By Ty Malcolm
When people ask me my favorite period in history, I usually choose the interwar years, around 1920-1930. This time period brought about a radical shift in a wide range of fields - politics, economics, art, music, literature. In European capitals, artists and writers hopped between endless bars and cafés, exchanging ideas and styles they would use to describe and shape their age.
Paris attracted American expats from the "Lost Generation," like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Earnest Hemingway. Hemingway would go on to write A Moveable Feast about this period in his life, detailing his interactions with the Well-Knowns and Unknowns of 1920s Paris. Armed with my copy of Ein Fest fürs Leben (the German-language title for A Moveable Feast), I set out for my second visit to Paris. No longer tied to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, I could shape the trip into whatever I wanted!
While Hemingway and his family would have needed an entire day on the train to reach Vienna, for me flying was the clear choice. My preference for morning flights (and my financial limitations) conspired to leave me with a 6AM flight, arriving in Paris just after 8AM. The neighborhood of my hotel, located just outside the Luxembourg Gardens, was a very popular area during this time period. It was really interesting to walk down streets and boulevards that I had already read about. I visited the Institute of the Arab World, a multi-level museum off the beaten path. The art was beautiful... I just wish I spoke French so I could read the descriptions!
I spent the rest of the day with some friends, including my roommate from GW who is studying in Paris at Sciences Po for the semester. We walked the Tuileries Gardens and visited the Christmas markets along the Champs-Élysées. We ended the night at a piano bar, in the same neighborhood as a long-gone piano bar where Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time. Because of his respect for Fitzgerald's writing, he had a lot of patience for Fitzgerald's outbursts and episodes. Luckily, my friends and I had a relaxed and drama-free evening.
On the second day, we got a traditional French breakfast at a café near the opera house, and I visited the Museé de l'Armee, France's largest museum of military history. It was a wonderful experience, and the displays were (thankfully) also in English. It was really moving for me to see the French side of the relationship with the United States, throughout our War of Independence and the World Wars.
On my final day, I walked along the Seine to the Museé de L'Orangerie, where I viewed art from the interwar years, an "Age of Anxiety"as the exhibit was called. American artists worked to depict the highs and lows of life in this time period, in both rural and urban settings. Paintings of churning factories were placed next to paintings of dust-bowl fields in Oklahoma, and I got to see American Gothic up close! (With much less of a crowd than I remember pushing and shoving in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre....)
With an afternoon flight back to Vienna, and no hotel room to come back to, I had an hour to spare. I sat down for a "cafe creme" in the Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway's favorite spot to work without being bothered. In one short story, he finds the sanctity broken by a young fan. Whatever patience Hemingway had shown Fitzgerald was long gone by this time, as he implores the stranger to leave him in peace. "A pest like you has plenty of places to go. Why do you have to come here and louse a decent cafe?" After more back-and-forth, Hemingway convinces the young writer to find his own café.
The Closerie des Lilas still has a stool marked for Earnest Hemingway at the bar. But even if I could really go back in time to experience the 1920s, I would know better than to disturb the American writing quietly in that seat. It's true in Vienna as well as Paris - sometimes it's better to find a café of your own!
