Paris Was Yesterday

by Janet Flanner. Harvest / HBJ. 232 pages.

It's tempting to want to write about Janet Flanner the way she wrote about Paris, but I hope I'm wise enough to know that I'd die from the effort. Ms. Flanner's exquisite prose was a staple of the New Yorker for almost fifty years, writing dispatches from Paris that provided a glimpse into France's artistic, social and political scene. Paris Was Yesterday is a collection of these letters spanning most of the interwar years, from 1925 - 1939, and it's a work almost without peer. As a stylist, Janet Flanner is a marvel while her perceptive and wry take on all subjects, be it Ulysses or Hitler, makes for an engaging read.


 According to Brenda Wineapple, Ms. Flanner's biographer, Janet Flanner herself was at least as colorful as the folks she wrote about - apparently she fled to Paris with her lover where they could live without fear of persecution. Although some famous names make it into this book - Hemingway, James Joyce, ,Mata Hari, Edith Wharton - there is true wonder to be found in her stylish essays on those obscure figures who once caught Parisian eyes. Screenwriters take note: there are nearly a dozen potential Hollywood blockbusters hiding in Ms. Flanner's annals of history, including such colorful figures as Lydia Stahl (an unassuming international spy), Jean de Koven (a murdered American tourist) and Marthe Hanau, a Bernie Madoff style schemer who Ms. Flanner called the "most inventive, brainiest, most convincing confidence woman modern France ever produced". 

But it's Paris itself that is the real star, a city which celebrates art, proved an escape depot for American ex-pats and boasted a Lord High Executioner still known as "Monseiur de Paris". With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the city is headed into the terrors of WWII and Ms. Flanner's reveals the city itself had some inkling of it, although a year too early. In 1938, Parisians seemed terrified of war; but by the summer of 1939, there was confidence that "the European landscape can be clearly seen". Most wrenching is Ms. Flanner's own description of the city's conviction that war, if it came, would be an immediate disaster for Germany and that the Americans would be the first to send soldiers overseas.

Whether or not you can read Paris Was Yesterday in one sitting depends on how willing you are for your brain to skip quickly from one topic to another: the book may be an ideal travel companion, as it's lack of singular narrative means you can go days between chapters without missing a beat. But reading the book in one sitting may prove the more rewarding task. Although at first glance it is a disparate collection of stories about long forgotten celebrities, artists, criminals and politicians, as a book it emerges as a biography of a city and an era now forever gone.