Yet travel writers also dream of occasionally breaking out from the truth and using their knowledge of people, culture and place as the background for the enjoyment and conflicts of fictional character. Some then go on to produce stories and novels of great seriousness and psychological drama. Others prefer a lighter touch, as Corinne does in her new novel French Ghost, a romantic cozy mystery published in January 2022 by The Wild Rose Press.

French Ghost is the first of a three-part series featuring Melody Layne, an American ghost writer who gets stranded in Paris when the over-sexed, unloved French movie star who hired her to ghostwrite his memoir accidentally (or not) drowns before the interviews begin. A tall, dark and sexy Spaniard then offers her an alternative book contract, and more, leading Melody on a quest for truth and near-truth that leads her throughout Paris as well as to Rouen, Vichy, Bordeaux, Dijon and Cannes, with lots of Chardonnay, pains au chocolat, fine dining and some steamy romance along the way.

Corinne previously published Temporary Engagement, a New York-based romance published under the penname Cairenn Lawless.

Gary Lee Kraut interviewed Corinne LaBalme about her new book and the place of travel and travel writing in her novels.

What does your travel writing have in common with the romance and cozy mystery that you also write? And how does the former feed into the latter?

Travel writing is like a treasure hunt. It’s a quest, and what’s more romantic and mysterious than the time-honored quest narrative? Even if the quest of the editorial assignment can be as prosaic as hunting for “The Five Best Hotel Breakfasts in Bordeaux,” it still qualifies as a quest. Who knows what’s hiding in that innocent-looking jar of razzleberry jelly? Usually, it’s just razzleberries, but you’re there, on the scene, to investigate that jam, taste it, and report on it.

Until the 21st century made fake news into a dangerous art form, telling the truth (or aiming to tell the truth) has been the cornerstone of journalism. It’s always been my goal, even when doing recon for an article about crepes in Paris.

That’s why fiction is such a relief. You’re no longer constrained by facts. Fiction isn’t about what happened, it’s about the infinite possibilities of what might have happened. In French Ghost I was able to take facts that I’ve gleaned as a travel writer and use them as the background or décor for the fictional story that takes place in France.

French Ghost mostly takes place in Paris, but Melody Layne becomes quite the traveler over her first few months in Paris. She goes to Rouen, Vichy, Cannes, Bordeaux and Dijon. Why did you choose those cities in particular?

I’ve spent years as a travel writer, freelancing for the New York Times, for the luxury destination newsletter La Belle France, and now for the very congenial France Revisited. These are all cities that I’ve visited and written about. Paris is where I live but during lockdown, I used this book to “virtually” revisit so many French towns that I’ve written about for magazines. I missed them!

I especially wanted to highlight Vichy in this book. It’s had a very bad rep since WWII when it was the seat of the Pétain government but the town is really worth a visit. Vichy has been a resort for over 2,000 years (the Roman legions were especially fond of its healing waters) and the royals and uber-rich riff-raff who built stately pleasure domes around the spa spared no costs in their efforts to out-do the tsars next door. The main avenues are flanked by a delightfully flamboyant medley of overblown pagodas, ginger-breaded castles, Moorish haciendas, Gothic gargoyles and turreted fortresses.

Yes, I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the Napoleon III Festival in Vichy and of the Cannes Film Festival ? Were they as fun to write as they were to read?

I didn’t get to attend the festival in Vichy on my last trip there—wrong season—but there were posters and reminders about it everywhere. The festival was perfect for my purposes: I wanted Melody to preen in fancy dress and give history professor Carlos an opportunity to display his knowledge of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie.

I also enjoyed writing about the Cannes Film Festival which, let’s face it, is just a snotty trade fair with celebs walking around in borrowed evening gowns in broad daylight. Taneesha, my character who freelances for a Hollywood studio, is based on a Belgian friend who babysits hapless American movie stars in France. And I really enjoyed writing about Charlene Trent, the booze-challenged, silicon-enhanced B-movie actress who’s in Cannes to promote Beach Zombies III. Charlene is crude, class-less, but she’s a gas.

Did you have to do much additional research for French Ghost beyond what you already knew?

I love research, but books 1 and 2 of this trilogy treat facets of French life—food, fashion, cinema—that I know quite well. However, for Book 3, I am definitely all over the internet map trying to figure out what makes an influencer hot.

Will Melody continue to introduce readers to various regions and aspects of France in books 2 and 3? Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about them?

Melody’s big trips in Book 2 take her to Switzerland, specifically Vevey and Geneva. She does something on the shores of Lac Leman that I did myself many years ago. I guess I inspired myself on that little episode.

Your protagonist occasionally pals around with a well-known food writer who seems to be dining out every day, everything from high gastronomy to fancy pizza. Is she based on anyone you know? Do you enjoy restaurant writing?

Jenna Bardet, the food writer, is based on little old moi. While I was writing for La Belle France, I spent two weeks on the road each month reporting on hotels and restaurants and the other two weeks writing about those experiences. I really enjoyed it at the time, but now I’m rather glad to be writing about something other than pea soup and grilled grouse. I’ve also become a bit too vegetarian to do that job well anymore.

Do you like Chardonnay and pains au chocolat as much as Melody Layne does?

Yes on Chardonnay. No on the pains au chocolat. I’ve never been wild about French breakfast pastry. Correction: I used to like croissants. Years ago, the bakeries sold two kinds of croissant: curled-up ones baked with lard and straight ones (more expensive) baked with butter. The ones made with lard were much lighter and fluffier but they went out of style. Those lard croissants, if I could taste one now, would be my personal Proustian madeleine.

The Wild Rose Press will be publishing another romance of yours outside of this series. Does it take place in France?

Summer People, which will hopefully on the bookshelves by July, is a Cape Cod mystery-romance that takes place in Brewster, Massachusetts. Like my fictional writing about France, those are places that I know well since I spent most of my childhood vocations on Cape Cod. The protagonist, an antique collector who’s got a statue with some rather murky provenance at her gallery, doesn’t much care for Europe. She’s got a French-Canadian accent, and a rude concierge at a Monte Carlo hotel once made fun of it. That woman sure does hold a grudge.

French Ghost by Corinne LaBalme, available in ebook and paperback. Published by The Wild Rose Press. Available from your preferred online booksellers and select bookshops.
Temporary Engagement by Cairenn Lawless (aka Corinne LaBalme), available in ebook and paperback on Amazon, on ebook only on Barnes and Noble and Kobo.
Corinne LaBalme’s numerous contributions to France Revisited can be found here, with more on the way.

© 2022, France Revisited.

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The Missouri-born entertainer, resistance fighter and civil rights activist arrived in Paris in 1925 and soon found fame in France and internationally. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1937, losing her American citizenship in the process (while also gaining an accent on the e in her first name).

The Pantheon, a major monument of the 18th-century, was built as a church then came to serve as the secular tomb of the great men and, more recently, women of France.

The first Black woman and first U.S.-born individual to be “Pantheonized,” Josephine Baker joins statesmen, scientists, authors, resistance leaders, economists, architects, generals, philosophers and others who, at the time of their induction, were held to represent exemplary values of France. Since 1958, individuals have been selected for Pantheonization by decision of the president.

