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447
And yet it is in Glori a ni's garden tha t Strether rece ives "the deepest
intell ectual sounding to whi ch he had eve r been exposed ." He won–
ders wha t it is tha t he's fee ling. "Was it the mos t spec ial fl a re, un–
equall ed , supreme, o f the aes thetic torch , li ghting tha t wondrous
world for eve r , o r was it , a bove all , the long, stra ight sha ft sunk by a
personal ac uteness tha t life had seasoned to steel?" J ames rushes on
to desc ribe the o ther guests; the plot moves a long. In the end
Strether goes back to America , but the vi sit , the a ft ernoon - these
redound a nd cha nge hi s view of life .
One continues to hear , as late as the 1950s , of the revelations
Pari s can provide . The GI s who arrived in the city a t the end o f
World Wa r
II ,
a nd the ma ny stude nts who came a few years a fter ,
oft en on the G I Bill , may have been the las t to experi ence something
like J ames's "signs a nd tokens," his "aestheti c torch ." Picasso , a ft er
welcomin g the G Is, pretty much left Paris for good , but one could
still mee t Bra ncusi a nd Gi acometti , a nd study with Leger , whil e
scraping by on almost nothing. "Peace and Paris in the springtime of
our lives!" - tha t's how the America n sculptor Sidney Ge ist recall s
the fifti es in the introducti on to a 1986 exhibition of "American Ar–
tists in Paris" at the tiny Denise Cade Gallery in New York City.
Geist's coupl e o f pages a re a rush of images:
The Louvre, the Se ine, Notre Dame , Montparn asse, Montmar–
tre, Saint-Ge rma in
I
The little ho tels a nd
baraques
where we li ved
and worked . ..
Existentialisme.
Juli ette G reco, Gera rd Philipe.
Dancing into the dawn on
QuatorzeJ uillet,
the smell of bread bak–
ing. It was all delicious then a nd is still pungent in memory .
Arrivin g back in the New York of the 1980s a fter the plane trip
from Paris, the shock o f return does n't take hold until the taxi rolls
onto the da rk , overburdened streets of M a nha tta n. The syncopated
traffi c lights a nd the hundreds of neon signs a re still today something
noteworthy, a ft er the rela tive qui et of central Pari s. Zooming by,
you can understa nd wha t fift y or sixty years ago a ttracted Leger and
Mondri a n to New York - you feel anew the bumpy rhythms of the
city's ni ghts. Colette, giving a radio talk to Ameri can audiences in
the month s before Pa ri s fell to the Naz is, recall ed her visit to New
York. "At thi s moment , Ameri ca is glittering in tha t multicolored
evening gla re I once glimpsed on a sho rt trip to ew Yo rk , the let–
ters of fire, the arrows, the qui ve ring garl a nds o f the adve rti sements,
the cinemas, the bi g stores. But here , it is two o'clock in the morn–
ing, ni ghttime, wa rtime . ... "
