off a bridge into the Seine. As they part, he gives her his business card. Call, if she needs to talk. He doesn’t expect to hear from her. The marriage is in five days.

Out on a run, he receives a text. She is at the bridge, ready to jump. By providence, he is near, and when she jumps, he goes after her, rescues her, and takes her back to his apartment to dry off. And so begins an improbable love affair. He realizes that he never loved Kelly and that he does love this woman and doesn’t want her to marry the millionaire, even as she grapples with the implications for her family, herself, and even other Saudi women, if she refuses to take the burqah.

Amid all this, the Nice truck attack occurs, in which a Muslim, shouting Allahu-akbar (“God is greater”), drove a truck for a mile down a boulevard crowded with Bastille Day celebrants, killing or injuring 500. Cal is sent along with cameraman Ahmed, to cover the attack. It surfaces all the memories, the trauma, the anger. And he takes it out on Nadia, forgetting all he has learned of her and other honorable Muslim friends. Too late, he realizes how he has wronged the woman he loved and desperately tries to communicate. Silence.

He is a wreck. Drinking too much. Barely holding it together. Yet loved. By his Uncle Jack in Texas who would hop on a plane in a moment, talks straight sense. He and his wife pray like crazy. By Rob and his wife, going through a rough patch in their own marriage. By a former military chaplain and by Clarice, the dean of the American cathedral. And by Allison, an attractive lesbian and good friend. They have faith when Cal has lost his. No cliches. Presence. Honesty. Love.

Cal will need it. To face the complicated relationship with his deceased father. His guilt over Khalid. Over the police officer. Over Kelly who he does not love. He is broken and needs to find “brave” within it. Especially with Nadia who he can’t bear to lose despite the obligations she faces.

This is an adult novel from a Christian publisher. There is sex outside of marriage, though not graphically portrayed. There is violence that is graphically described. There is also a quietly compelling Episcopal community (as well as Uncle Jack) who make space to include Cal in their journey as far as he will go. He is both skittish from a fundamentalist youth, and broken from the horrors he has seen, including the horror he sees in himself. We wait to see how brave will he be.

Greg Garrett offers a finely drawn story occuring in the space of a week, peopled with characters we come to love, including Frederick the bartender at Harry’s New York Bar. We consider Christian-Muslim relations, in ways integral to, but never overshadowing, the plot. The dialogue is never trite, but reflects people who care about their lives and those of others, wrestling with fraught choice, life’s ambiguities, and the unanswered questions of suffering and loss. I will be thinking about Cal, Nadia and their friends for awhile…

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

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A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 2010 (Original edition published in 1964).

Summary: Based on the manuscript submitted by Hemingway for publication rather than the posthumously edited version originally published, a memoir of his time in the 1920’s in Paris, his beginnings as a writer, his first marriage, and the circle of writers he worked among, including the previously unpublished “Paris Sketches.“

A Moveable Feast was the last work to come from Ernest Hemingway. He began working on it after recovering two trunks of effects in 1956 that had been stored at the Ritz in Paris in 1928. He wrote his publisher weeks before he took his life (in June 1961) of the difficulties in writing the beginning and ending. The manuscript published posthumously contained edits made after his death that he may not have approved. In 1979, Hemingway’s personal papers were released. In 2009, Hemingway’s grandson Sean Hemingway edited the manuscript as it came from Hemingway, restoring the text as it stood before Hemingway died and also including ten “Paris Sketches” not previously published. His son Patrick also contributed the Foreword.

A Moveable Feast, the title of which is explained in Sean’s “Introduction,” is a memoir of Hemingway’s Paris years. We read of the honeymoon years of his first marriage to Hadley, how joyously and inexpensively they lived, especially after Hemingway gave up journalist writing, and then betting on the horses, both of which took him away from the work of writing. In the Paris Sketches there is a wonderful little sketch of how his son accompanied him to the cafe’s as he wrote, and tried to shame Fitzgerald out of drinking. In another Paris Sketch, “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” Hemingway chronicles the end of his marriage, his inability to love two women, and the remorse he lived in, without recriminations toward Hadley, who eventually, in his words, “married a much finer man.”

He recounts his beginnings as a writer, trying to get his short stories published, and the support of Sylvia Beach, of the original Shakespeare and Company, the venerable Paris bookstore, that served as a gathering place for the ex-pat writers of this period–Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound. He recounts the advice of Stein and his falling out with her, the influence of Joyce, and his relationships with a number of others, not always flattering. Hemingway describes Fitzgerald’s problems with drunkenness and Zelda’s jealousy of his writing as she sinks into her own insanity. Ford Madox Ford is portrayed in one of the Sketches as a liar, and Hemingway describes the disagreeable, acrid odor that emanated from him when he lied. On the other hand “Ezra Pound was always a good friend and he was always doing things for people” and was a great encouragement to the young Hemingway.