While Baker’s remains are buried in Monaco, her presence in the Pantheon is marked by a cenotaph bearing her name and containing soil from places where she lived: the United States, France, Monaco).

Follow the steps to Joséphine Baker’s cenotaph in vault 13 of the crypt of the Pantheon in this video:

Video and text by Gary Lee Kraut. © 2021. All rights reserved.
Music: Opening of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue performed by George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman. Creative Commons.

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… her streets were cold and gray. It was March 1952. My husband had been recalled for the Korean War and sent to France as part of a bomber wing Eisenhower promised NATO in the early days of the Cold War.

Twenty-four years old at the time, married almost a year, I arrived in the city of my dreams ready to be seduced by her warmth and historic charm. Expecting beauty and light in a city with echoes of Victor Hugo, Degas and Maurice Chevalier, we got somber darkness and bone chilling weather. We drove through grim streets, rundown houses on either side, to our hotel, a turn-of-the-century hostelry with a shabby lobby and a cage elevator. My husband had selected the one-star Napoleon Bonaparte, partly for its price, 3500 francs (about $10) for a double room, and partly for its view. The 1952 Michelin indicated that it overlooked the Arc de Triomphe. Obviously, M. Michelin had made his notes on a clear day. On this day, fog and drizzle prevented us from seeing more than an outline of that venerable monument or anything else. Looking out the hotel window, my only thought was: what was all the fuss about? I had traveled thousands of miles on the North Atlantic in February, retching all the way, to celebrate our first anniversary in this renowned citadel of love. For this? In 1952, my feminism had yet fully to emerge. Tired and disappointed, I had only one recourse. I burst into tears.

Luckily, my husband, who was also let down at his first view of Paris, had been trained for bravery in World War II. In his if-we-have-to-be-in-Paris-for-our-first-anniversary-let’s-make-the-best-of-it voice, he said, ”Let’s go out to dinner.”

We did, and even before we had our first sip of French champagne and realized it wasn’t imported, the joy of being together, wherever, prevailed. In the remaining three or four days of that first stay, although the dreary weather didn’t lift, our spirits did, and despite the gloom we started to feel some of the magnetism Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein must have felt.

Notwithstanding the gloomy weather, it was heartbreakingly apparent France had still not gotten her act together. In 1952, six and a half years after the end of World War II, the grime of war coated even the most beautiful buildings, causing them to appear proud but worn. The Louvre, Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur were like elderly actors who hadn’t worked for a long time. The Champs-Elysées was only beginning to wake up with a few fashionable shops occupying some of the large storefronts that had been shuttered for many years during and after the war.

Even if I had not been wearing a bright yellow topcoat (from my trousseaux) when all the Parisian women were still in black, we would have been very conspicuous driving our 1950 Pontiac. Few Frenchmen had cars at the time, and we had ours only because the Air Force, which wouldn’t pay my way over to join my husband, was willing to pay his car’s way over. So much for family values in 1952.

Because there were so few automobiles in Paris and so little traffic, diagonal parking was allowed on the sidewalks along the Champs. Wherever we parked, we would come out to find our car surrounded with curious onlookers. The French were fascinated with American cars. People would touch the doors, the hood or the windows as if to share ownership for a moment. These observers who had no idea how our car had gotten there must have seen us as a rich American couple. Little did they know that the car was owned mostly by the bank, and the exchange rate was so advantageous that a Second Lieutenant’s salary allowed us to, if not quite live it up, indulge in a few more ooh-la-lahs than we might have at the same time in the U.S..

We could afford to eat in restaurants then we could only dream of today: Lapérouse, La Tour D’Argent, Lasserre. We could walk right into any museum or the Eiffel Tower, no waiting. We bought fine leather gloves for $5 a pair and with the purchase got a handful of samples of the leading French perfumes: Chanel #5, Arpège, Shalimar.

On that first visit, VE Day was still a living memory, and we were the symbols of liberation. We were treated with respect and admiration; the general thinking of the day seemed to be: if we were American, we had to be good. Not too hard to take for a young soldier and his bride. Rain and all, Paris had begun to claim our hearts.

The next time I saw Paris was in May of that same year. We drove up from Bordeaux, where my husband was stationed, with a windshield that had been shattered by May Day demonstrators. The Communists were expressing their opposition to the American military presence in France. Spare parts for our car were only available in Paris. Tough assignment. We had to go back.

The sun shone for the four or five days we were there. The trees were in leaf, the flowers were in bloom, the Boulevards looked Grand: the buildings that had appeared grim and sad only two months before, although no cleaner, now seemed resplendent with their softly rounded corners, balconies and mansard roofs. Lovers walked along the Seine, kissing in public. We held hands. Book stalls dotted the quays, and the Bateau Mouche had begun regular trips back and forth on the river. We were smitten. We hated to leave.

Once my husband had been transferred to Laon and we lived in nearby Soissons, 62 miles northeast of Paris, we were only an hour by train or car to the capital. Weekends, we would pack a bag, toss it in the car, and drive into “town.” Since our living costs in the small hotel where we were staying in Soissons equaled my husband’s salary (married couples without children were not given living quarters by the Air Force, just an allowance for housing) we depended on the small commission checks forwarded by my husband’s previous employer, and the favorable rate of exchange, to finance our weekend excursions. Mindful of our limited resources, we would find a small hotel, nothing as grand as the Napoleon Bonaparte, ask to see a room, check it out for fleas by shaking the curtains and bedspread, and if it proved to be insect free, check in. From here we would get dressed in our stateside finery and go out on the town to the Follies Bergère, the Lido or a small club with walls draped in dark red velvet where Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow, sang in her sad waifish voice. Very often we would end up at Les Halles for onion soup at two o’clock in the morning before returning to our creepy but flea-less room.

By the time we were shipped back to the States, or rather my husband and his car were—I went on my own—Paris had become a part of us. Never mind the tourists who had come before. Forget those who would come after us. It was our town; our love.

The last time I saw Paris, her streets were cold and gray. It was April 2001. My husband and I had celebrated our fiftieth anniversary in March and decided to go back to the scene of our first anniversary. Remembering the weather on our first trip, we decided to wait until April. But the day we arrived was misty and overcast, and that was the best day of the week. On the drive in from De Gaulle Airport, we saw industrial plants, hotels, ordinary buildings. Except for the signs in French, we could have been entering any American city, until, all at once, in the distance the Eiffel Tower came into view, and then the street names became familiar: We were crossing the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue de Rivoli. We were at the Place de la Concorde, and suddenly we were driving over the Seine to the Left Bank. Our taxi driver took us to the Boulevard St. Germain where he turned onto a narrow street, Rue de Jacob. This is where our small Hôtel des Marronniers stood. This time I didn’t cry, but a few tears did gather as we entered the lobby and the tiny garden restaurant beyond. Because we were not alone. Having an early breakfast was our whole family: our two daughters and their husbands, and their children, our grandchildren. They had come to help us celebrate our fiftieth anniversary.

It rained off and on all week, even sleeted one day. The temperature hovered at 50; the lines were blocks long at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Eiffel Tower. Our umbrellas dripped as we entered the Café de Flore for an aperitif. The view from the top of Notre Dame was mostly of other tourists. The banks of the Seine were flooded because of the “unusual” rain. It didn’t matter. We were here surrounded by our family. Paris never looked lovelier.

