The Lowlife
Then there’s the title, The Lowlife, which to contemporary comprehension is more redolent of the slob, the miscreant or the deviant. Harryboy Boas may shirk obligation and mooch on his in-laws at 45, but in his own words he cuts a dashing figure and takes care of himself. It’s the life as a gambler down Harringay dogs and the whoring down the West End which does it for him, not to mention the odd “shag against the bales” in the factory basement when he’s forced to work, as there’s no shortage of willing would-be wives wheeled out by his in-laws to cure him of it. Nor is Harryboy ignorant, a consummate devourer of Zola on jags that can rival drinking sessions, hours wiled away in bookshops on the Charing Cross Road.
Andrew Stevens hails the reissue of Alexander Baron‘s seminal London classic.
Breathing Parisian Air
Hazan also traces the disappearance of the Carrousel quarter — a jumbled collision of market stalls and shacks, along whose narrow streets rabbits and parrots scrambled, and where poet G érard de Nerval lived in the early 1830s. The area where the quarter stood is now, in Hazan’s words, ‘a dusty steppe between the Louvre pyramid and the Tuileries gardens, crossed by a stream of cars […] and by an underground tunnel whose concrete entrances give a final touch to the whole ensemble.’ Go there now, and experience the difficulty of imagining a labyrinthine atmosphere in such windswept surroundings. Yet this is what Hazan manages to do, and his book is a testament to the power of the historical imagination when fused with the urban environment.
Karl Whitney on Eric Hazan‘s The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps.