February 20, 2003
Janet Flanner and Roni Horn
I have returned to Janet Flanner's Paris Journals. A New Yorker columnist for fifty years, these slim paperback volumes collect her dispatches in chronological order. She seems the quintessential New Yorker contributor: equally interested in politics and the arts, widely read, and with a casual writing manner that nonetheless conveys a lot of information. I first read the volume dedicated to the years 1965-70 as a way to understand a little bit more about the events that led to the May 1968 student riots. Her writing didn't offer the insights I looked for but did a fantastic job of narrating the end of de Gaulle's regime.
Now I'm back to the book narrating the years 1944-1955. It reads surprisingly fast, and after less than twenty-four hours, I find myself seventy-odd pages in. To continue my newly-minted tradition of offering an excerpted paragraph, here is Flanner's take on the first post-liberation election, in 1945:
Never before in living memory has a bitterly contested French election made a trio of rivals so happy as the Communists, the Socialists, and the new Popular Republicans are right now. One way or another, all of them have just won in France's first election since before the war. The world waited over the weekend, with unusually flattering attention, to see how France would choose. France chose three things, all different. Madame La Quatriéme République is starting out like a woman with three hands, two Left and one Right, the Communists and Socialists being on the side closer to her newly reawakened revolutionary heart and the Popular Republicans on her other, purse-carrying side.
Much like my admiration for Martin Amis, noted below, I am deeply impressed by Flanner's ability to fashion with words a vivid, clear image of an enormously complex situation. I look forward to the moment when I read the last page of the volume that covers 1956-1964 and the two jaunts through postwar Parisian history join together in my mind. Then, perhaps, it might be a good idea to return to Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography.