A PRESSING, BLOODY JOY
WHY I LOVE PARIS - AS DID EDITH WHARTON, JAMES BALDWIN, AND PRESTON STURGES
(Above: Edith Wharton’s passport photo.)
“Je l’ai dans mon sang,” wrote Edith Wharton in her journal about her need to reside in Paris claiming the city itself resided in her blood. Intellect is another kind of tender here, its tender-ness not based on legality (though they are a bureaucratic bunch) but the emancipating emendation of a carefully considered cafe table colloquy. And yet one does love the place sensually. It is voluptuous, zaftig in its beauty - womanly in its bosomy boulevards, yet manly in the sinewy biceps of its byways, the nomenclature of its cartography, like its language’s nouns, having aspects of the sexes without being driven by gender. It is a mystifying mix, an atmospheric perfect party list put together by the ghosts of Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso and Marcel Proust and Zelda Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker and Jean Cocteau and Langston Hughes and Andre Gide and Cole Porter vetted by the cigar-smoking Bricktop so it can have the uncanny piquancy of her Pigalle nightclub on a really good night when Cafe Society converged on it already acknowledging its ghostliness because too daringly clever for its age, too clued-in, its members knew in its legend that its ghastlinesses would be forgotten. Still both ghastly and ghostly and daring and clever and clued-in with cafes filled with society’s striving strata, there is a musk to it all - l'odeur de l'ardeur - so much so that it is the only place I’ve ever encountered where the light, filtered, filigreed, could be described as musky in its own magnificence which is separate from the city’s even as it languishes all along its bosoms and sinews as if having searched the world for the spot that deserved to be stylishly draped in its splendor it gratefully just went ahead and drooped here instead when it spotted Paris because even it, the light, falling softly, fell hard for it after falling for itself in its reflection in the river that runs through it. Falling for yourself - a self that can feel in other places estranged in order for you to go along to get along - is the reason we fall for Paris. It gives our selves agency. It has a history of it. It is an extremely proper place - preeningly precise - and at the same time a refuge for outliers who can no longer lie about who they - we - really are. It can be curiously vexed about itself yet does deign to confess it has been designed, assuredly, for pleasure. It is transgressive, a fabulist’s bivouac, a sharpened dull arrow in equality’s quiver, bountiful, fraternal, artful, liberating, purposefully wrong before it decides to be righteously right. It is the smell of Gertrude Stein on Edith Wharton’s breath.
(Above: William Morton Fullerton in a portrait from his youth - circa 1887 when he was 22 - before he became The Times correspondent in Paris and the lover of Edith Wharton, among other men and women of the day, including, some speculate, Wharton’s great friend, Henry James, who introduced them. Indeed, James and Wharton paid off the woman who blackmailed Fullerton threatening to expose his homosexual past. I am currently reading The New Life, the recent novel by Tom Crewe, and although the background of the character Frank Feaver does not match Fullerton (he sets, rather pointedly, the type for writers), the physical description certainly does. Moreover, aesthetic poet John Gray (and ultimately priest), on whom Oscar Wilde, another “acquaintance” of Fullerton, based, it is often suggested, his character Dorian Gray, figures prominently in The New Life and was also one of Fullerton’s many associates. George Bernard Shaw referred to Gray as “the most abject of Wilde’s disciples,” i.e. part of his gay posse. Fullerton was a kind of connective literary Lothario finely threaded through the fin de siècle. The photo, in fact, is signed in his hand to another gay man of the day, the Parisian poet and wealthy arts patron, Marc-André Raffalovich, who had a lifelong relationship with Gray.)
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