Delectations by Alec Waugh

During last year’s PEN Club Congress in New York—PEN stands for Poets, Editors, Essayists, Novelists—the delegate from the Ivory Coast suggested that the next congress should be held in Abidjan. His invitation was warmly and gratefully accepted and quite a number of us planned our summer in terms of a charter flight from Paris on the last Friday in July. It was a bitter disappointment when the project was abruptly canceled in mid-May. What a reshaping of our schedules; which for me had an added corollary of irritation. I should have to put in an extra three days in Paris. To most people that would not seem a fate worse than death and forty years ago I should have been delighted by that bonus dividend. All my life I have been an ardent Francophile. In my early years I soaked myself in the literature of nineteenth-century France—Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant—and to me France in those days was Paris. In a German prisoner of war camp, I pored over the illustrations of the Albert Michel Edition of Bel-Ami. One day I would tread those boulevards. I went there for the first time in the summer of 1922. I was bound for the Riviera and I fancied that I had enough francs to finance three days on the Left Bank. I was enchanted. I quaffed my morning bock in the Rotonde; I patronized the bookstalls on the quais; I paced the galleries of the Louvre and the Orangerie; I lunched in the Café de la Paix; I watched the Seine curve between its flowered banks; I sauntered round the Promenade of the Folies Bergeres. Just as Bel-Ami had done, I explored the legend of the Chabanais. As soon as I reached Cannes, I cabled home for cash. During the early Twenties when I had a part-time office job in London, I could take only brief holidays abroad and I sought the sun, in Italy or the South of France. But I always spent two or three days in Paris on my way south, invariably spending so much in the process that I had to economize in Nice and Florence. “I’d have had a better time,” I’d think, “if I hadn’t stopped off in Paris.”

By 1926 I had begun to feel that it was time I gave up playing Rugby football. I was doing well enough as a writer to resign my office desk. Why not, I thought, take an apartment in Paris, spend the autumn and the winter there, returning to England for the summer and the cricket? It seemed a very feasible proposition. How different my life would have been had I accepted it. The Paris of the Twenties which is so legendary now, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald; of the Shakespeare Book Shop, of transition and Ford Madox Ford! I could so easily have been a part of it. But the influence of Maugham had become more potent than that of Maupassant. The palm trees and the lagoons of the Pacific whispered their siren summons. Paris could wait. But Paris is an exacting mistress who will not wait. If one once misses one’s chance with her, one misses it forever. That postman does not knock twice, and by the time I had finished my long round-the-world trip to the Pacific, I had begun to put down those roots in the United States that have grown deeper and stronger with the years. Perhaps if one is a townsman— as I am—one can really only love one city other than one’s own and for me that city is New York. I have never since my earliest days felt foreign in it. On my first lengthy visit, I took an apartment for four months in a block at the corner of Lexington and 36th. And if you live in an apartment, doing your own marketing, taking out your laundry, employing your own weekly help, you become automatically a part of the city’s life. It is because I have never done just that in Paris, that I have never been part of Paris. And it was for that reason that as the Thirties passed, I began to feel a mounting resentment towards Paris. I felt cheated. I always spent more money than I meant and never seemed to get my money’s worth. Why spend as much there in three days as I would in ten in Beaune or Brittany or Beaulieu? I started to say all the things that it was becoming fashionable to say, that Paris was not France, that the Parisians were mean and avaricious, shortmindedly killing the goose that should be laying them golden eggs. And of course I recognize it now, I was being monstrously unjust to Paris, as one is when one is jealous, and I was jealous of the rich life that was quivering on every side of me but of which I could not become a part, because I had not way back in 1926 served my apprenticeship. Cities like Paris, London and New York withhold their secrets from the six-day vacationer. You have to be a sojourner, not a visitor. Paris, I realize now, is one of the things in life that I have missed and it is just because it could have meant so much to me, because it had already come to mean so much to me through its writers and its painters, that at one time I felt illogically resentful. There is nothing to be done about it now. I realize that. I have grown resigned. As I stroll along the Seine, relishing its unmatched beauty, I try to savor with appropriate nostalgia the sense of missed opportunities. Once I spent in transit a night at Orly Airport, rather than go down to the boulevards and cafés. Now I have ceased trying to avoid it. Yet even so when I learned later in June that the PEN Congress was after all to be held in Abidjan, there was added to my general excitement over a trip to an as-yet-unvisited part of the world, a mild but definite relief that I should not have to spend a week in Paris.

