Janet Flanner’s book Paris Was Yesterday was John Allemang’s inspiration and goal when he got into journalism.The Associated Press
Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, between Canada Day and Labour Day, Globe writers will share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
When Janet Flanner's Paris Was Yesterday caught my easily distracted attention in 1972, I was a 20-year-old student of Latin and Greek, longing to live in a bigger world than present-day Canada could offer. The study of far-off civilization, for an impressionable kid like me, was the highest form of escapism. But when I needed to flee the ancient world, desperate to rest my eyes from the dictionary drudgework that made a 2,000-year-old love poem accessible, I holed up in the student-union magazine room and lost myself in the idle chatter of topical English weeklies such as New Statesman and The Spectator.
I aspired to be a witty, all-knowing observer of life just like the writers I was reading, but had no idea how to get to there from here. I'd grown up in one of the new suburbs of Toronto that deliberately set out to have no antecedents, no distractions or encumbrances from the past. History was like the dust that settled on our Scandinavian-modern table if you didn't keep up with the cleaning – messy, awkward, out of place. My neighbours were Jewish but I never heard a word about the Holocaust.
So a reviewer in London praising a book about between-wars Paris written by a tough, stylish New Yorker was exactly right for a suburban kid who couldn't stand to be defined by his background. We all come from somewhere inappropriate to our expectations, I know now. That's the whole point, the impulse that pushes us onward if not upward. Janet Flanner's father was in the funeral business back in Indiana – her leap to Paris became a model for me of the precise pleasures that could be crafted from vague discontent.
At 33, settled into a Left Bank hotel that was a blackbird's song away from the church of St-Germain-des-Près, mingling with Hemingway, Joyce and a fashionable coterie of formidable lesbian writers, she felt so much older and wiser than I could ever hope to be when she began to write her Letter from Paris for The New Yorker in 1925. But being a fine-detail classics student with a weakness for the well-turned phrase, I took to her highly polished, epigrammatic style from the start. She said she based her prose on Edward Gibbon, which sounds absurd when you think that she's applying the lofty cadences of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to news of Josephine Baker's latest nude revue, gossipy chatter about a Dadaist poet's upscale marriage and an extended appreciation of the lightly attired dancer Isadora Duncan – "She lifted from their seats people who had never left theater seats before except to get up and go home."
But the fit is perfect. The dignity and detachment of her language elevates the everyday preoccupations of Paris that, because they're Parisian, are already so much more alluring than other cities' normality. Showgirls and courtesans on the make turn into literary figures, over-the-top parties become historical events, shabby financial frauds and seamy murders re-emerge as page-turning conspiracies that wouldn't be out of place at the fragrant court of one of the more debauched Roman emperors.
When I found my way into journalism after a long series of missteps and failed escapes, Flanner's Paris Was Yesterday was my inspiration and my goal. I loved the way she cut out the dull, orderly distinctions that still survive in journalism between high and low, light and serious, the Pansy Patch (as the arts were called when I broke in back in the 1980s) and A1, the Front Page, where you better play it straight if you want to be taken seriously.
Every time I reread Paris Was Yesterday, even though I've gone through it as often as I've passed through the real Paris (but with fewer courtesans and showgirls), I never know what's going to come next. I read it in bed, late at night, the best time and place for disappearance. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, entering the same terrain in a similar dreamlike state, seems so empty and fraudulent by comparison. Flanner was there, completely there, and so are you when she surveys the decline and fall of a cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge who'd modelled for Toulouse-Lautrec, danced naked for nobles, served bankers champagne from her slipper but ended up taming lions in a street fair and washing other people's dirty laundry.
Decades of showy and intimate Parisian history collapse before your eyes into tiny, perfect stories of outsized, imperfect lives. Over the next few pages, staving off sleep's banality, you're suddenly immersed in the chaotic crowd thronging the funeral procession for the First World War commander Maréchal Foch, where "orphan girls, tied to each other by a rope whose end was around the end of an anxious nun, were pulled up and down the curb like Alpine climbers" and overshadowed female spectators "saw the Marshal's caisson by turning their backs to it and looking into mirrors held aloft."
Details are everything, the writing teachers will tell you. But it's not just a lesson for writing. As Janet Flanner taught me so memorably, it's the best way to see life.