Geniuses Together American Writers in Paris in the 1920s by Humphrey Carpenter

Detailed and passionate, surely Geniuses Together American Writers in Paris in the 1920s

by Humphrey Carpenter tells a story pretty profound and interesting of all the writers and creatives emigrated, better, expatriated because of the Prohibitionist Era from the USA in the Old Europe and precisely in the lazy, romantic Paris.

But Carpenter, intelligently doesn't start his trip from the 1920s but from the 1770s and before when Franklin and before, other diplomats, spent a lot of time in France, trying to cemeted a good friendship with people of the Old World and at the same time enjoying Europe.

Henry James did the same and Gertrude Stein was substantially born and grown up in France.

But why most Americans picked up as first choices Paris in the 1920s? The most important intellectuals (you will remember when Hemingway at first thought as first option Italy when he married Hadley but then someone else suggested him: "If you want to work seriously goes to Paris because you'll find the best writers and people in grade of being helpful") choses this Capital because Paris represented what the USA were not anymore: the US were becoming a materialistic land and place and in this capital, in the Old World, they could find also a more normal dimension where living well meant also appreciate the good and little things of life.

Who represents well the so-called Lost Generation baptized in this way one day by an irritated Gertrude Stein to a shocked Ernest Hemingway? Not this one, because later he realized all his dreams and more although he couldn't totally win his internal demons but as adds the author Harold Stearns, poor and and broken.

These people were real geniuses? The author thinks that "The geniuses had mostly turned turned out not to be geniuses after all. Yet they had been geniuses at being together, drinking together, sleeping together, and quarrelling together; and that was something worth remembering."

Not only: they were extraordinary people. My fascination for Sylvia Beach and her work with James Joyce proves that dedication and help exists in this world. Sylvia did this world and the other for Joyce but Joyce after all when signed for Random House remembered few of the help received by her, telling just that: "All she ever did was to make me a present of the best years of her life."

No words...

Without Sylvia Beach Joyce surely couldn't never have seen published the Ulysses, a book not loved by part of intellectuals of that time, and the Dubliners. Let's add that personally if the course of history would have been totally different I wouldn't never been traumatized the first year of english at the high school when I still knew few words for reading the Dubliners the book choosen by our english teacher (I just studied french) and Joyce wouldn't never been reason of frequent tachicardias per two decades when I saw, terrorized, his works displayed in book stalls or bookshops. I know that I would have been traumatized by another author, of course, there wasn't escapism in this sense. I made some peace with him, bought an used copy of The Dubliners a year and half ago but it was very hard.

Ernest Hemingway was  another altruistic man, and, back to the book of great help  bringing the copies in the American territory. That book, the Ulysses was banned in the USA. There was a solidariety that didn't take in consideration money. Sylvia Beach helped Joyce financially, but also providing him good doctors for his eyes's problems but later Joyce didn't remember it when he became rich thanks to Random House for what I read.

Enjoy this book, enjoy Hemingway, Robert McAlmon the publisher, Pablo Picasso, enjoy Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, the joy and altruism of Sylvia Beach, her love for books and authors; enjoy a fantastic moment, that after a while knew an end. When Hemingeay left, when people moved somewhere else for a reason or another. But... This historical parisienne's period for all these expatriates was remarkably important and will always be remembered for being an exceptional moment in the history of literature, because the most prominent thinkers interacted, lived, loved, hated, dreamt, were born as established authors all together in Paris, changing the face of the capital thanks to their influence and customs, and the one of the world and literature. Let's just think at the new writing-style created by Hemigway.

This one has been one of the most beautiful books I read about the 1920s in Paris. Written with passion, love and desire of telling to you something more, highly and warmly suggested to everyone.

Anna Maria Polidori