An American in Paris

Good Americans, when they die," wrote the artist Thomas Gold Appleton, "go to Paris." Poetically, if not theologically, he was right. Paris has been a source of endless inspiration to Americans, especially their writers.

Throughout the 20th century, no city in the world can claim to have nurtured so much American talent. Almost all the great writers of the post-war years seem to have had a Parisian schooling; Hemingway, Truman Capote, Irwin Shaw, JD Salinger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and countless others.

What had become of their Paris? One weekend, I decided to find out, and boarded Eurostar for a 186mph kick-start to a leisurely investigation encompassing fine food, iconic, sometimes bizarre hotels and dust-licked bookshops. The train was as good a place as any to contemplate the literary trail.

France unrolls magnificently from the moment one is out of the tunnel: great swoops of chalk, pink roofs and huge, angular cattle.

It was a timely reminder that this was "abroad", a fact often lost on the writers. Few of the Americans learnt French or understood the politics, and most got by on a sense of abandon. The train was also a reminder of the travails of their travel.

Nowadays, it's an easy ride, a simple whoosh from London to Paris, all in the time it takes to eat breakfast. The statistics of this transition are overwhelming; every day Eurostar staff wash 36,000 glasses and 80,000 pieces of cutlery. It was different then. Burroughs had to bum his way to Paris from a squat in Tangiers, and Salinger arrived on a tank in 1944.

First Impressions

The first sign that things are different are the statues at the Gare du Nord: enormous armed women, sportingly naked from the navel up. In Paris, sex sells, and everything - from tickets to yoghurt - comes with a faceful of rump. You either love this or hate it, and the Americans loved it.

While the British have always assumed Paris is a City of Love - and feel constantly spurned - the Yanks are more realistic, enjoying it for what it is: an adventure. As far as the writers were concerned, it also helped that there was no McCarthyism, no prudery and plenty of hooch.

"It was a silly useless life," wrote Harold Stearns, "and I have missed it every day since." I began my tour in Montmartre, just as the Americans had. In 1918, thousands of them, mostly black, had settled there. I could see why. The 18th arrondissement still felt like an island bobbing around several hundred feet above the city. Almost everybody living there had exiled themselves from the ordinary.

All the dogs were dalmatians, and most people did something baroque, such as gilding, lute-making or barometer repair. I saw a tramp wearing a pair of headphones made of rags and wire, as if unable to bear any further intrusion into this world of his own. I ate at the Caf‚ des Deux Moulins, which was still raffishly arty.

Most of the customers seemed to be in the throes of either creative breakthrough or persistent hangover. The woman next to me, a dancer, ate like a bird and smoked like a fish. Although the air was filmy and blue, and the walls were crusted in yellow, the food was exquisite: lemony swordfish, rocket and chŠvre.

That's Paris's trick, I suppose; just when you think it's about to be appalling, it does something wonderful and you love it all over again. Among the first Americans to appreciate this sleight of hand were Scott Fitzgerald, Pound and Cummings, along with their muse, Josephine Baker.

She was performing a few blocks away, at the Folies BergŠre, wearing only a string of bananas. Miss Baker had, as it happened, stayed at my hotel on St Germain. It's easy to see why she'd let Paris go to her head.

The H“tel Lutetia is as zany now as it was in the 1920s; it has stone vines wriggling up the front, and the bars are like great caverns of art deco, with cubist chairs and surrealist sculptures (a head of cogs and a boatless propeller). Every evening a jazz pianist plays a bright-red grand, and every morning a sumptuous breakfast is served up on tiny square plates.

The Americans still love it, and so do the French. One night, a woman turned up wearing what looked like a parachute and a basket of ocelots. But the best of the American ghosts are to be found downtown, at the Ritz. This is the sublime end of the hospitality spectrum.

With its gold light switches and swan-shaped taps, the Ritz fits neatly into the love-it-or-hate-it debate. In 1944, it was "liberated" by Ernest Hemingway, who immediately bought dry martinis for his 50 guerrillas.