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Alec Waugh

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During last year’s PEN Club Congress in New York—PEN stands for Poets, Editors, Essayists, Novelists—the delegate from the Ivory Coast suggested that the next congress should be held in Abidjan. His invitation was warmly and gratefully accepted and quite a number of us planned our summer in terms of a charter flight from Paris on the last Friday in July. It was a bitter disappointment when the project was abruptly canceled in mid-May. What a reshaping of our schedules; which for me had an added corollary of irritation. I should have to put in an extra three days in Paris. To most people that would not seem a fate worse than death and forty years ago I should have been delighted by that bonus dividend. All my life I have been an ardent Francophile. In my early years I soaked myself in the literature of nineteenth-century France—Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant—and to me France in those days was Paris. In a German prisoner of war camp, I pored over the illustrations of the Albert Michel Edition of Bel-Ami. One day I would tread those boulevards. I went there for the first time in the summer of 1922. I was bound for the Riviera and I fancied that I had enough francs to finance three days on the Left Bank. I was enchanted. I quaffed my morning bock in the Rotonde; I patronized the bookstalls on the quais; I paced the galleries of the Louvre and the Orangerie; I lunched in the Café de la Paix; I watched the Seine curve between its flowered banks; I sauntered round the Promenade of the Folies Bergeres. Just as Bel-Ami had done, I explored the legend of the Chabanais. As soon as I reached Cannes, I cabled home for cash. During the early Twenties when I had a part-time office job in London, I could take only brief holidays abroad and I sought the sun, in Italy or the South of France. But I always spent two or three days in Paris on my way south, invariably spending so much in the process that I had to economize in Nice and Florence. “I’d have had a better time,” I’d think, “if I hadn’t stopped off in Paris.”

By 1926 I had begun to feel that it was time I gave up playing Rugby football. I was doing well enough as a writer to resign my office desk. Why not, I thought, take an apartment in Paris, spend the autumn and the winter there, returning to England for the summer and the cricket? It seemed a very feasible proposition. How different my life would have been had I accepted it. The Paris of the Twenties which is so legendary now, the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald; of the Shakespeare Book Shop, of transition and Ford Madox Ford! I could so easily have been a part of it. But the influence of Maugham had become more potent than that of Maupassant. The palm trees and the lagoons of the Pacific whispered their siren summons. Paris could wait. But Paris is an exacting mistress who will not wait. If one once misses one’s chance with her, one misses it forever. That postman does not knock twice, and by the time I had finished my long round-the-world trip to the Pacific, I had begun to put down those roots in the United States that have grown deeper and stronger with the years. Perhaps if one is a townsman— as I am—one can really only love one city other than one’s own and for me that city is New York. I have never since my earliest days felt foreign in it. On my first lengthy visit, I took an apartment for four months in a block at the corner of Lexington and 36th. And if you live in an apartment, doing your own marketing, taking out your laundry, employing your own weekly help, you become automatically a part of the city’s life. It is because I have never done just that in Paris, that I have never been part of Paris. And it was for that reason that as the Thirties passed, I began to feel a mounting resentment towards Paris. I felt cheated. I always spent more money than I meant and never seemed to get my money’s worth. Why spend as much there in three days as I would in ten in Beaune or Brittany or Beaulieu? I started to say all the things that it was becoming fashionable to say, that Paris was not France, that the Parisians were mean and avaricious, shortmindedly killing the goose that should be laying them golden eggs. And of course I recognize it now, I was being monstrously unjust to Paris, as one is when one is jealous, and I was jealous of the rich life that was quivering on every side of me but of which I could not become a part, because I had not way back in 1926 served my apprenticeship. Cities like Paris, London and New York withhold their secrets from the six-day vacationer. You have to be a sojourner, not a visitor. Paris, I realize now, is one of the things in life that I have missed and it is just because it could have meant so much to me, because it had already come to mean so much to me through its writers and its painters, that at one time I felt illogically resentful. There is nothing to be done about it now. I realize that. I have grown resigned. As I stroll along the Seine, relishing its unmatched beauty, I try to savor with appropriate nostalgia the sense of missed opportunities. Once I spent in transit a night at Orly Airport, rather than go down to the boulevards and cafés. Now I have ceased trying to avoid it. Yet even so when I learned later in June that the PEN Congress was after all to be held in Abidjan, there was added to my general excitement over a trip to an as-yet-unvisited part of the world, a mild but definite relief that I should not have to spend a week in Paris.