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There was a time – and
I don’t know when it ended – when if you were self-assured, had the necessary
leisure and some ability to write, you could write about pretty much anything
which took your fancy, expressing your opinions or sentiments, often in short
literary form (the essay), and you would have a decent chance of finding a
publisher who would put you into print. You would then become a contributor to
the genre of Belles Lettres.
At some point, belles lettres got put under pressure
and specifically by professionalised academic writing where it was obligatory
to distinguish fact and opinion and, in either case, obligatory
to situate what you were saying fully and explicitly in the field of what other
people had been saying - and preferably, very recently saying. The footnote and
the Bibliography are the outward markers of academic writing - you might even
say invented to mark the difference
with belles lettres.
Publishers - and I
suppose readers too - became wary of belles
lettres. What was left from what academic writing had taken over was
fiction, poetry and journalism, including the journalism of book reviews.
Nowadays, the last bastion of belles
lettres is the serious book review or essay in one of the serious Reviews: The New York Review of Books, The London
Review of Books, The Financial Times, and so on.
Lauren Elkin situates
her book within academic writing by providing copious notes – which I felt under
no pressure to read – and a fairly long Bibliography. But the jacket design –
very messy, actually – title page and quaint publishing house (Chatto and Windus)
situates this as a non-academic book. On the jacket flap we are told it is
“Part cultural meander, part memoir” – I am surprised they put it like that
because this is tantamount to saying that the book is belles lettres.
And none the worse for
that. It’s an interesting read, the short quasi-academic studies spliced with
personal narrative and the stage set changing from city to city. The title and
sub-title Flâneuse: Women Walk The City
in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London is not misleading but I would
bet a bit of money that the author was under some pressure from literary agent
and publisher to make it all hang together so that it could Fit into some
category – social history or literary representations of the city or sexual
discrimination at street level or just autobiography. There are many
possibilities, some of which would have led to the writing of a dreadful book,
dull and correct and easy to shelve.
I enjoyed reading this book, though
she lost me for a moment when late on she mentions keeping a dog in Paris, a
dog shit city when I lived there (1971 – 72) and even long after. But I did find her
narratives of Parisian history helped me understand how and why I have come to
dislike Paris. She narrates the tragedies which today repeat themselves as
farce: the ritual demonstrations, the immature bad temper (they were still
honking car horns last time I went, albeit less fervently than in the 1970s),
and the intense conservatism of the radicals, who think that the past is the
model for the future right down to the cigarettes they still smoke. If you think
Ruritania is stuck, try France - a country haunted by a collective memory of which several parts still have to be denied. Empire and Collaboration for starters.
I think the weakness of the book is that Elkin does not quite know what she stands for. On occasion, she
expresses a forceful opinion or cracks a telling joke but much of the time she
muses, a bit ironic, a bit fey. I made a mental contrast with Katie Roiphe. She should strike out a bit more, strut her
stuff rather than stroll it .
