BOOKS
505
Feast"? Carpenter's choice of a title only serves to underline the
twice-told quality of this anecdotal account of what was, granted,
an anecdotal event, the establishment of an American colony on
the Left Bank in the decade following the First World War.
For they had come to write, or to learn to write, and to pub–
lish when possible, in a town which promised fun and cheap
drinks. When they departed they left almost nothing behind
them; the reader (not to speak of the writer) of any history of the
Lost Generation must be struck by the discovery that one must
leave Paris in order to learn something about it, for the raw mate–
rials are in library stacks and manuscript collections back home
in the States. The present reviewer is keenly aware of this para–
dox, for he has been asked more than once to write about the
Americans of Paris
from
Paris, and has had to say that it cannot
be done. Humphrey Carpenter tells us that he worked in Paris
when not at the Bodleian Library near his Oxford home; one
wonders why. For the best of the Lost seemed to have put all of
their Paris into their memoirs, or into gushy first-time-tourist let–
ters home.
Still, Carpenter brings to this shopworn subject something it
lacked-clean style. He also has the advantage of distance, both
in historical time and in his quality of British subject; he is a
published and praised biographer (of
W.H .
Auden ,
J.R.R.
Tolkien); surely no more elegant and orderly account of the sub–
ject will be published, or should even be necessary. To help make
this the definitive account, its author has provided absorbing if not
quite relevant historical background on the association of
Americans with Paris from the time of Benjamin Franklin , to–
gether with some general information on the Latin Quarter as
the French lived in it before the invasion of the Americans. He
introduces Henry James, who was attracted to Paris by "the sense
of being in a denser civilization than our own ." James came and
went-to England, which was more like what he knew. "Life at
home has the compensation that there you are a part of the civi–
lization," explained James, "whereas here [in Paris] you are out–
side it. It's a choice of advantages." Unlike the Americans of the
between-the-wars decades, James actually cared about French
culture and French authors, and sought them out. The
Americans of the 1920s were drawn less by denser civilization
than by cheaper francs.
