Paris in an American

by David Benjamin 

 

“They’ll never want to see a rake or plow/ And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?/ How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm/ After they’ve seen Paree?”

―Sam Lewis & Joe Young 

 

PARIS — Among my grandfather Archie’s four brothers, my favorite was Uncle Harry, partly because he had been somewhere else, and mostly because that somewhere was Paris.

France.

It had changed him. 

Harry was a farmer, with a spread just outside of Tomah, with all the accessories that go along with tilling the earth. Tractor, plow, harrow, fields and crops, tons of hay, a feedlot, a barn full of cows, cow manure and barn cats, even a few horses. And there was Lou, the absolute essence of the Wisconsin farmer’s wife. She was bigger than Harry, blowsy, affectionate and frank, bursting with so much ebullience and vitality that she was among that rare breed of people who give off the impression that they’re going to outlive God.

Because of the cats, cows, horses and Lou—not to mention Lou’s cooking—I loved visiting Harry’s farm. But I think I loved it a little more because of Paris.

Harry had been mustered out of Tomah by the American Expeditionary Forces in 1918, just about when the The War to End All Wars was petering out but President Wilson was still loading ships with doughboys and sailing them off to the Western Front. Because of the Great Influenza, those boats came to be known as “death ships” by troops who had to consign thousands of their fellow soldiers, felled by the flu, over the rail and into the clutches of Davy Jones.

Harry survived that. And he survived the war because it was pretty much over when he landed at Le Havre. All he got from the only sea cruise of his life was a madcap billet in Gay Paree. Harry hadn’t bargained for that—or for much else at that point in his life—but he took Paris and ran with it.

I don’t recall much of what Harry spilled about his Paris days, or how many there were. But my impression was that “Champagne Harry” partook of every pleasure, thrill, surprise and sin that the city had to offer. Like his brush with the flu, he survived it all and came to Tomah sated, nostalgic and loquacious. However, I never got the feeling that he wanted to go back. He was wised-up enough, perhaps by his whirlwind sojourn in the big city, that he knew he could never replicate his postwar adventure (especially with Lou along to cramp his style). So he chose to tuck it safely into his locket of romantic memories.

Nevertheless, something about Harry set him apart, a twinkle in his eye, a joie de vivre that squirmed inside his overalls. If asked to think about it, he’d stoutly deny he was any different from any other dirt farmer in Wisconsin but … well, if there was any truth to the mystique of the place, he’d by and by intimate that he’d been to Paris, and you can’t come away from that the same as you were before. 

Harry and the swarm of AEF vets who’d been through the flu and Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry and the Battles of the Marne, were the first invasion of Paris by a whole cross-section of regular American wage-earners. Before the war, Paris had been primarily a playground for a mercantile aristocracy of American swells who came in search of luxury, sophistication and a cosmopolitan “culture” for which France had become the world standard. 

World War I suddenly flooded Paris with blue-collar Yanks who sought, after what they’d been through, little more than wine, women and God-knows-what. Many, like Harry, came back with tales of love, cuisine, spectacle and discovery that turned Paris into a tangible possibility, a place to go if only we could afford it. Staying behind in Paris, a postwar “Lost Generation” of expatriate artists, writers, musicians and journalists—many of them risen from the same hardscrabble roots as Harry’s—poured out dispatches from the City of Light, fleshing it out, lending it a sense of reality and a wink of temptation.

Another war brought another wave of GIs, and after them, a world-dominating, affluent America that couldn’t be kept away. The transition of Paris, from a distant dream to the foremost tourist destination in the world, particularly for Uncle Harry’s Yank successors, has enriched the city immensely. But it has also been the source of a naggingly ambivalent French attitude toward Americans.

I sense it here all the time. Even now, I feel the timeless relief, release and gratitude of Parisians who lined the Champs Elysées to cheer, wave flags, kiss and hug the American troops who had in August, 1944, freed them from the darkest days in all of French history. And I feel the dismay of Parisians who wonder why, in September, 1944, we didn’t leave and not come back but—instead—kept coming, in droves, in sneakers, sweat pants and “I’m With Stupid” t-shirts.

Parisians are entitled to a little attitude about “cultural hegemony.” Throughout the 19th century, notwithstanding its political ups and down, France defined chic for the civilized world. French was the language of diplomacy, a basic necessity for anyone aspiring to appear erudite, artistic, sophisticated and cool. Even Britain, whose empire stretched from China to the Canadian commonwealth, required French fluency of its emissaries, officers, princesses and aristocrats, lest they be seen as rubes and thugs in the throne rooms of the kings they had crushed.

But, in 1945, France reached a troubled turning point. It had lost a war in which its leaders had collaborated with the most barbaric enemy in its history. Its colonies were rebellious and its cultural grip on the world was fast receding. Within a decade, the influence of a nation that had given the world Bizet, Saint-Saens, Ravel and Satie, Victor Hugo, Balzac and Proust, Delacroix, Ingres, Monet and Matisse, had been subsumed by Walt Disney and Elvis Presley. French filmmakers were mimicking Jerry Lewis.

Ever since, America has stuck in France’s craw. The French still love us, but they would prefer to do so from a distance. They need the money that all the trampling philistines from Kansas spend in Paris, but they wish we could be a little—well, a lot—less intrusive. And they really wish we’d dress a little better.

After thirty years, I’m less intrusive than I used to be, and probably much less than Uncle Harry (who, I suspect, didn’t care). But as soon as I open my mouth, even speaking my rudimentary French, I’m busted. They know where I’m from.

As a regular resident, I’m as torn as the natives toward my presence here. On the one hand, I’m reverent toward this city’s wondrous history and its status as the vessel of the world’s finest art, best cuisine, most breathtaking architecture. On the other hand, I’m a patriot, proud to come from the country that taught the French how to govern its people with liberty, equality and fraternity. And I deplore France’s official and popular denials, spawned in colonialism, of a racism that has been ingrained in French culture. I chafe against a bigotry reminiscent of its American cousin but unacknowledged as a national illness that could be mortal.

I take pleasure, when I’m here, in making fun of American tourists—their clothes, their noise, their taste, their bizarre tendency to bring children to the world’s most adult city. Watching Harry discover Paris would have been a gas! But I also enjoy picking at Parisians, their prejudices, pretense and peccadilloes, of which they have so many. The French might rightly insist that I, a foreigner who can’t even properly pronounce millefeuille, should keep my opinions to myself. 

To which, of course, harkening back to the friendship between Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette and his Yankee BFF, Tom Jefferson, I can only say, “C’mon, mon ami. It’s a free country.”