In "Letters into the Void" (from the September 21, 2024, issue of Mind Travel), I touched on the solitary nature of writing and quoted Emily Dickinson, who wrote, "This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me—" Dickinson and other writers seem to have felt or worried that they were detached from others — at least from their potential readers — and we do often think of writers as working in isolation.
Reflecting on my time in Paris a few weeks ago, I was reminded of a different side of writing. There, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, writers congregated at cafes and bars, often conversing with other writers. Ernest Hemingway, Emile Zola, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the more notable figures who could be found at spots such as La Coupole and Closerie des Lilas.
Cafe culture goes back centuries earlier. Le Procope, one of the first cafes in Paris, opened its doors way back in the late 1600s. Noel Riley Fitch, author of the useful little book Literary Cafes of Paris, explains that Le Procope, which is still open today, "helped turn France into a coffee-drinking society." That's a pretty noteworthy legacy. Fitch goes on to discuss the dramatic increase in the number of French cafes. Over the next century or so, the number passed 1000, and, by 1869, it had reached 4000. It was even higher in the 1920s and 1930s, which was probably the golden age of the literary cafe in Paris.
One evening in Paris, Lisa and I seized the opportunity to have dinner at one of the most popular of these literary cafes, Les Deux Magots, named after two large Chinese porcelain figures, still visible at the top of a column in the restaurant's interior. We weren't alone there: the restaurant's reputation apparently has made it a magnet for tourists. I poked around the interior a bit to see the black and white photographs of Simone de Beauvoir and others on the walls. It was here, according to the menu, that Hemingway wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. It was here, too, that Richard Wright got into an argument with his protegee, James Baldwin.
Other notable magnets for writers include the Hotel Chelsea and the Algonquin Hotel in New York. The Chelsea was home to Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other writers (along with painter Jackson Pollock, singer Madonna, and others). The Algonquin became famous for the "Algonquin Roundtable," a circle of writers such as Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, who became famous for their lively banter.
We will never know 99 percent of what happened — and, most notably, what was said — at these spots, but Hemingway gave us some hints in his memoir A Moveable Feast, written many years after he had lived, breathed, and imbibed cafe culture, sometimes in the company of other writers. Chapter 15 provides a brief but piquant glimpse into the conversation that went on around the cafe tables. Hemingway recounts part of a conversation with fellow writer Evan Shipman about Russian writers, particularly Fyodor Dostoevsky. Here's a snippet from the conversation as Hemingway recounted it:
"I've been wondering about Dostoevsky," I said. "How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly and make you feel so deeply?"
"It can't be the translation," Evan said. "She makes the Tolstoy come out well written."
"I know. I remember how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garrett translation."
A little later in the conversation, Hemingway complains that "you can't read Dostoevsky over and over."
Hemingway is famous for leaving a lot unsaid in his fiction, and this nonfiction may reflect this same approach to writing. Reading this chapter, we don't know what other remarks may have emerged over the course of the conversation, but even this snippet is interesting, as it points to what writers and readers value. (Hemingway and Shipman, after all, were both.) Hemingway, rightly or wrongly, clearly found fault in something that Dostoevsky did on the page, something in the writing, but considered that this same author could evoke deep feeling. As both a reader and a writer myself, I suspect that Hemingway was reacting to Dostoevsky's style — perhaps his syntax or diction — which matters a great deal to many writers, especially Hemingway, who obviously sought to craft his sentences. I know that I have a soft spot for the lyrical prose of, say, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Thomas Wolfe, all master stylists, and find myself underwhelmed or even frustrated by the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Theodore Dreiser, whose work is insightful and provocative, but not especially lyrical.
What are we to take away from these not-so-solitary moments of some of our greatest writers? I think it exposes the social side of writing and the impact of writers on one another. The classical notion of a "Muse," a figure who supposedly inspires writers (and other creative people), may make it seem that art is a highly personal experience, and it is, but it's impossible (and unadvisable, I think) that a writer should be immune to the influence — in the form of conversation, behavior, and more — of other people, including other writers. In some cases, writers may consciously or unconsciously pick up and use ideas or aspects of style from the writers they know. In others, they may be writing against those other writers, asserting their own ideas or stylistic signatures to set themselves apart from others. It's hard to measure what kind of impact this kind of conversation has on a writer, but I don't think it's negligible. One might pick up ideas — about characterization or technique, for example — or develop an opinion about whether these other writers are worth imitating. If you find another writer's style repugnant, you might even make a concentrated effort to write very differently.
There's a potential downside to cafe culture, though. It's one thing to sit and dine and talk with other writers; that's the easy part, the fun part. The words flow easily, and there's no expectation that the sentences be polished or permanent. The "talking writer" doesn't have to create memorable (and consistent) characters, craft a coherent plot, or plumb the depths of the human experience. There's no editor. There's not even a broad audience — no one beyond one's dining or drinking partners — and there are no expectations among that audience of anything unified or even complete. The "talking writer" can just talk and, probably occasionally, hit on a witty remark. In fact, the "talking writer" may not be much of a writer at all — all chatter, but no matter.
The "writing writer," on the other hand, has to act, to focus (and keep focusing), to revise and often revise again. Novelist Peter De Vries captures the real labor of being an author in this wonderful line: "What I hate about writing is the paperwork."
Today, we can enjoy visiting some of these spots and imagining both the chatter and the matter. We can see, in our minds' eyes, some Surrealist writers dreaming up their manifesto and Emile Zola or Ernest Hemingway scribbling away at a table. Oh to be a fly — or a magot — on one of those walls!
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