In contrast to some of the others, notably Fitzgerald, we see a writer increasingly disciplined, who did not treat those who interrupted his work kindly, often getting up early to his writing. Not only did a number of short stories come out of this time, many lost in a stolen suitcase, but also The Sun Also Rises, his first full-length novel. Sadly, he finished the last revisions in December of 1925 during their ski holiday in Schruns, their last together before they separated and divorced.

There is a bittersweetness about this work, it seems to me. One senses a generation trying to escape into the gaiety of Paris after the spectre of war and the wounds, physical and mental it left on so many. We meet the great talents, often thwarted by their own demons as much as anything. We delight in the decision of Ernest and Hadley to both grow their hair to the same length, which will save them the time-consuming social life with disapproving friends. And we wish it could have lasted. Sadly, Hadley would not share him with Pauline and the honeymoon in Paris ended.

One wonders what Hemingway thought as an older man, struggling with this memoir, in his fourth marriage and suffering from depression. One senses both glimpses of the wonder of the memory of these times, and a sadness, that despite the successes that flowed from this time, that he’d not found what he was looking for, that may have seemed so near in those Parisian years. Perhaps that is why he could write neither beginning nor end. Perhaps this was a time that could not be anchored in time–a moveable feast indeed.

Review: The Greater Journey

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the-greater-journey

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Summary: Vignettes of the waves of Americans who came to Paris as writers, artists, medical students, musicians, politicians, diplomats, and members of the cultured elite, and the profound impact the “City of Light” had on their lives.

Before An American in Paris was a George Gershwin composition, it was a reality for generations of Americans who played culture-shaping roles on both sides of the Atlantic. Historian and biographer David McCullough combines these two genres in a history of the Americans who took the risky journey to Europe, and a “greater journey” culturally and intellectually during their time in Paris.

The book is organized chronologically beginning in the 1820’s and the journeys of James Fenimore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., lawyer and later abolitionist Charles Sumner up through the 1890’s with Henry Adams and sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens. Some lived in Paris just a few years, some, like artist George A.P. Healey for most of their adult lives. All were profoundly touched by Paris. Sumner, living among students from Africa while pursuing studies in the Sorbonne, came to realize these people were his intellectual equals, and became an abolitionist. Later, after being caned by southern congressman Preston Brooks following a fiery anti-slavery speech, Sumner found Paris the one place that could calm his shattered nerves and restore his physical well-being.

Many came to study medicine in Paris including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Henry Bowditch. Most determined of all was Elizabeth Blackwell, who became the first women physician in America. Americans braved the dangers of a typhoid epidemic and learned the most advanced, and yet by modern standards, primitive methods of surgery.

The artists found special inspiration, studying with masters and reproducing the masterpieces they found in the Louvre. Most striking is the story of Samuel F. B. Morse, who painted a giant painting of a room in the Louvre with selected masterpieces. This is the same Morse who eventually invented the telegraph. In a later period, we read the story of Mary Cassatt, who joins the impressionists, and paints striking works of domestic scenes with family members as her subjects. The works of John Singer Sargent won acclaim in Paris, culminating in the controversial Madame X, a life-size portrait of Madame Gautreau, a striking woman with dark hair and deathly white skin. It was in Paris where Augustus Saint Gaudens executed statues of David Farragut and William Sherman and many others that are the most distinctive public sculptures in New York and other cities (including a statue of Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Chicago.

Perhaps most striking for me was the narrative of the courageous efforts of American ambassador Elihu Washburne during the seige of Paris. Washburne stayed throughout, and because of the diary he kept, provided a narrative of his efforts to secret refugees as well as Americans out of the country, intercede on behalf of prisoners, and provide food and other assistance in an increasingly famine-ridden city. One short entry typifies his exertions:

“December 15. 89th day of the siege….Went to the Legation this P.M. at two o’clock. The ante room was filled with poor German women asking aid. I am now giving succor to more than six hundred women and children.”

His presence throughout the siege and fall of Paris, and his diary mark him as one of the very greatest of American ambassadors, and a more than worthy successor to Franklin, John Adams, and Jefferson.

I’ve read some reviews of this book that criticize it for its multitude of characters and problems of continuity. I did not find this a problem because the common theme that runs through was the profound impact Paris had on all of these figures and how so many of their culture-shaping and making contributions trace back to the unique milieu of Paris. In addition, McCullough’s skill in sketching out the unique character of each of these individuals as well as the community they often formed with each other as well as Parisian friends and mentor. One thinks of similar places like New York at certain times, and the artistic communities as diverse as those in Harlem and Greenwich Village. What McCullough does here is trace an influential artistic and intellectual community over the course of nearly a century, through vicissitudes of plague and political upheaval continuing to be a “City of Light” to so many who came to her. I don’t think McCullough answers the question of why, but perhaps that is the mystique of Paris.