By Tomoé Hill.
Jean Follain, Paris 1935, translated by Kathleen Shields (CB Editions, 2024)
Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 occupies a very particular niche in literature, one that can be best described as the Parisian diorama: offering both intimate and panoramic views of the city and inhabitants through its daily happenings, this moveable feast adapts to whatever form or story it finds itself in but is immediately recognisable on its appearance, no matter how brief. The city diorama in literature is an extended universe; one only has to read August Endell or Franz Hessel on Berlin, Joseph Roth in The White Cities, his exploration of not just Paris, but also the Midi, or Joseph Brodsky on Venice in Watermark, to name a few. But Paris remains the star within the constellation of dioramic cities, forever changing but maintaining something nearly indescribable, the Parisian version of a Platonic city-form. I cannot articulate this beyond remarking on my own life in London over the years. I have changed, the city has changed, its people have changed; at the same time, the city remains the same inscrutable entity. It is akin to an animal recognising the scent of a mate.
The great contradictory charm of this is to understand that to be Parisian is to be any number of things; including not Parisian, or even French. This does not negate, but adds to the sense one is bound to the city. Indeed, at times one can and should be negative about it. Such feelings are necessary: they frustrate and reinforce emotions like partners caught up in a dance. In Etel Adnan’s Paris, When It’s Naked, the immigrant’s Paris is always one worry away from expulsion, but there is still pride in being there, while in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face, Simeon’s initial adoration of a Paris accepting of his skin colour is questioned on witnessing the treatment of Algerians as he would be back home in the United States. One can also be enraptured by the city and soon realise the observer is not beyond becoming ensnared in too-real life; James Baldwin, recounting the story of finding himself in a Parisian jail cell over a borrowed hotel sheet in his essay ‘Equal in Paris’, writes:
I considered the French an ancient, intelligent, and cultured race, which indeed they are. I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue.
And of course Mavis Gallant documents the events of May 1968 in Paris Notebooks, describing not only the movements of the students, but how this strange period captures her dreams and possesses her neighbours with a sense of unease in their whispers of food shortages which do not exist.
The ideal Parisian diorama (indeed, regardless of city) is shaded in chiaroscuro rather than flooded in incessant light. There is nothing that draws the curious to its streets again and again as much as the hesitation of never knowing how one will be captured at any moment in memory. Julian Green’s own diorama Paris shows this by contrasting his memories and black-and-white photos of pre- and post-war Paris. Jean-Paul Clébert’s memoir Paris Vagabond does so by way of the Paris of the homeless (in Clébert’s case, a deliberate choice) against the one of those with more fixed lives, something which Violette Leduc does as well by revealing the elegant pathos of her protagonist’s necessarily fantasy-embellished survival in the novella The Lady and the Little Fox Fur.
Within Follain’s diorama, thirty-two individual scenes are divided not only by the usual places (‘Department Stores’, ‘Cemeteries’, ‘The Left Bank’), but people (‘Girls’, ‘Women’) as well as the more abstract (‘Solitude’, ‘Paris Spirits’, ‘The Elements’). They do not trace the terrain of a standard map but one where the eye and the mind lead each other gloriously astray with no fear of becoming lost. The opening scene ‘Earth and Sky’ functions uniquely as a memento mori. It rejects the idea of the eternal city with a reminder that stone and buildings and people change and disappear, and as great as Paris is, is also only memorable as the regard we place upon what will outlast it, the natural world. Both sober and soaring, it serves to encourage the reader, and one imagines Follain himself, to take in and record the city as if they were both the first and the last images.
It becomes apparent that the city is time captured all at once in past, present, and future. What Follain knows is that all life has already occurred, and he only presents it to the reader, the observer of this grand display within his diorama. His omniscient gaze takes in the slow degradation of people and material by lives measured by routine and upset. The ‘click of ivory balls on smooth billiard tables’ and the fading red plush of theatre seats mark the inevitable passing of minutes and days, while ‘deep inside cafés and in small dark hotels, people dream out loud’. Life and buildings alike wish to, but cannot escape, the inevitability of its destruction. Lives are observed but also speculated upon, less a fiction than an ability to see into the heart of the Parisian’s fears and desires, projected as they will be onto wine glasses and ribbons, hats and even the cities beyond:
His window looks out over the Seine. In his feverish state his memories are like poisonous flowers, magnified, amplified and disturbing as they merge into Marseilles or Rouen.
There is a pervading sensuality to Follain’s Paris. It is not steeped in sex in the way of J-K Huysmans’ Parisian Sketches, with its vivid and overly familiar descriptions of the Folies Bergère, dressmaker’s busts, and surprisingly, roast meat. If Paris 1935 lusts, it is with an elegance that stands in intimate juxtaposition to the most unlikely events: ‘We were eating when the riot broke out and we let the melting pear juice trickle down our throats’. There is violence and appetite, and neither are far from each other in the way death shadows life. The desire which emerges from these contrasts is all the more powerful for it, such as in the memories of dead lovers in the minds of old men:
Fresh gilding in the cafés and steamy roses perversely tucked into black stockings fuelled the artistic and literary dreams of a thousand and one nights whose fragile secrets are now lost.
Suddenly the metallic scents of gold leaf and sweat, high and sweet wilting roses pressed against overheated flesh crowd the reader’s mind like a cuckoo in the memory. This is not our Paris, but it is given to us as if it were.
Kathleen Shields’ translation captures an important aspect of the Parisian diorama, that of the rhythm of prose. It is never enough to merely describe, no matter how detailed. In fragments of lines such as ‘girls with small ears and vast sad cinemas’, and ‘women who sigh as they lace up their high boots but no longer tremble when regiments go by’ the city sings and cries, whispers and moans, layering its longings and memories like masonry.
What makes this such a jewel-like niche within literature is the sense we are being told part of an epic more than travelogue as we are guided through the city. Somewhere, above the buildings and parks, looking in through windows at lovers and quarrels, is someone who views every scenario with an innate understanding that bad and good, Paris simply would not be without each exposed human fragment. Their telling will be bound with the next person’s telling, and the next throughout time to create a complete but ever-changing narrative of Paris.
At the end of the book are a few pages of ‘Preliminary Notes’, which contain a throwaway but extraordinary line: ‘All the people who truly love Paris eventually find their guiding star’. If it is true that we are made of stardust, then Follain spoke truly of and to us when he wrote, ‘this is what Paris teaches us: they are here to last, the earth and the sky’.
Read an interview with Tomoé Hill here.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Tomoé Hill‘s writing has appeared or will be forthcoming in places such as The Spectator, Asymptote, Vestoj, The Quietus, MAP Magazine, and The London Magazine. She is the author of Songs for Olympia, a response to The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat by Michel Leiris. Twitter/X: @CuriosoTheGreat