© 2021, Lyla Blake Ward, for first publication on France Revisited, francerevisited.com.

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Baldwin felt the burden of race and identity in America from the time he was a shy, but precocious child in Harlem. Born out of wedlock to Berdis Jones who bore eight more children when she married Reverend David Baldwin, James was humiliated, physically abused, and told repeatedly that he was ugly by the man he called father. Young James was aware of the boundaries set by white America and, indeed, the boundaries accepted by blacks. He recalls in The Fire Next Time, “the fear I heard in my father’s voice” when he realized that James believed he “could do anything a white boy could do.” Early on, however, teachers recognized his intelligence. One, Orwilla Miller, saw his devotion as a reader and talent as a writer. She convinced his reluctant stepfather, who deeply mistrusted whites, to let her take the 10-year-old to films and plays. Baldwin credits her with encouraging his intellectual development and they remained friends over the years. Orwilla called him Jimmy, as did friends and family all his life.

Baldwin probed race and identity relentlessly as an expat in Paris. In “The New Lost Generation,” an article in the July 11, 1961 Esquire Magazine, Baldwin attributes his decision to leave America to his recognition that attempts to deal with racism and inhumanity through political or social systems was a process that always led to “failure, elimination, and rejection.”

Considering realities such as the plight of blacks in the US, the Holocaust in Europe, and Hiroshima, he concluded that “all political systems . . . seemed morally bankrupt.” Dealing with issues of hate, intolerance, homophobia and alienation on a personal level was equally perilous as exemplified by the suicide of a close friend two years earlier who jumped from The George Washington Bridge in New York because of the relentless fear of living life as a black man in America. Considering the impossibility of ever attaining fulfillment as an ambitious, gay, black intellectual in the United States, Baldwin sought life in Paris to find the long heralded “refuge from American madness” that generations of artists and writers hoped to discover in the City of Light. More importantly, Baldwin wanted to explore and define his identity and “accept his own vision of the world”; this, he felt, was impossible for him in the United States of 1948.

Baldwin did not find utopia in Paris—and he did not expect it. In his 1972 memoir, No Name in the Street, he states that “I had never, thank God—and certainly not once I found myself living there—been even remotely romantic about Paris”; in fact, he had considered going to Israel to live on a Kibbutz. His flight “had not been to Paris, but simply away from America.” He later recalls, however, feeling the lure of Paris when he studied French as a high school student in Harlem with poet Countee Cullen. He credits reading Balzac for his understanding of Parisian institutions and conventions, but upon arrival he came to grips with everyday realities of being poor in Paris directly. He remarks in Esquire that surviving meant “not expecting to be warm in one’s hotel room,” and in Notes of a Native Son that poor expats, Africans and students in the Latin Quarter lived in “ageless, sinister-looking hotels” and were forced to “continually choose between cigarettes and cheese for lunch.” There was nothing resembling an American toilet, and toilet paper was day-old newsprint. He admits to “moments” of longing for familiar American comforts and missing family, but when he thinks of what he so resolutely left behind in America, he chooses to adapt and continue his search for identity.

Baldwin was lonely at first and mourns that he and other poor expats were “surrounded by quite beautiful and sensual people, who did not, however, find us beautiful and sensual.” Parisians generally kept travelers “at an unmistakable arm’s length” even though comporting themselves with “impenetrable politesse.” He recalls that it was a long time before he made a French friend and even longer before he saw the inside of a French home. In the essay, “Encounter on the Seine,” from Notes of a Native Son, he states that “the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man” ignored not just by the French but by Americans in Paris. In an “undemocratic discrimination,” white Americans did not expect to see blacks in Paris. When they did, they assumed the Negro to be “a needy and deserving martyr or the soul of rhythm.” While meeting a white countryman in Paris did not evoke fear as it would in the US, it did not inspire a bond of community between compatriots abroad.

In Paris, Baldwin became aware of France’s problems with race from its colonial past. He affirms in “Encounter on the Seine” that the African in France has “endured privation, injustice, medieval cruelty” and exploitation in his native land. In addition, he cites the “intangibly precarious” existence the African has in Paris as a colonial desiring freedom for his country. But Baldwin also notes that this “bitter ambition is shared by his fellow colonials, with whom he has a common language.” When the African in Paris meets a fellow-countryman, there is camaraderie, unlike the “lifetime of conditioning” that often keeps the white American traveler at an uneasy distance from the black American. The African has “not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past.” A salient difference for Baldwin is that the Africans had the solace of belonging to a culture, the possibility of a homeland and a people to which they could return. The American Black, in contrast, is a “hybrid,” with the “memory of the auction block” and alienation from his own homeland rooted in America’s violent racial past.

In No Name in the Street, Baldwin recounts that after returning from a visit to the US in 1952, he “began to realize that I could not find any of the Algerians I knew.” He discovers that “Algerians were being murdered in the streets, and corralled into prisons, and being dropped into the Seine, like flies,” awakening him to the fight for Algerian independence and the consequences for Algerians in France. He muses on the irony of his coming to France for “the comparative freedom of my life in Paris” as he witnesses the harassment and abuse of Algerians. Still, he recognizes a shared, violent history of colonialism and concludes that he “was still a part of Africa, even though I had been carried out of it nearly four hundred years before.”

In the video below, James Baldwin expresses some of this when asked about his relationship with Paris during an appearance before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on December 10, 1986, a year before his death from stomach cancer. Listen to the full three minutes of his answer. (After reading this article, consider returning to watch the entire 55-minute video for a sense of Baldwin’s point of view, the type of questions in the air at the time and their relationship with America and the world today.)

Despite his initial poverty, loneliness, and familiar encounters with prejudice, Baldwin came to love Paris and lived there on and off for the next nine years, returning to the city and its environs after time spent in places including Switzerland, Corsica, Turkey and several visits to the United States. Upon arrival in 1948, he connected with the editors of an avant-garde English language publication, Zero, who took him to the second floor of Les Deux Magots, a regular haunt of artists and intellectuals since the 1890s including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Picasso among others. Richard Wright, the celebrated American author of Native Son, who had long encouraged Baldwin in his writing, was there to greet him. That night Wright helped him find a room at Hôtel de Rome on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Despite the camaraderie between the two, the next year, Zero published Baldwin’s essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—later part of Notes of a Native Son—rebuking literature that attempted to show the brutality of racism without a realistic representation of humanity. Richard Wright’s acclaimed Native Son was among the books chastised for the portrayal of its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as someone whose “life is defined by his hatred and his fear” rather than in more complex ways. It caused a feud between the two that erupted publicly at Brasserie Lipp. Nevertheless, by 1950 Baldwin was hailed in Commentary Magazine as “the most promising Negro writer since Richard Wright.” They continued their relationship, somewhat tenuously after the outburst over the article, and Baldwin maintained his respect for Wright’s importance as a writer and influence throughout his life.

