Meet Me in Saint-Denis
The Left Bank still draws bookloving pilgrims to Paris, but today’s writers find their stories beyond the boulevard Périphérique.
I recently moved to Paris, starting a job just outside the city teaching English at a lycée, but, frankly, the reason I’m here is to write. For Ernest Hemingway, Paris is “the town best organised for a writer to write in that there is.” But Hemingway lived on la Rive Gauche, near the boulevards Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, in a time when even a poor journalist–writer could make do living in the quarter, by wearing sweatshirts as underwear to save money on heating.
If you tell a Parisian that you’re living in Saint-Denis, they’ll do their best to hide their horror with a polite “D’accord, c’est bon.”
But that was the twenties. Today, poor writers like me live in areas like Saint-Denis, les banlieues, or suburbs, outside the city’s boulevard Périphérique. Saint-Denis, one such commune in Paris’s north, is home to the city’s immigrants from the Maghreb, West Africa and Turkey; a few old communists; students; and, now, me.
And this is not the Paris of Hemingway. There are no secondhand bookstalls along the Seine. There are no picturesque views of the Notre Dame as you write from a brasserie over a café crème, followed by a dozen oysters washed down with some fine, provincial wine. There are no late night promenades down lamplit boulevards, or stolen kisses in cobblestoned alleyways. No Fitzgeralds, Fords, Pounds, Joyces, Steins or Hemingways here. Saint-Denis is the kind of place where taxi drivers refuse to go after dark (spawning a black market taxi service, which involves entrepreneurial residents who own cars offering to pick you up from central Paris for a fee). If you tell a Parisian that Saint-Denis is where you’re living, they’ll do their best to hide their initial and instinctive horror with a polite “D’accord, c’est bon.”
Saint Denis was the first bishop of Paris, who was beheaded for refusing to acknowledge the divinity of the Roman Emperor and for his enthusiastic conversion of many local pagans to Christianity. He was beheaded on the area’s highest hill (today Montmarte, its name derived from “mountain of martyrs”) and, the legend goes, Denis then picked up his head, walked 6,000 paces preaching a sermon of repentance, and finally dropped dead. The place where Denis fell is where the Gothic cathedral of Basilique de Saint Denis stands today, from which the surrounding suburb of Saint-Denis takes its name.
The cathedral is considered to be the oldest Gothic church in the world and is the burial site of almost every king of France. Yet beyond the church, it’s hideous concrete monoliths — les HLM, or public housing — that dominate the landscape, everywhere around the main square and in the suburb. They sit alongside much more traditional Parisian apartment buildings, like the kind one might find in the nearby 18th or 19th arrondissements, with their wrought-iron balconies and ostentatious embellishments, but with peeling paint, shabby, unkempt.
As you walk from the Métro station to my apartment, down the rue de la République, you run a gauntlet of street vendors, peddling the latest make of iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. If you manage to get through with your phone and wallet still in your pocket, you reach my street, where on the corner you pass the men sitting outside smoking their shisha, the artificial strawberry or apple aroma wafting through the air. Once you reach my building, you ascend two flights of stairs until you reach my apartment, nestled between apartments of families, each with its own set of screaming toddlers.
To see Shakespeare and Company, the old bookstore of American expat Sylvia Beach, favourite haunt of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and others of their generation, was something akin to a pilgrimage.
This was not what I had in mind when moving here. After being here for two weeks, I decided I needed to find the other Paris, Hemingway’s Paris, Hugo’s Paris — hell, even Carrie Bradshaw’s Paris. I needed to be inspired. So with that in mind, I took the train to Shakespeare and Company.
Counting the stops to Odéon Métro station once I was on Paris’s line 10, I felt the kind of anticipation that thousands of writers, bibliophiles and literary tourists must have felt making this trip. To see Shakespeare and Company, the old bookstore of American expat Sylvia Beach, favourite haunt of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and others of their generation, was something akin to a pilgrimage.
