The Crazy Years: Paris In The Twenties

William Wiser, “The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties,” Atheneum, 1983, 249 pp.
This book captures the places and characters that I imagine when I walk the streets in Paris—it is the 1920s that I would most like to experience in this city and this book does a good job of reconstructing that time.

The book begins with an insane French president, Paul Deschanel, and the deaths of Modigliani and his lover and then on to Nancy Cunard, Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Hemingway, the Faulkners, Josephine Baker, Charles Lindbergh's grand triumph, Picasso, Isadora, Coco Chanel, the Crosbys, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, Dos Passos, Virgil Thomson, and many more.

The book ends appropriately with the 1929 stock market crash and an epilogue bringing us back to the time when the book was written.

My Notes:

Pg. 23: The 1920 Peace Conference brought the Big Four to the Hotel Crillon at the place de la Concorde, to squabble over questionable promises and secret treaties while Europe was being carved into a new design. Presidents and prime ministers dismantled two empires, deposed four kings, and brought forth three new republics.

Pg. 27: Picture of Ernest Hemingway’s’ WWI nurse Agnes von Kurowsky who is the inspiration for the nurse in “Farewell To Arms” and likely the only woman Hemingway really loved. She left him and married an Italian officer instead.

Pg. 29: The downward spiral of the French franc was an added inducement that lured the first wave of Americans to Paris after WWI. On 1 January 1920 the dollar stood at 26.76 francs – a single American dollar could purchase a month’s supply of bread. Following the 1924-26 financial crisis in France, the dollar would rise to a record high of fifty francs. As little as $80 purchased tourist-class passage across the Atlantic. A modest allowance from home would subsidize an American in Paris.

Pg. 45: Sylvia Beach had started Shakespeare and Company, her lending library of books in English, and mail-drop service – a kind of Left Bank American Express at 12 rue de l’Odeon, across the street from Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres. They would become life-long companions. This bookshop became a salon for just about every important painter, writer, poet, and musician in Paris.

Pg. 65: Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, lost a valise at the gare de Lyon containing his entire first years work; he had no copies.

Pg. 121: Gertrude Stein was one of the first to buy and champion the paintings of Matisse, Braque and Picasso.

Pg. 200: Gertrude Stein told her companion Alice that she had just realized that the difference between sentences and paragraphs is that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not.

Pg. 214: At the end of 1928 Ernest Hemingway’s father had committed suicide. Hemingway’s mother, at her son’s macabre request, sent him the pistol Dr. Hemingway had shot himself with – a grim trophy the writer would brood over.