In James Baldwin, a Biography, Baldwin’s biographer, archivist and friend David Leeming states that once in Paris he eventually met some of his acquaintances from the lively Greenwich Village scene he had left in New York, and that before “long had no shortage of English-speaking friends in Paris.” He and other struggling writers and artists lived at the Hôtel Verneuil on rue de Verneuil in the 7th arrondissement. There he was part of a vibrant but impoverished group of men and women who shared rooms and friendship. He also found compassion in Mme Dumont, the Corsican woman who owned the hotel. Early in 1949, shortly after arriving in Paris, Baldwin fell ill. She exempted him from rent and cared for him for three months, allowing him to feel human kindness amidst the cool indifference of Paris. Leeming also notes that Baldwin “maintained non-Bohemian friendships as well” and eventually frequented the homes of “liberal, white, mostly Jewish middle-class Americans in Paris.” It was at dinner parties at these homes that he “met other American writers such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth.”

As he became integrated with life in Paris, Baldwin came to love walking through Les Halles, investigating the clubs and sex shops of Pigalle, and eating at Chez Inez, a jazz club and restaurant on Rue Champollion in the Latin Quarter specializing in fried chicken and emerging talent. Over time and with growing reputation, he met luminaries including Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Truman Capote. In 1953, artist Beauford Delaney, cited by biographer Leeming as “the most important influence in his life,” moved to Paris. A close friend and mentor from his Greenwich Village days, Baldwin credits Delaney for being “the exemplar of the black man as functioning, self-supporting artist.” Delaney eventually moved to “an old house surrounded by a garden in Clamart,” outside of Paris, which became a refuge for Baldwin for many years.

Despite his increasing comfort with life in Paris and the jobs he picked up reviewing books or writing articles, Baldwin struggled financially for years and often felt lonely. He took loans from friends and family, but it exacted a toll on his sense of self-worth. Once, Leeming notes, a desperate Baldwin “agreed to take a job as a singer in an Arab night club” until a friend “saved him from that job by employing him as a clerk.”

It was in Paris that James Baldwin finally became comfortable with his homosexuality and found love. According to his biographer, “Lucien Happersberger was a Swiss who had left home in search of excitement and success in Paris.” Baldwin declared that in Lucien he found “the love of my life.” They shared an intimacy for two years that was new to Baldwin. Their complex connection lasted in various iterations of lover and mostly friend for thirty-nine years. Baldwin wanted a permanence that Lucien did not; Lucien married three times and fathered two children. With Lucien, as well as in other relationships, Baldwin had experiences that would surface in Giovanni’s Room, his beautiful and tragic 1956 novel about a gay, white American in Paris who comes to terms with homosexuality, denial and brutality. The bar in the novel, Guillaume’s, is reported to be modeled after Reine Blanche and Fiacre, gay bars frequented by Baldwin in Paris.

A painful experience for Baldwin was his arrest and imprisonment in Paris for eight days over Christmas in 1949. A New York acquaintance, a traveler, spotted Baldwin in a café and decided to move from his hotel near Gare Saint-Lazare to the Grand Hôtel de Bac where Baldwin was living. It was a dismal lodging described in his biography as one of the “enormous, dark, cold, and hideous establishments” typical in those years. The man brought with him a sheet with the name of his previous hotel on it. Since Baldwin was having problems getting the hotel to change linens, it wound up on his bed. Two policemen came looking for the stolen sheet and found it. He and the acquaintance were charged and imprisoned until the 27th of December when the case was dismissed. The experience was frightening for someone new to the language, to handcuffs, to the putrid shed in which men were initially squeezed together with a hole in the center for a toilet, and to the isolation of a cell. One of the interesting observations about the ordeal that Baldwin relates in Notes of a Native Son is that “the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts”; under arrest he felt fear and the unknown as he would have in the States. But he also notes that in the “commissariat I was not a despised black man” as he might have been in America. In fact, he observes that in New York he would have been described as “what” he was—a black man. In Paris he was described as “who” he was—an American.

Over time, Baldwin began to concentrate on writing and, in doing so, to explore his vision of himself as a man and as an American. It was in Paris that he began to seriously develop his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, setting up shop, like generations of writers seeking to escape their unheated rooms, on the second floor of Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. Largely biographical, it recounts one day of a boy’s 14th year in Harlem where he awakens to the reality of racism, brutality within family and injustice on the streets and begins to pursue his own identity. The story had been incubating in Baldwin for years; it confronted his own history within family and in the racial divide of New York. It was published by Knopf in 1952 while he was visiting family in New York for three months. When he returned to Paris, Baldwin arrived with the resources so lacking when he first saw Paris in 1948. Following its publication, he won a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1956 he published Giovanni’s Room which is set in both Paris and the south of France. The novel was written mostly in France but not only in Paris. Baldwin also wrote essays in his early years in Paris that would become part of Notes of a Native Son.

In writing Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin was able to begin unlocking the identity he longed to discover and define when he first left New York. Leeming points to its “theme of the destructive fear and guilt at the base of racism.” This would be explored by Baldwin throughout his life’s work. By writing much of the text in Paris, he was—like so many writers in the past—able to look to look back to America with a new clarity through the lens of an observer. He had the freedom to be a writer and live without the fear and impenetrable barriers he felt in New York. His biography notes that in his “Paris years he never lost sight of his need to confront his ‘inheritance’ as an American black in order to achieve his ‘birthright’ as a man.” In 1955, in his introduction to Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin declares that “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Baldwin spoke no French when he arrived in 1948, but he did eventually become fluent, as you can hear in this extract from a 1973 interview in French.

Baldwin never idealized Paris or saw it through the “charm of legend” as he referenced the appeal it had for so many Americans; however, he believed that his life “began during that first year in Paris.” Baldwin returned to America for a time during the height of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s. He traveled the country as a writer as well as an activist. He came to see first-hand the American South where so much violence was taking place. He met with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Meredith and Thurgood Marshall and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. He also raised support for the march from expats in Paris.

In 1962 he published The Fire Next Time, his seminal compilation of two essays that warn about white America’s need to confront and examine the reality of historic and systemic racism. It brought him international fame. In it he describes the “rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape, death, and humiliation” of “the Negro’s past” in America. He decries that blacks still feel “fear by day and night” and “doubt that [they are] worthy of life.” It is also a text, however, that concludes with the interesting and hopeful metaphor that “relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” must “like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others.”

Once more, Baldwin left America. He traveled to Africa, Israel, Turkey, England, Switzerland and America again over the years, returning to Paris frequently but declaring himself to be a traveler rather than belonging to any country. (He also referred to himself as a “commuter” between France and the United States.) Leeming reveals that while visiting Paris in 1958, Baldwin “realized that he had changed a great deal in the years since his first arrival in Paris. Paris was no longer home, but it had been an important place in his life.” Later, after more travel and living in Turkey for a few years, Baldwin returned to France in 1970, this time to the south. For the last seventeen years of his life Baldwin spent a large part of every year in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. His home there became a refuge for his thoughts and writing, as well as a magnet for writers, artists, and intellectuals including Marc Chagall, Ella Fitzgerald, Yves Montand, Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone and others.

Baldwin’s need to explore race and identity and to define his life as a writer was pivotal in his decision to leave America in 1948, and he reflects on his decision to come to Paris in the 1961 Esquire article. “I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have difficulty accepting. Which is simply, that a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.” He adds that Paris and Europe gave him “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance.”