I knew that Beach’s original bookstore, at number 12, rue de l’Odéon, no longer existed. It was closed during the German Occupation of Paris in 1940, because, as rumour goes, Beach refused to sell the last copy of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. But I wanted to walk those streets anyway. I wanted to feel the ghosts of that literary past, and perhaps let them give me the inspiration that I craved to write, write, write. Finally arriving at Odéon, I bounded up the steps exiting the underground station, taking them two at a time, and was amazed by what I had stepped into. I realised after a moment that, as though I were in a film, I was spinning around, soaking it all in, mouth agape. I was standing on the boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris’s chic 6th arrondissement. Instead of fried chicken shops, you had bistros and brasseries. Instead of fake Lacoste outlets, you had designer boutiques. Instead of imposing HLM, you had Haussmann-era apartment blocks, a wide boulevard leading to the Jardin du Luxembourg on the opposite corner. I was conscious of looking too much like a tourist but I couldn’t stop spinning.
I crossed the road and walked down a side street, marvelling at the people, their dogs, their apartments. I walked past a chocolaterie, with its immaculately presented window display, of macarons and its tiny, individually wrapped chocolates. It was about midday, but already people sitting outside the restaurants where drinking wine and smoking, as they ate their plâts du jour. Back at home, I grew up in a family of four kids, where eating was a race to get as much food inside you before the others so you could have seconds. Yet these Parisians, the way they ate was to cut off a small portion of food, place it on their fork, take the knife to add a smear of sauce, place the morsel in their mouth, chew, swallow. Then they would continue their animated conversation.
After a short time, I came to rue de l’Odéon. It was a small street that started with a square at one end and finished with the Théâtre de l’Odeon at the other. The theatre is a stunning neoclassical structure, its present form opened in 1819. I walked down the street, towards the theatre, picking up the pace, eagerly noting the building numbers as I walked past them. The street was full of different bookshops, some secondhand, some general, some esoteric. I wondered if perhaps Beach’s old premises were now occupied by another bookstore.
But it wasn’t there. Perhaps there was a mistake. Had I walked too far? I looked around to see if perhaps there was another number 12. There wasn’t. This was it: a bland apartment building with an unmarked store beneath. What would have been the bookstore where Hemingway borrowed books, that stocked banned titles from Joyce and DH Lawrence, where writers had their offices, slept and lived, was now a banal clothing store. The only thing hinting at this address’s former glory was a small plaque on the second story reading: “En 1922, dans cette maison, M.elle Sylvia Beach publia ‘Ulysses’ de James Joyce.” That’s it.
I knew that there was another bookstore, around the corner on the rue de la Bûcherie, opened well after Beach’s store had closed, that called itself Shakespeare and Company, as an homage to the original store. I decided that perhaps I could find my ghosts of Paris’s literary past there. That feeling of excitement and anticipation started to build once more, as the Notre Dame cathedral came into full view and I crossed the Place Saint-Michel, with its sculpture of the archangel between two dragons spurting water into the fountain.
But Paris this morning was quickly becoming a city of disappointments. The new bookstore existed but it was full of tourists, taking pictures, posing with books outside the shop front, pretending to read them with mock concentration. I would hope that if there were any ghosts once here, that they’ve found a quieter bookstore to haunt for eternity.
But being the kind of person who can’t walk past a bookstore without picking something up, I got a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his time in Paris. I couldn’t bear to be in that shop for longer than I needed to, so after getting out as soon as I had found my book and paid, I sat in the nearby square René-Viviani, named after the French socialist prime minister during the first year of the First World War. The sun was uncharacteristically warm for early October, so I took advantage of it and sat in that square until I finished Hemingway’s book. On the last page, Hemingway writes: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.”
So I made my way back to Saint-Denis, with its maghrebiens, its black market taxi drivers, its concrete HLM, its crowded markets and its screaming toddlers. But this is also the Saint-Denis that has a Jean Jaurès antiwar quote on a permanent billboard in the main square. It’s where such figures as Badiou, Deleuze, and Foucault have lectured at the local university, one that continued to be occupied by student radicals even after the events of May 1968. Sure, I’ll never have Hemingway’s Paris. But this will be my Paris. And this is the Paris that I will write.
