38
Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.
JOHN PHILIP SOUSA, “The Stars and Stripes March”
The poster and bookplate painted by Charles Buckles Falls for the War Service Library manages to be at the same time playful and martial. The doughboy wears a tin hat and carries a carbine, but the weapon is slung over his shoulder, and in flagrant defiance of all rules of safety, its bayonet is fixed. Not that he could use it in case of attack, since his arms are filled with books, piled higher than his head. “This book,” explains the text of the bookplate, “is provided by the people of the United States through the American Library Association for the use of the soldiers and sailors.”
War Service Library bookplate
During the war, the American Library Association collected millions of books and shipped them to France. The library set up to distribute them still exists. Now the American Library in Paris, it’s located in the tree-shaded seventh arrondissement, where at each street corner one encounters the Eiffel Tower peering inquisitively into your business.
These days, computer terminals are more evident than books at the ALP, and the emphasis less on reading than lap sits for toddlers and seminars on investment opportunities, with a free glass of boxed Beaujolais afterward. But its complacency is less a sign of senescence than of success. The battle has long since been won. Large parts of twenty-first-century Paris have become as American as tarte aux cerises.
In retrospect, the American force sent to help the Allies in 1917 was an invading army as well. Europe, already half converted to an Americanized way of life by its seductive popular culture, and deeply in debt to its money men, was ready to embrace, as its avant-garde had already done, a world inhabited by Buffalo Bill, Pearl White, and Charlie Chaplin, in which one drank martinis and old-fashioneds, drove a Ford, snapped pictures with a Kodak, wound up a Victor gramophone, and danced the one-step and le fox to the music of James Reese Europe.
If one could specify a single moment in which Paris surrendered to that seduction, it came in August 1918.
Finally, Paris felt it could exhale the breath it had been holding for three years. The Paris-Geschütz, its usefulness at an end, had been hauled back to Germany. On the Amiens front, on the Marne, and in the Saint-Mihiel salient, the Germans were in retreat. Not so much because of the war news as the fact that it was the sort of thing one did in August, Etienne and Edith de Beaumont threw a garden party in their eighteenth-century town house at 2 rue Duroc.
The occasion was the premier performance of a work by young Francis Poulenc, a piece for baritone and piano quintet plus flute and clarinet, called La Rapsodie Nègre.
Its inspiration was the music for Parade. Poulenc was an admirer of Satie, to whom the piece was dedicated. The title tipped a wink at jazz and Africa, but the piece was actually a spoof—a setting of a poem by “Liberian poet Makoko Kangourou,” a name which, like the text—Honoloulou, poti lama!/honoloulou, honoloulou,/kati moko, mosi bolou, etc.—was patently fake.
The words were probably influenced by the “boomlay boomlay boomlay BOOM” and “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you” of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo,” published in 1914 and subtitled “A Study of the Negro Race.” In turn, Scott Fitzgerald may have been harking back to this event when he had the band at Jay Gatsby’s party present “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World that created a sensation at Carnegie Hall last year.”
By 1914, the heavy artillery of American cinema and popular music had already softened up the Europeans. After 1918, Hollywood would buy up the remains of the German and French film industries and stake a claim to the British. In 1925, it absorbed France’s design expertise as well by copying and merchandizing art deco, which France had introduced to the world at its Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.
But for the moment, the front on which it fought was jazz. James Reese Europe, chosen to form and lead the band of the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, had been a club owner in Harlem, a composer, and musical director for the exhibition dancers Vernon and Irene Castle. In France, his musicians traveled over two thousand miles, performing for British, French, and American military audiences as well as French civilians. They also made recordings for Pathé, planting the seed of jazz that would germinate after 1920 in the soil of France.
James Reese Europe and musicians
Following Europe’s death in 1919, stabbed in a trivial skirmish with a drummer in his band, a mourner said, “Before Jim Europe came to New York, the colored man knew nothing but Negro dances and porter’s work. All that has been changed. Jim Europe was the living open sesame to the colored porters of this city. He took them from their porters’ places and raised them to positions of importance as real musicians.” Just as importantly, he alerted them to the opportunities, social and musical, of France. Numerous African American performers who remained in Paris after the war or returned following their demobilization were living proof that he was right.
The American Library retains a few relics of its early years. One of them, an unwieldy bound volume, sits awkwardly in the sleek glass and aluminum decor. A librarian and an old friend, Simon Gallo, climbs a ladder to bring it down from exile on top of a shelf unit.
Multilingual, a collector of seventeenth-century bindings, Simon lived in Brazil and Italy before coming to Paris, He belongs to the same scholarly brotherhood as Neil in London and Peter van Diemen.
“We don’t get many requests for this,” he says as he helps me carry the book to a table in the reading room.
“I can tell.”
The yellowing newsprint is fragile. With too much exposure to light and incautious hands, the pages would become brittle and crumble, like an ancient scroll or papyrus.
Pershing had been in France only eight months when the first number appeared of the forces’ weekly newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Its staff included Harold Ross, who would go on to found and edit The New Yorker magazine; the future columnist Franklin P. Adams; sports journalist Grantland Rice; and Alexander Woollcott, destined to tramp like a wounded elephant through American culture as theater critic, humorist, playwright, and model for the irascible Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner.
Stars and Stripes ran until June 1919, its pages a priceless record not so much of war news—censorship restricted that—as of the preoccupations of the Americans who read and edited it. Foremost among these was food. None of the Allies took to French food—which, in any event, was difficult to find close to the front line. The restaurant-bars called estaminets learned that rosbifs and kangourous were not adventurous eaters. Rather than explaining French cuisine, it was easier to offer something they all enjoyed—fried eggs and chips. Patrons seldom complained, except about the price.
Americans were even more attached to their national diet. Under the headline “Cigarettes Are Here,” Stars and Stripes reported:
At bases in France there are 200,000,000 cigarettes waiting for transportation to haul them to the front. The Army recently commandeered a large percentage of the YMCA’s motor trucks. Here are some things for the Army to be delivered to the YMCA in France next month; 77 tons of chewing gum, 1325 tons of flour and 2850 pounds of sugar for cookie making, 167 tons of chocolate bars, 200 tons of jam, 94 tons of condensed milk, 31 tons of cough drops, 176 tons of chewing tobacco, 9 tons of plain soap, 17 tons of tooth paste, 6 tons of towels, 1½ tons of razor blades and 7 tons of playing cards.
Colonial powers rely on converting subject races to their own values, teaching them the national language, introducing them to the national cuisine, educating them in the national manners. It would take a while for the French to realize that the Americans had no intention of becoming French. Rather, they intended to turn the French into Americans. Over the next century, the two cultures would fight each other to a standstill.
But it was becoming clear that four years of war and exposure to alien standards had damaged France as much as the American Civil War wounded the United States. Of the war’s effect on France, Edith Wharton wrote, “Like a monstrous landslide, it had fallen across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilization.”
Gertrude Stein coined the phrase “lost generation” to describe not the disillusioned expatriate writers, but those young French men and women who, because of the war, hadn’t finished their education, learned a trade, or developed an affinity for their culture. When, after 1919, Paris was gripped by les années folles, the crazy years, many of the disaffected young would find work in the growth industries of show business, prostitution, and crime.
No longer the woman of Europe, Paris became its whore, the international capital of sex and jazz, jiving to the charleston, the black bottom, le fox. Cafés rebranded themselves as bars americains, serving the cocktails the French never drank. High-stakes casinos, banished in 1913 beyond a hundred-kilometer radius of the city, returned now as spurious “clubs.” One of the largest, the Sporting Club de France, bought a mansion next to the residence of the president, installed a gym and a swimming pool, then dropped the pretence. “Members mostly ‘sport’ in the card rooms,” noted journalist Basil Woon, “and days go by when the pool is empty of anything but water.”
The arrival of Prohibition in 1920 would accelerate the flow of tourists. Visiting Paris for the first time in 1906, Ezra Pound met people who’d never seen an American. After the war, they could scarcely be avoided. By 1923, 135,000 arrived there every year, a number rising fast. So devalued would the franc become that, as Ernest Hemingway explained in a 1923 article for Esquire, one could live comfortably in Paris for a year on just a thousand U.S. dollars.
One historian analyzed these changes optimistically as “a giant step into modernity. Life would never again be about a state of being; it would be about doing. Pleasure would give way to productivity, and men who were once worshipped for their beauty, money, and abundance of leisure time would become extraneous when usefulness and purpose took over.”
Painters, composers, and authors were not so philosophical. Accustomed to singing for their supper at the salons of the rich, they would find those tables bare, their candles snuffed, the gas lamps dimmed, never to be relit. In the electric light that illuminated postwar Paris, a culture that looked its best in the soft glow of gas and beeswax was exposed by the pitiless glare of the incandescent bulb as blighted and sick to death.