It wasn't long before the others joined him: JD Salinger (enjoying his "best few minutes of the war"), Robert Capa, Irwin Shaw (who wrote The Young Lions) and Marlene Dietrich, who sang on the edge of Hemingway's bath, until she tired of his language and changed hotels.

There's still a bar, reverentially Hemingway-esque and decorated with fishing rods and sharks' jaws. It's a good place to nurse a cocktail, taking it gently at a euro a sip.

Hem had taken nothing gently and behaved appallingly most of the time; he tried to bed Simone de Beauvoir, composed a loud song about his wife Martha Gellhorn's vagina, punched Malraux (France's future minister of culture), drank six bottles of scotch with Sartre and gave Picasso a spattered shirt from a German he'd killed.

When his new mistress, Mary Welsh, tried to curb his drinking, he ordered the barman to invent an odourless cocktail. It was clearly a success. "Bloody Mary," he told the barman, "didn't smell a thing." NOT ALL Americans like the Ritz. I once heard a fashionista say it needed a swipe with a baseball bat.

Even Hemingway was given to moments of overload, and once - after a skinful - machinegunned his bathroom. Like most of the American writers, I usually found myself gravitating back to the Left Bank. It's more spontaneous than elsewhere, with its lime trees and crooked streets and views over Notre Dame.

There was a cluster of literary bars near my hotel: Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp and the Caf‚ de Flore. People still squash inside, in the hope of seeing a writer, but at œ15 a salad, these days it's mostly mink and parachute. Things were different in the 1950s, when, according to Capote, it was quite usual for a budding writer to find himself face down in a cafe. "Despite the waterfall hangovers," he wrote, "I was under the impression I was having a damn good time."

Paris: Food for the mind

As I wandered happily into the Latin Quarter, it occurred to me how little the Americans had taken away. Paris was food for the mind, a treat for the senses, but seldom gave them a plot. Perhaps, like all outsiders, the Americans could enjoy the surprises, but couldn't assemble it all as a whole; the cyclists with ladders, drunks covered in pigeons, the abundance of sex.

Few ever wrote about Paris, whether in fiction or memoirs. James Jones wrote his Pacific War classic The Thin Red Line (1962) on the leafy Ile St Louis, while Richard Wright and Chester Himes wrote about the predicament of the American black. The "beatniks", meanwhile, wrote about little that made any sense at all.

It took me a while to find their dive, the Beat Hotel. The old alleyway GŒt-le-Coeur is now clean and cobbled, and the little hotel gleams with polish and brass. Around its ochre walls are old pictures of Ginsberg, Burroughs and Gregory Corso. During the 1950s, they represented the new generation of American writer, drugged, marginal and thrillingly weird, and lived here in conditions of exorbitant squalor.

They had one cold tap between them and boiled mussels in their room, horrifying their French visitors by peeing in the sink.

Somehow, despite the stink, they'd produced The Naked Lunch and a few oddities for our language (such as "flower power" and "heavy metal"). Then they left and the place was redeveloped. I noticed from the visitors' book that Ginsberg hadn't returned for 40 years: "Gone are the rats," he wrote, "and so are we."

A few streets away, on Rue de la Boucherie, is a bookshop that marks the end of this literary trail. Shakespeare & Company is an odd place, with beds among the books. (Any wandering soul can sleep here, in return for a few hours at the till.) The owner, George Whitman, is 91, and lives in the attic, where he singes his hair and writes tracts for his "Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart".

He arrived in Paris 60 years ago, and remembers most of the writers since then. (According to George, when Burroughs read out his work, people didn't know whether to laugh or be sick.) Has it been a love affair, his life in Paris? The city is more like the set for Romeo and Juliet, he said, forever young, "but I have become like King Lear, slowly losing my wits".

John Gimlette travelled with Eurostar. He is the author of Theatre of Fish (Hutchinson œ16.99)

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