A Literary Digression

I was in a Paris mood after reading Les Miserables.  When I got around to it I found several books on the shelves, The Dawn of the Belle Époque, Paris Was Yesterday, and Paris in the Fifties.  The first devotes a chapter to each year of the last three decades of the 19^th century, running from the war and the Commune up through L’ Affair Dreyfus.  The third is a personal history by Stanley Karnow. Like me when you see the name Stanley Karnow you think “the Philippines,” but like every self-respecting journalist of the era, Karnow spent time in Paris after the war.  I haven’t gotten to it yet – I am reading in chronological order – so I don’t yet know how Stanley spent his time there.  Just now I am reading Janet Flanner. 

Flanner arrived in Paris in 1925, and spent most of the remainder of her life (she died in 1978) living there.  Shortly after arriving, at the urging of Harold Ross, she began sending him biweekly dispatches in the form or letters, which ran in the New Yorker for years and years.  In Flanner things are opening or closing, beginning or ending.  Josephine Baker: opening.  Isadora Duncan: dying.  The flea market and the Lapin Agile: closing.  The trial of Frank Harris for publishing My Life and Loves Volume II: opening. 

Before talking about Harris, I should mention the death of Anatole France.  France won the Nobel Prize for literature, and his funeral was a bigger event than the funeral of Victor Hugo, but, Flanner notes, a year after his death there was no public ceremony, and she saw him fading from memory.  I haven’t read him, have you?  I have certainly heard of him, but couldn’t name any of his books.  While looking him up I stumbled upon the name Ialdabaoth.  Did you know that some Christian sects (my definition of “Christian” may be broader than yours, but I have the advantage of perspective) think Ialdabaoth created the world?  I had some business cards printed years ago that read “Jake Jacobs – Savant.”  Now I have the urge (there is a pun coming, wait for it!) to print some that read “Jake Jacobs – Demiurge.”  (Was it worth the wait?)

If Anatole France is forgotten, what of Frank Harris?  Harris got into trouble for My Life and Loves.  It wasn’t the “life” portions that caused the problem.  His life was interesting.  Jack Lemmon plays him as a young man in the Glenn Ford Western Cowboy, which is based upon a small part of Harris’ autobiography.  Recently Harris turned up as a character in the staged reading here about the trials of Oscar Wilde.  That one man could be both Chicago bellhop turned fledgling cowhand, and Oscar Wilde’s best buddy hints at the fascinating life he lived.  One anecdote of his has stuck like chewing gum to a corner of my memory.

In his youth he traveled the Continent, and in Germany found himself in a street fight.  Harris was not large, and his opponent was an outsized thug who would have preferred to settle matters with a sabre.  Harris claimed to have learned a bit about fisticuffs, and knew the secret: an uppercut to the chin.  This secret has verification from no less an authority than Sgt. Nick Fury.  In one of the early adventures of the Howling Commandos Fury is battling Sgt. Bull McGiveney of the rival Maulers.  McGiveney lands a solid shot to Fury’s gut, and is amazed that our hero doesn’t crumble. “A man wears his kayo button on his chin,” Fury growls.  Maybe, but medical experts, and my friend Roberto Pedreira whose knowledge of martial arts is encyclopedic, say it is a lateral movement of the head that causes concussion; a straight on uppercut is not as effective as a solid hook.  In any event the German authorities of the mid-19^th century were not accustomed to seeing knockouts on the street, and Harris was charged with striking his opponent with his cane. He won acquittal by demonstrating his technique in court.

Or so he says.  Harris is suspected of artful embellishment here and there.

His loves were as interesting as his life.  It was their detailed, explicit accounting that got Harris into trouble.  When I read him in the sixties it was because Grove Press had won a censorship battle first fought in Paris in the twenties.  From his lubricious memoirs I also recall that, like Casanova, who was known as Monsieur Seis Fois, Harris claimed he needed no refractory period but could keep right on going without pause.  Once again there might be a bit of embellishment.

Another death noted by Flanner is that of Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven of Greenwich Village, Paris, and Berlin.  Often impoverished, she was momentarily flush, and so could afford the gas that accidentally asphyxiated her and her mother.  The Baroness was, according to Flanner, possessed of a magnificent torso, putting her in great demand as an artist’s model.  She also, to celebrate the birth of modern art, shaved her head, then painted and lacquered it.

While magnificent torsi are not uncommon, noblewomen with shaved, painted, and lacquered heads are somewhat unusual.  Which brings me to Alexander King.  If France is unread, and Harris forgotten, King is the answer to a trivia question in an experts round.  King’s moments of fame came in the late fifties and early sixties.  He was a frequent guest on the Tonight Show when it was hosted by Jack Paar.  Many of you never saw Carson, so you will be flabbergasted to learn that when Johnny was hired the show was already, by television standards, venerable.  Paar was a force on early TV who quit over the censorship of a toilet joke where the initials W.C. for “wayside chapel” are confused with the same for “water closet.”

King became a guest because of some autobiographies that were bestsellers: May This House Be Safe From Tigers; Mine Enemy Grows Older; and I Should Have Kissed Her More, all out of print, which is a shame.  King was an artist, writer, and editor. He was also a heroin addict for many years, his books coming after he cleaned up.  He knew many of the more interesting people of his time, famous, and not so famous.  One of his stories was about a noblewoman he knew in Greenwich Village who shaved her head, painted it pink, and lacquered it.  She fell in love with William Carlos Williams. She had never met Williams, but his poetry, and his name, inflamed her.  Then she learned he was, when not writing poetry, a physician in New Jersey with a wife and children.  The wife and children probably wouldn’t have bothered the Baroness, but the fact that he was bourgeois and suburban!  Horrible!  She picketed his house, but then realized that he was too pedestrian to apprehend what she was about.  “It was that name that fooled me! He isn’t Latin at all,” she told King.  She repainted her head purple and relacquered it, then wrote the poem “The Rape of the Cast-Iron Maiden,” and moved on.

As we shall: me to Karnow, and you perchance to Harris and King?

 Les Miserables

Les Miserables Movie

Dawn of the Belle Epoque

Paris Was Yesterday

Paris in the Fifties

My Life and Loves

Cowboy

May This House Be Safe from Tigers

Mine Enemy Grows Older

I Should Have Kissed Her More