© 2020, Elizabeth Esris
First published on France Revisited, October 2020.

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Meanwhile, the local hotelscape has also evolved as unremarkable small hotels are increasingly upgrading to boutique, even spa, status.

The classic Paris culinary education

The mainsail for culinary explorations in this area is La Fontaine de Mars, the ultra-traditional, southwest-leading Parisian bistro, red-and-white checkered tablecloths, duck confit, watchful matron and all.

If a pedestrian food market street (in this neighborhood that means rue Cler) can be considered step one in the traveler’s culinary education, then lunch or dinner a fresh-fare bistro such as La Fontaine de Mars is step two. Like Paris itself, the restaurant almost feels like it’s living in the past except that here you are, enjoying it, so it’s very much a part of the present.

The restaurant is named for an early 19th-century fountain just outside. Mars, the Roman god of war, stands in relief on the fountain alongside Hygieia, goddess of health and hygiene. The fountain recalls the presence nearby of a military hospital that was torn down at the end of the 19th century. The buildings that now surround the fountain were then built, and the original restaurant opened here in 1908.

Christiane and Jacques Boudon purchased the restaurant in 1991. Within six months they restored it to its 1908 roots and brought in chef Pierre Saugrain, who has been there ever since. Such single-restaurant longevity is a rarity for a hired chef in Paris.

The restaurant offers hearty, delicious reliability: warm goat cheese, foie gras, snails; duck confit, dover sole, cassoulet; crème brûlée, mousse au chocolat, millefeuille. Southwest comfort food. The wine list, heavy on the reds, covers the basics while also allowing for a splurge à la Lafitte-Rothschild, Petrus or Haut Brion.

In October La Fontaine de Mars came out with a cookbook “Un Bistrot Parisien: La Fontaine de Mars en 50 recettes,” featuring 50 recipes (in French) of southwestern cuisine.

Echoes of the Obama buzz

La Fontaine de Mars has long been a local institution, on the map for both Parisians and visitors. It was enlarged in 2007. Its reputation grew stronger across the Atlantic when Barack and Michelle Obama dined here on June 6, 2009, the 65th anniversary of D-Day. The president and his wife had come to Paris following the commemorations in Normandy and were looking for a traditional French meal.

The American ambassador and his wife had dined at the restaurant before, Christiane Boudon told me, so it was likely on their recommendation (and the green light of the secret service) that the Obamas came. As an admired and recently installed American president and as a couple known for their interest in quality meals, the buzz of their choice of La Fontaine de Mars quickly spread. That the buzz echoes ten years on is a testimony to both the Obamas and La Fontaine de Mars.

The Obamas dined in the second of the small rooms upstairs, as the plaque by the entrance to that room indicates, but better to opt for the atmosphere on the ground floor or, weather permitting, on the side terrace.

There’s another Obama and primarily Bush connection nearby: Philippe Excoffier, chef at residence of the American ambassador to France from 2001 to 2010, has operated his self-named restaurant just up the street since 2011.

La Fontaine de Mars
129 rue Saint Dominique, 7th arrondissement
Metro Ecole Militaire, RER Pont de l’Alma
Open daily, for lunch noon to 3pm, for dinner 7:30 (7:15 on Sun.)-11pm.
Tel: 01 47 05 46 44

© 2019, Gary Lee Kraut

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The sculpture by American artist Jeff Koons is intended as “a symbol of remembrance and support” from the American people to the people of Paris and more largely France in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015.

It’s comprised of a well-manicured Caucasian hand holding eleven marshmallow-like tulips, with the twelfth representing through its absence victims of the attacks.

Standing 41 feet high, including its base of limestone quarried from the Paris region, the polychrome bronze, stainless steel and aluminum Bouquet of Tulips is sufficiently hidden behind the Petit Palais in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées to be ignored yet colorful enough to be photogenic.

Funded through private donations in collaboration with the Fonds pour Paris – Paris Foundation for placement on public space, the original price tag of 3.5 million euros was surpassed.

As Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo noted in her speech, Parisians love a good debate about placing a new work of art or architecture in a public space. She failed to note that honoring victims of terrorism with eleven Koons tulips is too much like honoring victims of famine with a statue of Ronald McDonald with one French fry missing.

Also speaking at the inauguration were Jeanne d’Hauteserre, mayor of the 8th arrondissement, which covers the Champs-Elysées; Koons; Jane Hartley, U.S. Ambassador to France from 2014 to 2017, who initiated the project, and Jamie McCourt, current U.S. Ambassador to France.

Ambassador McCourt, a Trump appointee, won the battle of the blonde ambassadors by reading her text in well-spoken French, whereas former ambassador Hartley, an Obama appointee, smiled her way through a text in English despite having lived in Paris for 2½ years, professing this her favorite city (“don’t tell my friends in New York”), and practically calling Mayor Hidalgo her BFF. Score one for the current ambassador, though one can’t imagine a Trump appointee raising funds in the name of French-American friendship, so take that back.

Nevertheless, while the work of American ambassadors around the world is in English and we can’t expect them to be fluent in the language of their host country, you’d think that after a couple of years with her BFF in Paris Hartley would have been able to fake her way in the language of Lafayette enough to read a 3-minute fluff speech of the kind that she gave dozens of times during her tenure.

No one expected Koons to speak French—and he doesn’t. But he does see himself in line with Picasso, Monet, Boucher and Fragonard in their use of flowers in art. Art historians take note.

Text and photos © 2019, Gary Lee Kraut.

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Two and a half years ago, in the spring of 2011, Janet Hulstrand, an American writer and teacher of literature, asked me if I’d be interested in publishing a profile of James A. Emanuel, a longtime American expatriate resident of Paris, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Publishing such an article would be a strange choice for most travel magazines. The poet wasn’t well known as a resident of Paris. In fact, when Janet first approached me about the article and I asked her if there were any particular poems about Paris, or France, that I might run along with it, she said probably not. I liked the idea of introducing readers to this consummate poet—both to the man and to his work—but it wasn’t until I read Janet’s article that I understood why it truly belonged in France Revisited.

France Revisited, beyond its focus on travel and culture, aims to explore the notion of place—best translated into French as terroir—which includes the products, the ideas, the culture and the people who are anchored, whether deeply or loosely, in a given place. It seemed to me that the life and work of James Emanuel expressed a deep sense of place even though that place wasn’t necessarily Paris or France.

When Janet interviewed James for the profile she asked him what he most appreciated about living in France, what it had given him. He replied, “Nothing visible or tactile, ugly or beautiful, can do more for me than leaving me alone, free to recreate my environment in ways that I can understand. France has been silent when I had no questions; and it has been wise and ultimately generous, even poetic, when I needed counsel to walk on, or surf to carry me toward some shore.”

I ran Janet’s article with James’s poem “Christmas at the Quaker Center,” one of her favorites, and one that the poet would consent to. It is a poem grounded in three places:  Nebraska, where he grew up; Paris, where he came to live; and the childhood memories which he carried with him everywhere.

