Paris in Canadian Literature

Astrid M. Fellner “At Last Lost in Paris”: A Canadian View on the Avant-Garde Paris of the 1920s Introduction: Paris in Canadian Literature Rarely has a time and place so captured the imagination as the Paris of the 1920s. In Canadian literature, John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) has probably offered the most popular description of expatriate life in Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, the young Glassco arrived in Paris from Montreal and spent three wild years in this city. His book is a detailed memoir à clef of his years among the members of the Haute Bohème of those days, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Kay Boyle. The Paris of the 1920s is also the focus of Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris (1963), a memoir of his summer in Paris in 1929. Callaghan famously knocked out his friend and mentor Hemingway during a friendly boxing match while F. Scott Fitzgerald served as referee. His autobiographical reminiscence gives insight into the novelist’s relationship with the Paris expatriates and his friendships with the leading writers of that day. The Paris of these Canadian writers largely corresponds to the presentation of the Paris of the 1920s in U.S. American literature.1 Clearly in the expatriate writings by North American writers, Paris is not the Paris of the occasional tourist; it is rather the city that bears “an emotional resonance for the foreigner who has settled in” (Pizer 141). There is a level of intimacy between artist and place – Donald Pizer calls it the “Paris moment” (141) – which gave rise to literary creativity. As he states, “[i]t is this engaging and significant interplay between artist, place, and innovative self-reflexive forms that constitutes the most distinctive contribution of expatriate writing to the literary movement we have come to call high modernism” (143). This emotional investment in Paris continues to characterize many Canadian writings. While Francophone Canadian writers still have to fight the stereotype of 1 As Russell Brown states, the narratives by Callaghan and Glassco wrote themselves “into the larger and already-told story of Paris” by U.S. American writers (88). By retelling stories previously constellated around Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and others, these two Cana- dian writers, however, reshaped the U.S. American myth of 1920s Paris “by offering an al- ternative Canadian-in-Paris narrative that inserts [their] presence into a history in which Ca- nadians had previously been invisible” (86). 312 Astrid M. Fellner Quebec being “a cultural province of France” (Parris 431) and therefore often have an ambivalent relationship with Paris, a number of prominent Anglo- phone writers have found in Paris a setting and source of inspiration for their creative works.2 In fact, many Canadian writers who emerged in the past thirty years have found the experience of expatriation necessary in order to achieve recognition at home. Paris, for instance, has seduced and inspired Mavis Gallant, who moved to Paris in the 1950s and whose short story collection The Other Paris (1956) is populated by alienated expatriates and disillusioned characters in the 1950s whose depictions shatter the illusion of Europe’s most-dreamed-of-city. Similarly, Gallant’s Paris Stories (2002) focuses on expatriates in Paris, and one could say that her Paris stories derive much of their signifying power from the historical avant-garde writings of the Paris of the 1920s. To Nancy Huston, another prominent Anglophone Canadian writer who now resides in Paris, the figure of the expatriate is part of the cultural script of Paris. Paris, according to this Calgary-born writer, is a city that is densely populated with “monolingual impatriates” (26). As Huston explains, impatriates are the opposite of expatriates: they experience cultural stability and have a firm concept of a mother tongue. In Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self (2002), her self-translation of Nord Perdu (a phrase which in French means to lose the north as on a compass), Huston examines the life and language of cultural exile, describing herself as being divided in two (91). But while the foreignness of the expatriate brings about a double consciousness which might be perceived as painful, it also allows for an “acute awareness of language” (31), offering a privileged position for self-reflection. This sense of double consciousness can also be felt in the work of another contemporary Canadian writer – Gail Scott. Unlike Huston, Scott, however, never became an expatriate. In her novel My Paris (1999), she evokes the Paris of the 1920s and deals with expatriate experiences, but she clearly goes beyond the familiar engagement of the mythic Paris. A Montreal feminist who was born in Ottawa and grew up in a bilingual community in Ontario, Scott, contrary to Huston, does not translate her writings from one language into another. Instead, she “chooses to write in one mixed language that re- flects her double consciousness” as an Anglophone writer in Quebec (Simon, Translating Montreal 128, emphasis in the original). Conspicuously, Scott employs the figures of the foreigner and the expatriate to refer to the multi- lingual realities of Montreal, a city which, following Sherry Simon, can be 2 For a detailed discussion of the difficult relation between Francophone Canadian and Que- bec literature, see David Parris’s article “When French-Canadian Literature Freed Itself From the Tutelage of Paris”. .

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