James Emanuel’s funeral was held on October 4 at the crematorium at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Before the pine box in which he lay we read some of his poems, listened to music he loved, shared our memories of the man and heard a saxophone solo played by his friend Chansse Evans. An account of the funeral ceremony and the inhumation three days later has been written by Monique Wells for the website Entrée to Black Paris. James, through the presence of his ashes at Père Lachaise Cemetery, is now even more firmly anchored in the place,  le terroir, of Paris as he joins so many other remarkable writers, artists and musicians, both French and foreign, who made Paris their home.

Following James’s death I asked Janet Hulstrand if she would write another article about him, this time focusing on the man as she knew him through his visits to her class during her summer program “Paris: A Literary Adventure” nearly every year from 2000 to 2013. Thanks to Janet and to James, I’d attended one of those classes in 2011, when James gave me permission to film him reading his work to the class and answering their questions. Though my recording leaves much to be desired from a technical point of view, I’ve excerpted portions of it in order to give readers a glimpse of his remarkable presence, the quality of his reading, the confidentiality of his introductions, the precision of his thought and the universality of his poetry. Those clips accompany Janet’s beautiful and heartfelt article, Remembering James A. Emanuel, 1921-2013, Poet, Teacher, Humanitarian.

For those who haven’t yet taken the fabulous journey into James Emanuel’s work, or never had the chance to hear him read, this may be the perfect place to start.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

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* * *
By Janet Hulstrand

For thirteen years, starting in the summer of 2000, the students in my American literature class, “Paris: A Literary Adventure,” had the extraordinary opportunity of having James A. Emanuel, one of our nation’s great poets, read to them.

I had never met James Emanuel before the summer of 2000. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of him until a year before when I had asked Odile Hellier, owner of Village Voice, a major English-language bookshop in Paris at the time, if she knew of any expatriate American writers in Paris to whom I might introduce my students. I explained that I wanted to show them that great American literature was still being produced in Paris. James was among the writers she recommended to me.

When I returned home to Brooklyn, I went to the library and found a copy of his Whole Grain, Collected Poems 1958-1989.  I sat down and began reading. It wasn’t long before I knew I was reading the work of a great poet, and I thought it would be wonderful if I could give my students the chance to meet him.

I wrote to James to ask if he would be interested in reading to my students. In particular I asked him if he would read “Racism in France” and “Daniel in Paris.” “I won’t read those poems,” he said when I followed up my letter with a phone call.  “But there are others I would read if you like.”

That was a good introduction to James. He was very generous about sharing his time and talent, and he loved being back in a classroom again, among young people; I think it was something he missed. But he also did things his way, always. He had his reasons for not wanting to read the poems I had asked him to read. I didn’t ask what they were, and he didn’t offer a reason. I just promised him that if he would agree to come and meet with my students, he could read anything he wanted.

The first time he read to my class he was 79 years old, though he looked much younger. To my students, most in their late teens and early twenties, it was a revelation first of all to see just how full of energy and passion someone that age could be, and also how funny. It was also a revelation to most of them how interesting and fun poetry could be. Through the years, many of them approached the poetry reading with an opinion perhaps best summed up by one student who had said, doubtfully, the day before it, “Poetry and I don’t get along too well.”

James always won them over. Without aiming to prove anything, he proved to them that old age was not as boring or as fossilized as it seemed, and neither was poetry. When he introduced a poem in which a man in the street sees a wheel of cheese come at him, falling through the sky, by explaining to them that the poem (“It Was Me Did These Things”) had its start when he saw a friend’s young child push a cheese out of an open window, he taught them something important about how the events of everyday life can inspire poetry. Perhaps even more importantly, he showed them that poetry, even serious poetry, can make us laugh as well as cry.

The first few times he read to us, he stayed away from any poems that dealt directly with racism.  I would eventually learn, though not from him, that his own personal tragedy in the loss of his only son was what had driven him from the U.S., the reason he decided in 1984 to leave there and never return.  That was something he never talked about, and the one poem he wrote about that tragedy (“Deadly James”) he never read aloud at all, to my class, or to anyone else. But after the first few years of reading to us, he did read “Emmett Till,” a poem he’d written about the 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old boy who was murdered by white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. “It took me seven years to write that poem,” he always said.

In the video below, filmed during his appearance in my class in 2011, James speaks about his struggles with the poem and reads “Emmett Till.”

James loved, understood, and deeply appreciated children, and some of his most beautiful poems are written about or addressed to them. After a period in the 1970s when he couldn’t write, it was interaction with a child that helped him get back to work, as he explains as a preface to his reading of “Wishes, for Alix.”

Over the course of the years we met in various places, sometimes at Paris III, sometimes in residence halls at the Cité Universitaire. He would always start by reading a selection of his poems, usually for about an hour. Several times he invited Godelieve Simons, the Belgian printmaker with whom he had a close artistic collaboration, to join him. (Their collaboration had begun when she created prints in response to his poetry: later, he wrote poems in response to her prints.) Her presentations, in addition to being a wonderful introduction for my students to another not-very-well known art, engraving, also exposed them to the way in which artists from different media can inspire each other, and respond artistically to each other’s work.

After he had read, James would invite questions from my students. Sometimes the questions were a little slow to come. One year, wanting to make sure there would be no awkward lull, I made it very clear the day before that they were expected to be ready with good questions. “They asked some really good questions this time,” he said to me afterward. “That’s because I threatened them,” I confessed.

The last time I was in Paris, in July of this year, James wasn’t feeling up to traveling to our classroom, so we met at the home of his friend Marie-France Plassard, who kindly offered her apartment as a venue for our poetry reading.

He read “The Treehouse” and “The Young Ones, Flip Side” and “A Negro Author,” and “Emmett Till.” He read “Daniel is Six” and “For France,” and “To Martin, To Luther, To King” and “Jazz Anatomy.”

Here, from 2011, is James’s reading of “The Negro”, “The Treehouse” and “A View from the White Helmet.”

During the last time he met with my class, he read for a long time, longer than he, or Marie-France, or I thought he would, and then for a while he answered questions from my students. I don’t remember specifically much of what he said that day, except that he made sure to tell the students that the most important thing they could do in their lives was to be true to themselves. (He always said something along those lines, every year.)

I do remember the light in the room, the sound of his voice, the way Marie-France’s face was aglow with pride and love as she watched him. I remember how the warmth of his humanity and his sense of humor once again filled the room. I remember the rapt attention my students paid him as they were caught up in a very special moment of their lives, and the hush that fell when he began reading, everyone listening intently.

None of us knew that this would be the last event of its kind. But we knew that it was a very special gift, to spend more than an hour with this man, to have him read his poems to us and talk to us about his poetry, about his life, about life.

By now, there must be more than 100 of my students who have had the experience of meeting James Emanuel and hearing him read. He moved them, taught them very important things, and inspired them, not only through his poetry, but through his extraordinary grace and humanity as well.  For me the knowledge that they have gone back to their families and friends with a newfound appreciation for poetry in general, and in particular an enthusiasm for James’s work gives me a feeling of deep satisfaction. I know this was important to him as well.

From various corners of the world they have written to me upon hearing of his death. They tell me how well they remember James and his poetry. How they still love reading it. How they treasure the books he signed for them. They tell me how meeting him was one of the most special things they experienced while they were in Paris.

Mr. Emanuel will be sorely missed. But he has left behind a magnificent body of work. That work has the power to inspire and enrich the lives of anyone who takes the time to read it—and to all who open their hearts and minds to what it has to say.

Text © 2013, Janet Hulstrand
Videos of James Emanuel by Gary Lee Kraut © 2011, 2013. All rights reserved.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: A Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and literature classes at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. A 2009 interview she conducted with James A. Emanuel appears on her blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  She also wrote this 2011 profile of James Emanuel for France Revisited on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Also read James A. Emanuel’s Sense of Place as a companion piece to this article.

James A. Emanuel’s ashes are in the columbarium at Pere Lachaise Cemetery (niche 16412).

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France Revisited joins in the celebration with a series of photo reports by Elise Prudhomme, a longtime resident of Paris, beginning with seven stunning black-and-white images of the Tuileries Garden, Paris’s most historical garden.

It was here, behind the royal palace of the Tuileries, that André Le Nôtre cut his teeth as a landscape gardener. His father and grandfather had worked here before him, he lived within the garden walls, and he is buried nearby in Saint Roch Church.

These Tuileries photographs are accompanied by a text in which the photographer provides background about Le Nôtre and explains her photographic interest in this garden.

Le tien, le mien, Le Nôtre / Yours, Mine, Le Nôtre’s

Photographs and text by Elise Prudhomme

A walk through the Tuileries Garden is a return to the origin of French gardens. Considering its long heritage of transformations by queens, kings, landscape architects and gardeners, the Tuileries cannot be fully attributed to André Le Nôtre (1613-1700). It can nevertheless be viewed as the matrix of André Le Nôtre’s career. By matrix I mean that the Tuileries was his testing grounds and the precursor of his future projects, the womb or mold from which his future work originated and developed.  Without the Tuileries there would be no Versailles.

Le Nôtre was born near these royal gardens in the Saint Roc Quarter. He was baptized and would eventually be buried in the St. Roch Church.  For many years he lived with his family in a house inside the walls of the Tuileries Garden. This garden was a family affair. His grandfather Pierre Le Nôtre was in charge of the parterres for Catherine de Medici, who had built the Tuileries Palace. His father Jean Le Nôtre replanted and maintained the Tuileries for Henri IV. (The Tuileries Palace itself, begun in 1564, burned down in 1871, leaving its garden to appear as though directly connected to the Louvre.)

The Tuileries appears to rest on the pillars of its historical central axis running through the garden and out west to what would become the Champs-Elysées and the geometrical work of the basins, but as a photographer these are not the aspects that most interest me here. My eye is drawn instead to the groundmass that constitutes the garden, actually a series of gardens within the larger garden.

Le Nôtre made innovative and subtle changes to the notion of space, opening what was once a medieval walled garden towards the exterior, creating gardens within gardens (these developed into bosquets at Versailles), changing the form of the parterres (octagonal to trapezoidal) for visual complexity, and constructing the elevated terraces (including the fer à cheval [horseshoe] ramps) which provided the viewer with different heights from which to contemplate the garden.

André Le Nôtre sought to break with the early formalism of French gardens in order to render the space appreciable to visitors. Working with mineral and plant architecture, he created multifaceted gardens that are both majestic and playful. The introduction of great vistas allowed him to play with symmetry and geometry in order to create complexity and diversity that open the garden to various functions, to areas of ornamentation (though there were fewer statues at the time), pleasure and utility (though commercial utility was far from Le Nôtre’s intent).

While crowds of pressed visitors are naturally drawn by the dramatic perspective from the Louvre up the Champs-Elysées, the Tuileries also allows strollers the opportunity to discover smaller gardens within the garden.

Photographing these individual spaces like the pieces of a puzzle, I wished to form a notion of the whole through the assimilation of individual details. Working spontaneously, I visited the garden frequently and photographed a variety of subjects. The choice to work in black and white was made to better reveal the geometry and rhythm that nature and humans have brought to these places.

Text and images © Elise Prudhomme.

A Philadelphia-born photographer living in Paris since 1990, Elise Prudhomme developed a passion for photography during university years at Smith College.  She also directs Studio Galerie B&B, an art gallery, photo studio, darkroom facility and digital imaging center in Paris, 6 bis rue des Récollets, near Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. More images can been seen at www.eliseprudhomme.com.

Thirty photographs from Elise Prudhomme’s Tuileries series Le tien, le mien, Le Nôtre (Yours, Mine, Le Nôtre’s) were accepted by the Louvre to grace the walls of their reception tent in the Tuileries Garden during the 2013 Jardins Jardin festival.

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* * *

On June 15, 2011, one of America’s greatest living poets celebrates his 90th birthday quietly in the company of a few close friends, in Paris, where he has lived since 1984. Admired, respected and acknowledged as a master poet by many writers, literary critics, and scholars, wider recognition has eluded him. France Revisited is therefore pleased to introduce James A. Emanuel to our savvy readers and experienced travelers through this exclusive article by Janet Hulstrand, with photographs by Sophia Pagan, followed by Mr. Emanuel’s poem Christmas at the Quaker Center (Paris, 1981).

James A. Emanuel, a Great American Poet, Turns 90 in Paris

By Janet Hulstrand

Author of more than 400 published poems and 13 volumes of poetry, winner of numerous prestigious literary and scholarly awards, a well-respected critic and teacher, James A. Emanuel was referred to in a 2000 American Book Review article as “the Dean of Black Paris.” The same reviewer also noted that Emanuel has been “curiously overlooked…when one considers…the sheer power of his work.”

Who is James A. Emanuel and why is his work not more widely known?

“I represent almost everything that has happened to African-Americans in and beyond the USA, from the beastly things to the heart-warming things,” Emanuel says.

Indeed his life story is quintessentially American, for both better and worse. Born (1921) and raised in the small town of Alliance, Nebraska, Emanuel left home at the age of 17 and never turned back. In his youth he held a variety of jobs: cowboy, junkyard worker, elevator operator, professional basketball player, Confidential Secretary to Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. at the War Department in Washington, D.C., and foot soldier in the Philippines during World War II.

After the war he earned degrees at Howard and Northwestern Universities before continuing with graduate study at Columbia University, choosing to focus on the work of Langston Hughes for his doctoral research. Hughes, who responded promptly to Emanuel’s request for access to his papers, gave the young scholar free reign in his home.

Emanuel describes his life during that time as “a dream fulfilled…finding in his basement forgotten literary treasures; recording his answers to first-time questions; and, during his absence in Europe or elsewhere, whirling in his swivel chair at his desk, tapping my toes against his file cabinets.”When the work was done Hughes told Emanuel, “You know more about my stories than I do.” He saw promise in Emanuel’s poetry, and offered him editorial suggestions. (Always an independent thinker, Emanuel accepted some of the suggestions, and rejected others.)

In the 1960s, as a member of the faculty at City College of the City University of New York, Emanuel introduced the school’s first course in Black Poetry and championed the inclusion of African-American literature in the curriculum. His dissertation, published in 1967, was the first full-length critical study of the work of Langston Hughes by an American author.

“It broke the barrier of silence imposed upon African-American writers by the establishment,” Emanuel says, noting that there hadn’t been anything like it published since The Negro Caravan in 1941.

The following year Emanuel published, with Theodore L. Gross, a groundbreaking anthology, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, referred to by many scholars to this day as a “bible.”

In the 1970s he began spending significant amounts of time in Europe, first teaching at the University of Grenoble on an invitational Fulbright, and later at the Universities of Toulouse and Warsaw.

“I don’t know what my rather long years in France, my year in Poland, and my travels in China, India, Thailand, Turkey and less exotic trips in Europe have meant to me beyond the clichés we all know,” Emanuel says. “Generally, my life as an American professor in Europe taught me what I already knew, or guessed: that all French people, all European and African people are not the same.”

Then, in 1983, he suffered a loss he has described as “the wound from which I never recovered” when his only child, James Jr., committed suicide after being beaten by “three cowardly cops” in California. His comment about the effect of this life-shattering event in his autobiography, The Force and the Reckoning (2001, Lotus Press, Detroit), is terse. “My life, turning a corner in 1983, has not followed old paths since then,” he wrote, with characteristic restraint and stoicism.

He left the United States in 1984. Since then he has lived in Paris, devoting himself to writing poetry.

In 1999 he introduced through the publication of JAZZ from the Haiku King a unique new genre, jazz-and-blues haiku. He has read his haiku with musical accompaniment in Europe, Africa, and Australia, and he recorded a CD of the poems, with saxophonist Chansse Evanns. He has also done innovative collaborative work with Godelieve Simons, a Belgian printmaker who was moved to illustrate some of his poems: over time they developed a close artistic collaboration, and he has also written poems in response to her prints. Occasionally he participates in readings, literary conferences, and other cultural events. He has been a regular participant in Jacques Rancourt’s Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie since the late 1980s. In 2008 he was invited to participate in the Centennial Richard Wright Conference held in Paris.

American novelist Jake Lamar met Emanuel shortly after he arrived in Paris in 1993, through the poet Ted Joans. Lamar recalls that Joans invited him to join him at the Café Le Rouquet one “gray drizzly Wednesday afternoon” where Joans “held court” three times a week for a couple of hours in the afternoon with fellow poets Emanuel and Hart Leroy Bibbs.  During the course of the conversation, Joans quoted a brief passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Without missing a beat, Emanuel picked up where Joans had left off, quoting the rest of the passage from memory.

“I was thirty-two years old and had felt, up until then, very isolated in my situation as an African-American author,” Lamar recalls. “Suddenly, listening to James recite Ellison, I felt that I had somehow found my true place, my real community, right there at that café table.”

Of Emanuel’s work, Lamar says, “I could go on and on about his writing, the brilliance and profound depth of feeling…But one particular set of poems, the jazz haiku…there’s nothing like them that I know of in world literature. They’re imbued with the combination of discipline and play, improvisation and exactitude, inspiration and perspiration that defines the music he so beautifully describes. This is the work of a master artist. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to know him.”

Emanuel’s work is indeed powerful as well as prolific. His poem “A Negro Author” is an artist’s defiant declaration of independence from any “ism” that might confine him. “Emmett Till” is an American masterpiece: a spare, tender, and profoundly sad tribute to the innocent boy victimized by the incomprehensible brutality and violence of racial hatred. “After the Accident” is the poem that literally jolted me into realizing that I was reading the work of a great poet, and led me to seek him out, to see if I could convince him to read to my students. (He graciously agreed to do so, and nearly every year since 2000 he has read to them, answered their questions, and even—in one particularly memorable session—created poetry with them.)

Like his poetry, Emanuel’s personality is powerful, though his quiet, understated manner does not instantly reveal this. Almost inevitably it is the most skeptical of my students who are the most moved by Emanuel and his work when they meet him. One remembers his “very beautiful, kind, old-school type of voice…so different than what we hear most of the time.” Yet the gentleman and scholar is also a fighter, of which his poetry supplies abundant evidence, such as this small sample from “For Racists Remembered”:

We said “Sir” sometimes
“Sir Charles,” “Sir Honkie,” and then
the big lie: “the Man.”

Asked what he most appreciates about living in France, what it has given him, he replies, “Nothing visible or tactile, ugly or beautiful, can do more for me than leaving me alone, free to recreate my environment in ways that I can understand. France has been silent when I had no questions; and it has been wise and ultimately generous, even poetic, when I needed counsel to walk on, or surf to carry me toward some shore.”

Whatever the reasons for Emanuel’s work being overlooked, the fact of is a shame. It is a shame that, as he approaches his 90th birthday, one of the world’s great poets is not receiving the recognition and honor he deserves. It is an even bigger shame that his exquisite poetry, which ranges from the comic to the rageful to the elegiac—all of it masterfully well crafted, all of it infused with extraordinary grace and humanity—has not reached a wider audience.

In its condemnation of human oppression in all its forms, as well as its illumination of the best in humanity, especially the innocent genius of children, the poetry of James A. Emanuel is work that should be lifted up to its proper place in the pantheon of world poetry. More important, we should be reading it—carefully, for it reveals both our best and our worst selves, offering help in knowing ourselves better, and the chance to choose a better path.

Article (c) 2011, Janet Hulstrand.
Photographs (c) 2011, Sophia Pagan.

Article and photographs created for first publication on France Revisited.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and twice a year she offers Writing from the Heart workshops in a village in the Champagne region of France. Her 2009 interview with James A. Emanuel appears on her blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.

Sophia Pagan is a Paris-based photographer. She grew up in the inner city streets of New York, where she witnessed and lived through the difficulties of urban culture. Through her upbringing she developed an appreciation for things considered to be “outside her reach” and seeks to use that appreciation in her photography as she sets out to capture the fine balance between the modern metropolis and the old world charms of Paris. Examples of her work can be seen on her website.

Christmas at the Quaker Center (Paris, 1981)

By James A. Emanuel

Once upon a Christmastime
sleighbells snowed the sky
and when I slid the covers back
to slip a wonder-why
through windowfrost I wiped away
I couldn’t see a thing
except the hushed Nebraska night
and the little flaky ring
a sparrow dug into the snow
to spring himself to flight.

Once upon a Christmastime
I sneaked a sandwich where
old Santa couldn’t miss it:
that table was so bare
his bag of toys and reindeer food
would leave him room to spare,
to sit on while he ate and thought
“This boy is really nice.
I’ll search among the toys I’ve brought
And fill his stocking twice.”

Years grew long, and years grew hard,
but I can clear my sight
by twisting certain memories
to make it come out right
that I still hope to see again
a lovely-featured time
that stirs beneath my pillow
and wakes my heart to climb
into the sky on Christmas Eve
and listen to those bells
that ring because I do believe
a snowflake sound that tells
about a sleigh that’s coming,
that’s driving through the air,
with gifts for everyone who’s good,
who struggles to be fair.

And now when I see Santa
I grip him with my eyes,
with all my how-about-its,
with all my tell-me-whys;
and if he takes them standing
and if he shakes my hand
I bag another year of them
and try to understand
this load that makes us human,
those gifts on Santa’s back,
our bells for one another
that chime our starry track.

From Whole Grain: Collected Poems 1958-89 (Lotus Press: Detroit, 1991)
© 1983 James A. Emanuel

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